Of how the king sent Tristan da Cunha to India as a captain of a fleet, and on the uprising that ... more Of how the king sent Tristan da Cunha to India as a captain of a fleet, and on the uprising that happened in Lisbon against New Christians. To this gang of bad men and monks, who, without fear of God were carrying on in the streets, inciting people to such cruelty, more than a thousand men from the countryside, of the same mean sort, joined the others on Monday, and fanned this evil with even greater cruelty. And since this mob could no longer find any more New Christians in the streets, with battering rams and ladders, they attacked the houses where the New Christians lived or where they knew they would be staying and dragged them out into the streets, along with their sons, wives, and daughters, and threw them together, whether dead or alive, onto the fires. Without piety, they inflicted this cruelty even onto children and babies in their cribs, grabbing them by the legs, tearing them to pieces, and smashing them by throwing them against walls. With such cruelties they did not forget to ransack houses, stealing all the gold, silver, and linen they could get their hands on. With the chaos mounting, they took many innocent men, women, boys, and girls from churches [where they had taken sanctuary] and tore them from tabernacles and statues of Our Lord and Our Lady and other saints, to which they hugged for dear life. Without any fear of God, the rabble killed them, men and women, and ceremoniously burnt them to death. On this day [20 April 1506] more than a thousand souls perished without anyone around who would dare to protect them. Few people of note took part in it [the
This essay examines popular protest and resistance during the Italian Wars, 1494 to 1559, emphasi... more This essay examines popular protest and resistance during the Italian Wars, 1494 to 1559, emphasizing the importance of the decade of the 1520s. It is acomparative analysis with Italy’s more thoroughly studied epoch of insurrection during the late fourteenth century and concludes that the latter period, characterized by warfare and the growth of absolutism, was rich in new forms of protest wedded to ideals of equality and early practices of democracy.
This essay challenges generalizations since the late enlightenment about the effects of epidemics... more This essay challenges generalizations since the late enlightenment about the effects of epidemics and pandemics on collective mentalities: that from antiquity to the present, epidemics, regardless of the disease, have sparked distrust, social violence, and the blaming of others. By contrast, the pandemic that killed the greatest numbers in world history-the Influenza of 1918-20 -was a pandemic of compassion. No one has yet to uncover this pandemic sparking collective violence or blaming any minorities for spreading the disease anywhere in the globe. The essay then explores the variety of charitable reactions and abnegation that cut across social divisions in communities from theatres of war in Europe to nations thousands of miles from the direct military encounters. Most remarkable, however, was the overflowing volunteerism of women, especially in the US, Canada, and Australia. To explain this widespread charitable reaction, the essay investigates the milieu of the First World War, showing how that context in domestic war settings was not conducive to risking life to aid total strangers, especially when those strangers came from different foreign countries classes, races, or religious faiths. I end with a reflection on the unfolding socio-psychological reactions to Covid-19 from the perspective of 1918-20.
The topography of medieval popular protest The topography of revolt has been essential for unders... more The topography of medieval popular protest The topography of revolt has been essential for understanding changes in popular insurgency during the Middle Ages and to distinguish more broadly and globally 'modern' revolt from what some historians and social scientists have labelled as 'premodern'. To begin, what constituted popular revolt in the Middle Ages remains illdefined, and when defined, the notions are often conflicting. Riots, revolts, risings, uprisings, conflicts, disturbances, popular movements, insurgency, and other terms for popular protest are often used interchangeably. 1 Other historians, however, have drawn a sharp divide between 'riot' or 'revolt' or 'revolution. For Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, a revolt is 'a spontaneous reaction, a reflect of anger or self-defence', while 'revolution is something planed and prepared', and in the Middle Ages, the authors assert, the latter was extremely rare. 2 Guy Fourquin went further: 'rebellion' was 'the complete overthrow of a society's foundations', and in the Middle Ages this was an impossibility; 'rebellion' had to await the French Revolution. 3 By his account, 'victory was something the medieval 'insurgent never tasted...revolt led only to repression and not to revolution'. 4 Similarly, Perez Zagorin distinguished 'riot' from 'revolution', but defined 'revolution' more broadly as an 'attempt by subordinate groups through the use of violence to bring about (1) a change of government or its policy; 2) a change of regime, or (3) a change in society...' 5 Both Fourquin and Zagorin relied on the sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912-94) for their definitions: 'the phenomenon of revolution is without precedent in premodern history'. 6 Apparently, these authors were oblivious to the hundreds of medieval uprisings that overthrew ruling classes or that achieved fundamental constitutional changes granting those outside the realm of the current ruling elite, artisans and, in some cases, manual 2 labourers citizenship and rights to participate in governance as with numerous revolts of the 'popolo' in central and northern Italy from the mid-thirteenth century, ones in Low Countries, as in 1297 to 1305, or in French cities such as Toulouse as early as 1202. 7 I would distinguish a 'riot' from a 'revolt', in that the latter is collective action with evidence of prior planning, negotiation, and implicit or stated demands. By these criteria, all the incidents I am considering in this paper were revolts. None of them fits the patterns that the authors above and many others 8 have assumed as the norm or even the only possibility of popular political action in the Middle Agesthat these acts were 'spontaneous', without planning, organization, or aims. Over forty years ago, through comparative analysis of revolts in Italy, Spain, France, Flanders, and England, Rodney Hilton argued that revolts of the central Middle Ages were largely fixed by village or manorial borders. 9 However, following the Black Death, popular revolts extended over much wider terrain, especially with the so-called English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 that spread beyond Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, and London to places as far north as York, as far west as Shrewsbury, and as far south as Canterbury. Some have even speculated that these protests covered the entirely of England to places yet to be uncovered either because of an absence of historical research or because of the disappearance of documents. Towns as small as Rochester and Guildford had their revolts in 1381. 10 Hilton and others 11 have viewed this fanning out across wider terrains as reflecting progressive changes in the basic elements of revolts, their organization, communication, and ideology, that paralleled changes in state formation. Sociologists and modern historians since the 1950s-George Rudé, Charles
