Prof: And with that,
I'd like to turn to our subject
for the morning,
which is about the third--it's
the third in our series of
lectures on bubonic plague,
and I'd like to talk about the
effects,
or some of the effects,
of bubonic plaque on European
culture.
 
We've been trying to suggest
that plague had a major impact
on European society,
and I want to be arguing that
that impact was felt not only on
political events but also on
culture and intellectual life,
and I'd like to look at that
this morning.
 
But I want us to remember that
when we're talking about those
effects,
I'll be trying to say it was
the effects not only of plague
itself as a disease,
but also the impact of the
organized reaction to plague,
the anti-plague measures,
and the sense that for the
first time society had means
that were effective,
and could protect itself
against this dreadful outside
visitor.
 
Well, let's start again at the
beginning.
And, as you know,
there is a biblical
interpretation for the themes of
this course.
And this is the one that you're
now well familiar with;
this is the Fall.
 
This is Adam and Eve,
as painted by the greatest of
all--
perhaps the greatest of
all--plague painters,
Jacopo Tintoretto,
who was a painter in Venice and
lived from 1518 to 1594.
You know this is the story of
Genesis;
that Adam and Eve tasted of the
fruit that they were forbidden,
and as a result they were
expelled from the garden and for
the first time became subject to
death,
and also to disease and illness.
 
And if we move forward,
this is the next step.
You saw the original sin.
 
This is Masaccio's--one of the
great painters of the Italian
Renaissance--
this is his painting,
in the Brancacci Chapel in
Florence,
of the expulsion from the
garden.
And you know they're looking
extremely miserable.
Not only are they going to die
and become ill and experience
pain in childbirth,
but they're also--and I'm sorry
about this--
they're going to have to work.
So this is a tremendously
painful experience,
and you can see the pain
written in their faces,
of Adam and Eve.
 
So that, in a way,
is a story of our course.
And I'd like to talk now about
some attitudes towards what
followed--that is,
illness and death--just before
the arrival of the Black Death.
 
And I'd like to refer to the
work of a French historian who
died fairly recently and was the
great, perhaps,
historian of death.
 
His name is Phillippe Ari�s,
and he had an idea,
that before the Black Death,
he talked of it as "death
tamed."
 
That is, there were ways that
people had beliefs,
practices and rituals,
that helped them to face the
issue of our mortality;
to cope with loss;
to heal the tear that was
caused in a family or a
community, the loss of a member
of a family;
and also to express grief and
to pay one's last respects.
And there were two great aids
in doing that.
One we might say was the ars
moriendi,
which was "the art of
dying."
There were certain rules that
you should be aware of that
would prepare you for the final
moment and the passage from this
life to the next.
 
And then there were what were
called a memento mori,
which is a reminder of death;
that is, a reminder--you should
surround yourself with reminders
that it's time to get ready,
because any day could be the
last and death could come very
soon.
 
We'll see the art of dying
portrayed in instructions;
sometimes in paintings or
engravings;
also in books on how to die
properly, according to Christian
doctrine--who should be there?;
what are the last rites?;
that is, extreme unction--the
final confessions of sins;
the last communion and viaticum;
the funeral rites;
the laying out of the body;
the wake;
the procession,
with perhaps a town crier
announcing the event;
the funeral service and a
burial ceremony with a blessing;
an interment in consecrated
ground;
and finally a funeral meal for
surviving friends and relatives.
 
Leading themes in this are
themes of solidarity,
dignity and community.
 
And in this slide of the ars
moriendi,
we see a dying person
inhabiting two worlds:
the natural world he's about to
leave with possessions,
friends, family and home,
and a supernatural world he's
about to enter,
and that only he can see,
but is represented by angels
and devils vying for his soul.
We can also see in another
example by Nicolas Poussin,
also a great seventeenth
century French painter,
who--this is a painting of
extreme unction.
It's an illustration of the
good death to which everyone
should aspire.
 
Now, the seventeenth century,
the time of Defoe's great work,
also witnessed in Britain the
publication of the work of one
of the most famous of all
writers on the theme of ars
moriendi,
the art of dying;
that was the extraordinary
Anglican preacher and bishop,
Jeremy Taylor,
who lived from 1613 to 1667,
and wrote two major works,
both of which have gone through
edition after edition,
they were so popular and so
influential.
 
The first was called The
Rule and Exercises of Holy
Living, of 1650,
and the other was The Rule
and Exercise of Holy Dying,
of 1651.
Taylor argued that this life is
short and unimportant,
and so we should use our time
primarily to prepare for the
eternal world,
making certain that we die with
our worldly affairs in good
order,
and with our souls in a state
of grace,
prepared to meet our maker on
Judgment Day.
His books then were
instructional manuals on how to
do that.
 