Open any textbook on infectious diseases and its chapter on plague will describe three pandemics ... more Open any textbook on infectious diseases and its chapter on plague will describe three pandemics of bubonic plague. The first, the plague of Justinian, erupted in the Egyptian port city of Pelusium in the summer of AD 541 and quickly spread, devastating cities and countryside in and around Constantinople, Syria, Anatolia, Greece, Italy, Gaul, Iberia, and North Africa: ''none of the lands bordering the Mediterranean escaped it'', and it reached as far east as Persia and as far north as Ireland in less than two years and spread through their hinterlands. 1 Historians have counted eighteen waves of this plague through Europe and the Near East that endured until AD 750, if not longer. 2 The second pandemic originated in India, China, or the steppes of Russia, touched the shores of western Europe (Messina) in the autumn of 1347, circumnavigated most of continental Europe in less than three years and eventually struck places as remote as Greenland. While the first lasted just over two centuries and the third a mere twenty-five years in pandemic form, this second wave returned periodically for nearly five hundred years in western Europe. Its last attack in Italy was at Noja (Noicattaro), near Bari, in 1815, 3 but it persisted longer in eastern Europe and
In the three West African countries most affected by the recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbrea... more In the three West African countries most affected by the recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak, resistance to public health measures contributed to the startling speed and persistence of this epidemic in the region. But how do we explain this resistance, and how have people in these communities understood their actions? By comparing these recent events to historical precedents during Cholera outbreaks in Europe in the 19th century we show that these events have not been new to history or unique to Africa. Community resistance must be analysed in context and go beyond simple single-variable determinants. Knowledge and respect of the cultures and beliefs of the afflicted is essential for dealing with threatening disease outbreaks and their potential social violence.
FIVE CENTURIES OF DYING IN SIENA: COMPARISONS WITH SOUTHERN' FRANCE At the cutset I need to chara... more FIVE CENTURIES OF DYING IN SIENA: COMPARISONS WITH SOUTHERN' FRANCE At the cutset I need to characterize this presentation. It is a work-in-progress, based largely on impressions gained while reading and recording over a thousand testaments housed in the Archivio di Stato in Siena. They extend from the early thirteenth century through the middle of the eighteenth century. It will be a pre-statistical study, which will focus on the large, immediately visible changes, changes, in other words, which can be detected in transformations in the formula .and language of the documents and in the pivotal changes in the practices of the testators which do not need, at least at this point, the weight of percentages and statistical tests. These analyses will come later and hopefully will produce discrepancies and other discoveries which cannot be gleaned so readily from the day-in-and-out reading and coding of documents in the archives. For now, this essay will outline the large changes in notions and rituals of death over a long period of time -five centuries -from the standpoint of a single place -Siena, Italy. Our survey will stretch from the city's period of prominence in the early thirteenth century through its history of relative obscurity and decline until the middle of the eighteenth century. This outline will be placed in the context of the rich French historiography of the past fifteen years on religious sentiment and death. In particular I will compare my research from Siena with the results from two thèses d'état on the history of southern France.
Over the past forty years, studies of the period from the First Crusade at the end of the elevent... more Over the past forty years, studies of the period from the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century to the rise of the mendicant orders in the early thirteenth century have dominated research into anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. 1 Curiously, far less attention has been devoted to the most monumental of medieval Jewish persecutions, one that eradicated almost entirely the principal Jewish communities of Europe -those of the Rhineland -along with many other areas. Coupled with mass migration that ensued, they caused a fundamental redistribution of Jewry. 2 These persecutions were the burning of Jews between (cont. on p. 4) * I gave versions of this essay as a paper to the Jewish Historical Society, London, to the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and to the Jewish History Seminar at Vanderbilt. I have benefited from the criticisms of Rudolph Binion,
This article briefly surveys the history of pandemics in the West, contesting long-held assumptio... more This article briefly surveys the history of pandemics in the West, contesting long-held assumptions that epidemics sparked hatred and blame of the 'Other', and that it was worse when diseases were mysterious as to their causes and cures. The article finds that blame and hate were rarely connected with pandemics in history. In antiquity, epidemics more often brought societies together rather than dividing them as continued to happen with some diseases such as influenza in modernity. On the other hand, some diseases such as cholera were more regularly blamed than others and triggered violence even after their agents and mechanisms of transmission had become well known.
enthusiasm for what now ranks as a sub-discipline within Renaissance studies has prompted this ar... more enthusiasm for what now ranks as a sub-discipline within Renaissance studies has prompted this article, which returns to the will to explore its possibilities within this new arena of study and its larger implications for the economic history of the later middle ages and Renaissance. In defining the range of objects that constitute any study of material culture, this article returns to one of its pioneers. Like Braudel's, my notion reflects not only possessions that were 'mobile', whether precious jewels or banal utensils, but the built environments that housed them and the anxieties and aspirations that linked persons to these 'things'. 5 The dichotomy of things-bona mobilia et immobilia-were not rigidly fixed as we often assume. By the sixteenth century across the Italian peninsula, testamentary clauses of fideicommissum restricted and redefined precious movable objects, legally transforming them into 'immovables', 6 while in the north of Europe houses, and even land, were often legally defined as movables. 7 Why should the interior decoration of a Renaissance palace be considered mainstream in studies of material culture, while improvements to farm houses that obsessed more humble testators on their deathbeds are placed outside it? To examine the contours of this new sub-discipline for Renaissance Italy, we turn to two of its best-known products: Jardine's Worldly goods and Welch's Shopping in the Renaissance. Both present rich panoplies of the material culture of the Renaissance but are limited largely to prized possessions of elites, for the most part objects or their representations now on display in museums, palaces, or churches. Jardine's Worldly goods presents a lush description of objects depicted in Renaissance paintings-exquisite gems, jewellery, interior designs, and especially lavish clothing, such as the ceremonial dress of Doge Leonardo Loredan and the colossally expensive gold helmet studded with pearls, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds created for the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1530s-hardly the everyday attire even of elites. 8 Many of the same objects and patrons parade through Welch's more nuanced Shopping in the Renaissance, especially the Renaissance's supreme matron of arts, Isabelle d'Este, and her shopping sprees to clothe herself and to fill her studiolo and grotta with works from antiquity and of the best artists of her time.Welch's material world descends lower down the social ladder than Jardine's with rare illustrations of artisans at work, brief mentions of shopkeepers' records, and poetry depicting 'low-life'. 9 Although the thin threads of interpretation in the two books run in opposite directions, they share other aspects: both treat the Renaissance without chronological distinctions, c.1300 to 1600, and neither contrasts this Cavallo and Evangelisti, eds., Domestic institutional interiors; and other works discussed below. For an earlier signalling of the centrality of material culture for defining and understanding the Renaissance, see Findlen, 'Possessing the past'. 5 Braudel, Civilisation matérielle. On Braudel as a pioneer of the history of material culture in the second half of the twentieth century and criticism of him, see Allerston, 'Clothing', pp. 367-70, 375, 378. On definitions of cultural materialism and material culture that stress the importance of societal relationships between possessions and people, see Perry, 'Introduction', esp. pp. ix-xii; Martines, 'Renaissance'; Miller, Material culture. For definitions that consider the home and built property as central to material culture, see Auslander, 'Beyond words', p. 1023; and essays in Cavallo and Evangelisti, eds., Domestic institutional interiors. 6 Findlen, 'Ereditare un museo', p. 52. 7 Howell, Commerce before capitalism, pp. 49-92. 8 Jardine, Worldly goods, pp. 121, 137-81; see the criticisms of Jardine in Martines, 'Renaissance'. 9 Welch, Shopping, p. 44. Several essays in O'Malley and Welch, eds., Material Renaissance, penetrate further across the social spectrum; see especially Matchette, 'Credit and credibility', and Hohti, 'Innkeeper's goods'.
... Introduction The transition from the latemedieval to the Renaissance state' in Florence... more ... Introduction The transition from the latemedieval to the Renaissance state' in Florence has had a long and venerable historiography, spanning the fields of ... began to push its critical moment earlier, even as far back as the creation of its funded state debt, the Monte, in 1345.4 ...
HIV/AIDS and the threat of biological warfare have refueled interest in the Black Death among pro... more HIV/AIDS and the threat of biological warfare have refueled interest in the Black Death among professional historians, biologists, and the public, not only for assessing the toxic effects of the bacillus but for understanding the psychological and longer-term cultural consequences of mass death. This article makes two arguments. Against the assumptions of historians and scientists for over a century and what continues to be inscribed in medical and history texts alike, the Black Death was not the same disease as that rat-based bubonic plague whose agent (Yersinia pestis) was first cultured at Hong Kong in 1894. The two diseases were radically different in their signs, symptoms, and epidemiologies. The proof of these differences forms the major thrust of this article. The second argument stems from the epidemiological differences between the two diseases. Humans have no natural immunity to modern bubonic plague, whereas populations of Western Europe adapted rapidly to the pathogen of the Black Death for at least the first hundred years. The success of their immune systems conditioned a cultural response that departs from the common wisdom about "plagues and peoples." As far back as Thucydides, historians have seen the aftershocks of pestilence as raising the levels of violence, tearing asunder secular cultures, and spawning pessimism and transcendental religiosities. 1 A fresh reading of the late medieval sources across intellectual strata from merchant chronicles to the plague tracts of university-trained doctors shows another trajectory, an about-face in the reactions to the plague after its initial onslaught. This change in spirit casts new light on the Renaissance, helping to explain why a new emphasis on "fame and glory" should have arisen in the wake of the West's most monumental mortality. One of the many memorable phrases coined in Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages is the title of its first chapter-"The Violent Tenor of Life." While this attempt to sum up the collective psychology of post-plague Burgundy and northern France hardly mentioned the plague, 2 others following Huizinga's lead have argued that society became more violent precisely because of the plague, that the mass mortality cheapened life and thus increased warfare, crime, popular revolt, waves of flagellants, and persecutions against the Jews. 3 But few have gone beyond recounting dramatic episodes taken almost
Few have studied cholera revolts comparatively, and certainly not over the vast terrain from Asia... more Few have studied cholera revolts comparatively, and certainly not over the vast terrain from Asiatic Russia to Quebec or across time from the first European cholera wave of the 1830s to the twentieth century. Instead, scholars have concentrated on the first cholera wave to penetrate Western Europe in the 1830s and have tended to explain the protest and violence within the political contexts of individual nations, ignoring that, across vast differences in political landscapes from Czarist Russia to New York City, largely the same class configurations emerged of the poor and marginalized attacking governing elites and the medical profession. In addition, despite little evidence of any communication among rioters across national and linguistic divides or even an ocean, the same fears and conspiracy theories arose of elites employing the cholera poison to cull populations of the poor. Moreover, the history of cholera's social toxins runs against present generalizations on why epidemics spawn blame and violence against others. Especially in Russia and Italy, cholera riots continued and became geographically even more widespread, vicious, and destructive long after the disease had lost its novelty and mystery. The article then poses the question: given the stark alignments of class struggle with riots of 10,000 or more, murdering state officials and doctors, destroying hospitals, town halls, and in the case of Donetsk, an entire city, why have historians on the left not noticed them? Finally, the article draws parallels between the nineteenth-and earlytwentieth-century cholera experience in Europe and that of Ebola in Africa in 2014, 2 arguing that historical understanding of epidemics can pose solutions to problems of certain epidemics sparking social violence today.
The remarkable Books of the Dead from early modern Milan and the parish and tax records of Nonant... more The remarkable Books of the Dead from early modern Milan and the parish and tax records of Nonantola during the plague of 1630 allow historians to reconstitute the patterns of family and household deaths caused by pestilence. Not only did deaths caused by this highly contagious disease cluster tightly within households; the intervals between household deaths were also extremely short. As much as one-quarter of all plague deaths were multiple household deaths that occurred on the same day. Similar to a deadly influenza, the speed and efficiency with which the late medieval and early modern plagues spread depended on unusually short periods of incubation and infectivity.
Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy, 2021
From over a hundred chronicles, diaries, and the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo’s collection... more From over a hundred chronicles, diaries, and the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo’s collections of reflections, mercantile letters, and diplomatic dispatches, this chapter presents rebels’ chants and their flags and other insignia unfurled during popular insurgency from 1494 to 1559. It then compares these chants and flags to those previously collected and analysed in my Lust for Liberty from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth century. In contrast to the earlier period’s inventive cries and banners that extolled guild power, rallied to extend the political franchise, and decried new and regressive taxes, those of the Italian wars appealed to outside powers, almost invariably the enemies of their current regimes, to intervene. These included more simplistic chants such as ‘Franza, Franza’, for the French king, and most often, ‘Marco, Marco’ for the Republic of Venice. Moreover, popular rebels of the sixteenth century invented no new flags for their newly-minted causes or r...
This chapter delves in greater detail into the culture, politics, and ideologies of plague protes... more This chapter delves in greater detail into the culture, politics, and ideologies of plague protest principally in India, distinguishing it from cholera riots in Europe and assertions by colonial magistrates and foreign newspapers that religious fatalism, prejudices against Western medicine and science, and mythologies of poisoning sparked the Indian protests. Instead, this chapter catalogues the abuses suffered by Indian communities and their efforts to negotiate with governments to reform outdated and damaging anti-plague preventive measures. Demonstrations, town meetings with concrete resolutions, and petitions united castes, classes, and the subcontinent’s two major religions. The chapter then compares the Indian ideologies and protests with those in China, Europe, and San Francisco.
Unlike previous chapters, which are driven by the primary sources, this one relies on works by sc... more Unlike previous chapters, which are driven by the primary sources, this one relies on works by scholars and activists. From studies of the US, Australia, and Africa, this chapter finds a sharp break during the early 1990s in perceptions of HIV/AIDS’s social and political consequences. From emphasizing hate, violence, discrimination, and stigmatization, AIDS scholars and activists began focusing on the outpouring of volunteerism, charity, compassion, and successes from political activism: organizational developments (CBIs), volunteerism across communities—gay and straight, creativity in the arts, reshaping doctor–patient relations, the enhanced importance of nursing, achievements within the power structures of cities, and advances in gay and lesbian rights. This chapter brings together the book’s three principal categories for exploring the social side effects of epidemics in history—hate, compassion, and politics.
This chapter asks comparative questions: did other countries experience the same outpouring of vo... more This chapter asks comparative questions: did other countries experience the same outpouring of volunteerism as the US in the Great Influenza? Did women man the front lines of charity and self-sacrifice? It begins with the Deep South, which diverged from the national picture in the US. Here, men and their clubs, not women, played the dominant role, especially in New Orleans—the pattern set by a half-century of yellow fever resistance. The chapter moves on to Italy where there was some evidence of denial, though no blame or social violence. In contrast to the US, no outpouring of volunteerism emerged; rather, governments and the military intervened. France, Switzerland, and the British Isles likewise show no social violence or blaming, and no outpouring of volunteerism, especially among women. However, volunteerism was stronger in Ireland and Switzerland. Reliance on military intervention in civilian health care is the key to explaining these differences.
Of how the king sent Tristan da Cunha to India as a captain of a fleet, and on the uprising that ... more Of how the king sent Tristan da Cunha to India as a captain of a fleet, and on the uprising that happened in Lisbon against New Christians. To this gang of bad men and monks, who, without fear of God were carrying on in the streets, inciting people to such cruelty, more than a thousand men from the countryside, of the same mean sort, joined the others on Monday, and fanned this evil with even greater cruelty. And since this mob could no longer find any more New Christians in the streets, with battering rams and ladders, they attacked the houses where the New Christians lived or where they knew they would be staying and dragged them out into the streets, along with their sons, wives, and daughters, and threw them together, whether dead or alive, onto the fires. Without piety, they inflicted this cruelty even onto children and babies in their cribs, grabbing them by the legs, tearing them to pieces, and smashing them by throwing them against walls. With such cruelties they did not forget to ransack houses, stealing all the gold, silver, and linen they could get their hands on. With the chaos mounting, they took many innocent men, women, boys, and girls from churches [where they had taken sanctuary] and tore them from tabernacles and statues of Our Lord and Our Lady and other saints, to which they hugged for dear life. Without any fear of God, the rabble killed them, men and women, and ceremoniously burnt them to death. On this day [20 April 1506] more than a thousand souls perished without anyone around who would dare to protect them. Few people of note took part in it [the
This essay examines popular protest and resistance during the Italian Wars, 1494 to 1559, emphasi... more This essay examines popular protest and resistance during the Italian Wars, 1494 to 1559, emphasizing the importance of the decade of the 1520s. It is acomparative analysis with Italy’s more thoroughly studied epoch of insurrection during the late fourteenth century and concludes that the latter period, characterized by warfare and the growth of absolutism, was rich in new forms of protest wedded to ideals of equality and early practices of democracy.
This essay challenges generalizations since the late enlightenment about the effects of epidemics... more This essay challenges generalizations since the late enlightenment about the effects of epidemics and pandemics on collective mentalities: that from antiquity to the present, epidemics, regardless of the disease, have sparked distrust, social violence, and the blaming of others. By contrast, the pandemic that killed the greatest numbers in world history-the Influenza of 1918-20 -was a pandemic of compassion. No one has yet to uncover this pandemic sparking collective violence or blaming any minorities for spreading the disease anywhere in the globe. The essay then explores the variety of charitable reactions and abnegation that cut across social divisions in communities from theatres of war in Europe to nations thousands of miles from the direct military encounters. Most remarkable, however, was the overflowing volunteerism of women, especially in the US, Canada, and Australia. To explain this widespread charitable reaction, the essay investigates the milieu of the First World War, showing how that context in domestic war settings was not conducive to risking life to aid total strangers, especially when those strangers came from different foreign countries classes, races, or religious faiths. I end with a reflection on the unfolding socio-psychological reactions to Covid-19 from the perspective of 1918-20.
The topography of medieval popular protest The topography of revolt has been essential for unders... more The topography of medieval popular protest The topography of revolt has been essential for understanding changes in popular insurgency during the Middle Ages and to distinguish more broadly and globally 'modern' revolt from what some historians and social scientists have labelled as 'premodern'. To begin, what constituted popular revolt in the Middle Ages remains illdefined, and when defined, the notions are often conflicting. Riots, revolts, risings, uprisings, conflicts, disturbances, popular movements, insurgency, and other terms for popular protest are often used interchangeably. 1 Other historians, however, have drawn a sharp divide between 'riot' or 'revolt' or 'revolution. For Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, a revolt is 'a spontaneous reaction, a reflect of anger or self-defence', while 'revolution is something planed and prepared', and in the Middle Ages, the authors assert, the latter was extremely rare. 2 Guy Fourquin went further: 'rebellion' was 'the complete overthrow of a society's foundations', and in the Middle Ages this was an impossibility; 'rebellion' had to await the French Revolution. 3 By his account, 'victory was something the medieval 'insurgent never tasted...revolt led only to repression and not to revolution'. 4 Similarly, Perez Zagorin distinguished 'riot' from 'revolution', but defined 'revolution' more broadly as an 'attempt by subordinate groups through the use of violence to bring about (1) a change of government or its policy; 2) a change of regime, or (3) a change in society...' 5 Both Fourquin and Zagorin relied on the sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912-94) for their definitions: 'the phenomenon of revolution is without precedent in premodern history'. 6 Apparently, these authors were oblivious to the hundreds of medieval uprisings that overthrew ruling classes or that achieved fundamental constitutional changes granting those outside the realm of the current ruling elite, artisans and, in some cases, manual 2 labourers citizenship and rights to participate in governance as with numerous revolts of the 'popolo' in central and northern Italy from the mid-thirteenth century, ones in Low Countries, as in 1297 to 1305, or in French cities such as Toulouse as early as 1202. 7 I would distinguish a 'riot' from a 'revolt', in that the latter is collective action with evidence of prior planning, negotiation, and implicit or stated demands. By these criteria, all the incidents I am considering in this paper were revolts. None of them fits the patterns that the authors above and many others 8 have assumed as the norm or even the only possibility of popular political action in the Middle Agesthat these acts were 'spontaneous', without planning, organization, or aims. Over forty years ago, through comparative analysis of revolts in Italy, Spain, France, Flanders, and England, Rodney Hilton argued that revolts of the central Middle Ages were largely fixed by village or manorial borders. 9 However, following the Black Death, popular revolts extended over much wider terrain, especially with the so-called English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 that spread beyond Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, and London to places as far north as York, as far west as Shrewsbury, and as far south as Canterbury. Some have even speculated that these protests covered the entirely of England to places yet to be uncovered either because of an absence of historical research or because of the disappearance of documents. Towns as small as Rochester and Guildford had their revolts in 1381. 10 Hilton and others 11 have viewed this fanning out across wider terrains as reflecting progressive changes in the basic elements of revolts, their organization, communication, and ideology, that paralleled changes in state formation. Sociologists and modern historians since the 1950s-George Rudé, Charles
Open any textbook on infectious diseases and its chapter on plague will describe three pandemics ... more Open any textbook on infectious diseases and its chapter on plague will describe three pandemics of bubonic plague. The first, the plague of Justinian, erupted in the Egyptian port city of Pelusium in the summer of AD 541 and quickly spread, devastating cities and countryside in and around Constantinople, Syria, Anatolia, Greece, Italy, Gaul, Iberia, and North Africa: ''none of the lands bordering the Mediterranean escaped it'', and it reached as far east as Persia and as far north as Ireland in less than two years and spread through their hinterlands. 1 Historians have counted eighteen waves of this plague through Europe and the Near East that endured until AD 750, if not longer. 2 The second pandemic originated in India, China, or the steppes of Russia, touched the shores of western Europe (Messina) in the autumn of 1347, circumnavigated most of continental Europe in less than three years and eventually struck places as remote as Greenland. While the first lasted just over two centuries and the third a mere twenty-five years in pandemic form, this second wave returned periodically for nearly five hundred years in western Europe. Its last attack in Italy was at Noja (Noicattaro), near Bari, in 1815, 3 but it persisted longer in eastern Europe and
In the three West African countries most affected by the recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbrea... more In the three West African countries most affected by the recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak, resistance to public health measures contributed to the startling speed and persistence of this epidemic in the region. But how do we explain this resistance, and how have people in these communities understood their actions? By comparing these recent events to historical precedents during Cholera outbreaks in Europe in the 19th century we show that these events have not been new to history or unique to Africa. Community resistance must be analysed in context and go beyond simple single-variable determinants. Knowledge and respect of the cultures and beliefs of the afflicted is essential for dealing with threatening disease outbreaks and their potential social violence.
FIVE CENTURIES OF DYING IN SIENA: COMPARISONS WITH SOUTHERN' FRANCE At the cutset I need to chara... more FIVE CENTURIES OF DYING IN SIENA: COMPARISONS WITH SOUTHERN' FRANCE At the cutset I need to characterize this presentation. It is a work-in-progress, based largely on impressions gained while reading and recording over a thousand testaments housed in the Archivio di Stato in Siena. They extend from the early thirteenth century through the middle of the eighteenth century. It will be a pre-statistical study, which will focus on the large, immediately visible changes, changes, in other words, which can be detected in transformations in the formula .and language of the documents and in the pivotal changes in the practices of the testators which do not need, at least at this point, the weight of percentages and statistical tests. These analyses will come later and hopefully will produce discrepancies and other discoveries which cannot be gleaned so readily from the day-in-and-out reading and coding of documents in the archives. For now, this essay will outline the large changes in notions and rituals of death over a long period of time -five centuries -from the standpoint of a single place -Siena, Italy. Our survey will stretch from the city's period of prominence in the early thirteenth century through its history of relative obscurity and decline until the middle of the eighteenth century. This outline will be placed in the context of the rich French historiography of the past fifteen years on religious sentiment and death. In particular I will compare my research from Siena with the results from two thèses d'état on the history of southern France.
Over the past forty years, studies of the period from the First Crusade at the end of the elevent... more Over the past forty years, studies of the period from the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century to the rise of the mendicant orders in the early thirteenth century have dominated research into anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. 1 Curiously, far less attention has been devoted to the most monumental of medieval Jewish persecutions, one that eradicated almost entirely the principal Jewish communities of Europe -those of the Rhineland -along with many other areas. Coupled with mass migration that ensued, they caused a fundamental redistribution of Jewry. 2 These persecutions were the burning of Jews between (cont. on p. 4) * I gave versions of this essay as a paper to the Jewish Historical Society, London, to the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and to the Jewish History Seminar at Vanderbilt. I have benefited from the criticisms of Rudolph Binion,
This article briefly surveys the history of pandemics in the West, contesting long-held assumptio... more This article briefly surveys the history of pandemics in the West, contesting long-held assumptions that epidemics sparked hatred and blame of the 'Other', and that it was worse when diseases were mysterious as to their causes and cures. The article finds that blame and hate were rarely connected with pandemics in history. In antiquity, epidemics more often brought societies together rather than dividing them as continued to happen with some diseases such as influenza in modernity. On the other hand, some diseases such as cholera were more regularly blamed than others and triggered violence even after their agents and mechanisms of transmission had become well known.
enthusiasm for what now ranks as a sub-discipline within Renaissance studies has prompted this ar... more enthusiasm for what now ranks as a sub-discipline within Renaissance studies has prompted this article, which returns to the will to explore its possibilities within this new arena of study and its larger implications for the economic history of the later middle ages and Renaissance. In defining the range of objects that constitute any study of material culture, this article returns to one of its pioneers. Like Braudel's, my notion reflects not only possessions that were 'mobile', whether precious jewels or banal utensils, but the built environments that housed them and the anxieties and aspirations that linked persons to these 'things'. 5 The dichotomy of things-bona mobilia et immobilia-were not rigidly fixed as we often assume. By the sixteenth century across the Italian peninsula, testamentary clauses of fideicommissum restricted and redefined precious movable objects, legally transforming them into 'immovables', 6 while in the north of Europe houses, and even land, were often legally defined as movables. 7 Why should the interior decoration of a Renaissance palace be considered mainstream in studies of material culture, while improvements to farm houses that obsessed more humble testators on their deathbeds are placed outside it? To examine the contours of this new sub-discipline for Renaissance Italy, we turn to two of its best-known products: Jardine's Worldly goods and Welch's Shopping in the Renaissance. Both present rich panoplies of the material culture of the Renaissance but are limited largely to prized possessions of elites, for the most part objects or their representations now on display in museums, palaces, or churches. Jardine's Worldly goods presents a lush description of objects depicted in Renaissance paintings-exquisite gems, jewellery, interior designs, and especially lavish clothing, such as the ceremonial dress of Doge Leonardo Loredan and the colossally expensive gold helmet studded with pearls, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds created for the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1530s-hardly the everyday attire even of elites. 8 Many of the same objects and patrons parade through Welch's more nuanced Shopping in the Renaissance, especially the Renaissance's supreme matron of arts, Isabelle d'Este, and her shopping sprees to clothe herself and to fill her studiolo and grotta with works from antiquity and of the best artists of her time.Welch's material world descends lower down the social ladder than Jardine's with rare illustrations of artisans at work, brief mentions of shopkeepers' records, and poetry depicting 'low-life'. 9 Although the thin threads of interpretation in the two books run in opposite directions, they share other aspects: both treat the Renaissance without chronological distinctions, c.1300 to 1600, and neither contrasts this Cavallo and Evangelisti, eds., Domestic institutional interiors; and other works discussed below. For an earlier signalling of the centrality of material culture for defining and understanding the Renaissance, see Findlen, 'Possessing the past'. 5 Braudel, Civilisation matérielle. On Braudel as a pioneer of the history of material culture in the second half of the twentieth century and criticism of him, see Allerston, 'Clothing', pp. 367-70, 375, 378. On definitions of cultural materialism and material culture that stress the importance of societal relationships between possessions and people, see Perry, 'Introduction', esp. pp. ix-xii; Martines, 'Renaissance'; Miller, Material culture. For definitions that consider the home and built property as central to material culture, see Auslander, 'Beyond words', p. 1023; and essays in Cavallo and Evangelisti, eds., Domestic institutional interiors. 6 Findlen, 'Ereditare un museo', p. 52. 7 Howell, Commerce before capitalism, pp. 49-92. 8 Jardine, Worldly goods, pp. 121, 137-81; see the criticisms of Jardine in Martines, 'Renaissance'. 9 Welch, Shopping, p. 44. Several essays in O'Malley and Welch, eds., Material Renaissance, penetrate further across the social spectrum; see especially Matchette, 'Credit and credibility', and Hohti, 'Innkeeper's goods'.
... Introduction The transition from the latemedieval to the Renaissance state' in Florence... more ... Introduction The transition from the latemedieval to the Renaissance state' in Florence has had a long and venerable historiography, spanning the fields of ... began to push its critical moment earlier, even as far back as the creation of its funded state debt, the Monte, in 1345.4 ...
HIV/AIDS and the threat of biological warfare have refueled interest in the Black Death among pro... more HIV/AIDS and the threat of biological warfare have refueled interest in the Black Death among professional historians, biologists, and the public, not only for assessing the toxic effects of the bacillus but for understanding the psychological and longer-term cultural consequences of mass death. This article makes two arguments. Against the assumptions of historians and scientists for over a century and what continues to be inscribed in medical and history texts alike, the Black Death was not the same disease as that rat-based bubonic plague whose agent (Yersinia pestis) was first cultured at Hong Kong in 1894. The two diseases were radically different in their signs, symptoms, and epidemiologies. The proof of these differences forms the major thrust of this article. The second argument stems from the epidemiological differences between the two diseases. Humans have no natural immunity to modern bubonic plague, whereas populations of Western Europe adapted rapidly to the pathogen of the Black Death for at least the first hundred years. The success of their immune systems conditioned a cultural response that departs from the common wisdom about "plagues and peoples." As far back as Thucydides, historians have seen the aftershocks of pestilence as raising the levels of violence, tearing asunder secular cultures, and spawning pessimism and transcendental religiosities. 1 A fresh reading of the late medieval sources across intellectual strata from merchant chronicles to the plague tracts of university-trained doctors shows another trajectory, an about-face in the reactions to the plague after its initial onslaught. This change in spirit casts new light on the Renaissance, helping to explain why a new emphasis on "fame and glory" should have arisen in the wake of the West's most monumental mortality. One of the many memorable phrases coined in Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages is the title of its first chapter-"The Violent Tenor of Life." While this attempt to sum up the collective psychology of post-plague Burgundy and northern France hardly mentioned the plague, 2 others following Huizinga's lead have argued that society became more violent precisely because of the plague, that the mass mortality cheapened life and thus increased warfare, crime, popular revolt, waves of flagellants, and persecutions against the Jews. 3 But few have gone beyond recounting dramatic episodes taken almost
Few have studied cholera revolts comparatively, and certainly not over the vast terrain from Asia... more Few have studied cholera revolts comparatively, and certainly not over the vast terrain from Asiatic Russia to Quebec or across time from the first European cholera wave of the 1830s to the twentieth century. Instead, scholars have concentrated on the first cholera wave to penetrate Western Europe in the 1830s and have tended to explain the protest and violence within the political contexts of individual nations, ignoring that, across vast differences in political landscapes from Czarist Russia to New York City, largely the same class configurations emerged of the poor and marginalized attacking governing elites and the medical profession. In addition, despite little evidence of any communication among rioters across national and linguistic divides or even an ocean, the same fears and conspiracy theories arose of elites employing the cholera poison to cull populations of the poor. Moreover, the history of cholera's social toxins runs against present generalizations on why epidemics spawn blame and violence against others. Especially in Russia and Italy, cholera riots continued and became geographically even more widespread, vicious, and destructive long after the disease had lost its novelty and mystery. The article then poses the question: given the stark alignments of class struggle with riots of 10,000 or more, murdering state officials and doctors, destroying hospitals, town halls, and in the case of Donetsk, an entire city, why have historians on the left not noticed them? Finally, the article draws parallels between the nineteenth-and earlytwentieth-century cholera experience in Europe and that of Ebola in Africa in 2014, 2 arguing that historical understanding of epidemics can pose solutions to problems of certain epidemics sparking social violence today.
The remarkable Books of the Dead from early modern Milan and the parish and tax records of Nonant... more The remarkable Books of the Dead from early modern Milan and the parish and tax records of Nonantola during the plague of 1630 allow historians to reconstitute the patterns of family and household deaths caused by pestilence. Not only did deaths caused by this highly contagious disease cluster tightly within households; the intervals between household deaths were also extremely short. As much as one-quarter of all plague deaths were multiple household deaths that occurred on the same day. Similar to a deadly influenza, the speed and efficiency with which the late medieval and early modern plagues spread depended on unusually short periods of incubation and infectivity.
Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy, 2021
From over a hundred chronicles, diaries, and the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo’s collection... more From over a hundred chronicles, diaries, and the fifty-eight volumes of Marin Sanudo’s collections of reflections, mercantile letters, and diplomatic dispatches, this chapter presents rebels’ chants and their flags and other insignia unfurled during popular insurgency from 1494 to 1559. It then compares these chants and flags to those previously collected and analysed in my Lust for Liberty from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth century. In contrast to the earlier period’s inventive cries and banners that extolled guild power, rallied to extend the political franchise, and decried new and regressive taxes, those of the Italian wars appealed to outside powers, almost invariably the enemies of their current regimes, to intervene. These included more simplistic chants such as ‘Franza, Franza’, for the French king, and most often, ‘Marco, Marco’ for the Republic of Venice. Moreover, popular rebels of the sixteenth century invented no new flags for their newly-minted causes or r...
This chapter delves in greater detail into the culture, politics, and ideologies of plague protes... more This chapter delves in greater detail into the culture, politics, and ideologies of plague protest principally in India, distinguishing it from cholera riots in Europe and assertions by colonial magistrates and foreign newspapers that religious fatalism, prejudices against Western medicine and science, and mythologies of poisoning sparked the Indian protests. Instead, this chapter catalogues the abuses suffered by Indian communities and their efforts to negotiate with governments to reform outdated and damaging anti-plague preventive measures. Demonstrations, town meetings with concrete resolutions, and petitions united castes, classes, and the subcontinent’s two major religions. The chapter then compares the Indian ideologies and protests with those in China, Europe, and San Francisco.
Unlike previous chapters, which are driven by the primary sources, this one relies on works by sc... more Unlike previous chapters, which are driven by the primary sources, this one relies on works by scholars and activists. From studies of the US, Australia, and Africa, this chapter finds a sharp break during the early 1990s in perceptions of HIV/AIDS’s social and political consequences. From emphasizing hate, violence, discrimination, and stigmatization, AIDS scholars and activists began focusing on the outpouring of volunteerism, charity, compassion, and successes from political activism: organizational developments (CBIs), volunteerism across communities—gay and straight, creativity in the arts, reshaping doctor–patient relations, the enhanced importance of nursing, achievements within the power structures of cities, and advances in gay and lesbian rights. This chapter brings together the book’s three principal categories for exploring the social side effects of epidemics in history—hate, compassion, and politics.
This chapter asks comparative questions: did other countries experience the same outpouring of vo... more This chapter asks comparative questions: did other countries experience the same outpouring of volunteerism as the US in the Great Influenza? Did women man the front lines of charity and self-sacrifice? It begins with the Deep South, which diverged from the national picture in the US. Here, men and their clubs, not women, played the dominant role, especially in New Orleans—the pattern set by a half-century of yellow fever resistance. The chapter moves on to Italy where there was some evidence of denial, though no blame or social violence. In contrast to the US, no outpouring of volunteerism emerged; rather, governments and the military intervened. France, Switzerland, and the British Isles likewise show no social violence or blaming, and no outpouring of volunteerism, especially among women. However, volunteerism was stronger in Ireland and Switzerland. Reliance on military intervention in civilian health care is the key to explaining these differences.
Uploads
Papers by Samuel Cohn