And he reminds us that there
really isn't a moment to waste,
especially with the threat of
plague ever-present,
with sudden death that could
happen any moment now.
So, Phillippe Ari�s thinks
then the opposite of the good
death is death by bubonic
plague.
That is something we might call
"death unleashed,"
a sudden mass death for which
society had no defenses,
and no one was prepared.
 
This sudden death is mors
repentina--sudden
death--which was always feared.
 
Because sudden death catches a
person unprepared,
with his will unwritten in this
world,
and his soul in a state of sin
that could lead to eternal
damnation in the next.
 
And death from plague was not
only sudden but,
as we know now,
agonizing and dehumanizing.
It often meant that the
sufferer was alone and
abandoned,
and it was death without the
attentions of the clergy,
without funeral rites and
proper burial.
 
Or your body was hurled
unceremoniously into a mass
plague pit;
burned perhaps;
thrown into the sea,
picked over by vultures and
crows.
 
Now, remember,
don't think that this fear of
mors repentina was
something medieval and very
distant from us,
or simply early modern.
The historian Drew Faust,
in her extraordinary recent
book on the American Civil War,
This Republic of
Suffering,
places the fear precisely of
mors repentina at the
center of her account of the
Civil War.
 
It was a widespread anxiety,
pervasive among the soldiers on
both sides of the conflict,
and it recurred again and again
in the letters they wrote home.
 
Total war, like bubonic plague,
provides unlimited opportunity
for an unprepared and sudden
death that could set us all on
the wrong path for eternal life.
 
Well, literature also gives
expression to this new and
horrifying reality.
 
You've seen Boccaccio in his
introduction to The
Decameron.
 
You're reading Defoe and The
Journal of the Plague Year.
You could read about it again
in Camus' The Plague,
or Edgar Allan Poe's short
story, "Mask of the Red
Death."
 
Remember too that another
aspect of mors repentina,
the sudden unprepared death,
was the fear of premature
burial.
 
The certification of death in
the early modern world,
say at the time Defoe was
writing, was extremely
imprecise.
 
The only really certain
indication was putrefaction.
And, so, those religious rites
of laying out--
the wake, the funeral
procession and so forth--
were practical,
in that they allowed time,
and they ensured observation,
to be certain that the dead
person really was dead before
being interred.
But plague, on the other
hand--we've seen the plague
regulations.
 
They meant instead a rapid,
hasty burial,
with no attention and no
observation, and isolation
raised a real danger of being
buried alive.
In times of epidemic diseases
that swept populations,
this fear of death was very
pervasive.
And we'll come back to it when
we talk about cholera in the
nineteenth century,
when the cemeteries had all
sorts of experiments with
providing caskets with little
bells above ground and a rope
underground,
so that someone could raise the
alarm if they woke up
unexpectedly.
 
So, the plague then really led
to death unleashed.
Let's look at some of the
portrayals of it,
in painting and sculpture,
from the plague centuries of
the second pandemic--remember,
from 1347 to 1743.
Here's a bas-relief of Pierre
Puget.
This was the plague in
Marseilles, and I think one can
see the extraordinary portrayal.
 
I wanted to move on though to
this particular painting,
one of the most important of
the plague years.
And this again is Poussin,
whom you saw earlier telling
you how to die properly,
what the good death should look
like,
who should be there and all the
rest.
 
This is his famous painting of
1631, now in the Louvre in
Paris, called "The Plague
of Ashdod."
Let me remind you,
it's again a biblically
inspired painting.
 
Let me remind you of what
Ashdod was.
The story is from the First
Book of Samuel in the Old
Testament.
 
Ashdod was a city in the Holy
Land near Gaza,
occupied in biblical times by
the Philistines who worshipped
the idol Dagon.
 
The Philistines defied the
Israelites in battle,
and confiscated the Arc of the
Covenant as war bootie,
and set it up in the Temple of
Dagon in Ashdod.
So, the Book of Samuel tells
us: "And so it was.
The hand of the Lord was
against the city,
with a very great destruction.
 
And the Lord smote the men of
the city, both small and great,
and they had emerods in their
secret parts."
A special reward to any of you
who tell me what an emerod
actually is.
 
But anyway, this slide is about
the destruction of the great
temple of Dagon.
 
You can see that here.
 
This may be the Arc of the
Covenant.
It is, then--again we can see
it's a representation in
painting of plague as being a
punishment for divine anger and
for sin.
 
Some of the things we can note
are the gruesome and particular
details.
 
We can see that there are rats
scurrying.
You know the role that rats
played in plague.
Let's look--here we can see our
friend Rattus rattus
playing a starring role.
 
Or let's notice,
again in the foreground,
the attempt--the terrifying,
haunting attempt--
of a baby to suckle its mother
who's dying--
I'm sorry, that was in the
preceding,
and that's here in the
foreground.
And we'll look at this person
here.
And we can see the passerby
holding his nose because of the
stench of the victims and the
fear of miasma.
Or let's look at another
portrayal.
And this is Pietro Gaetano
"The Plague of the
Late-Seventeenth Century."
 
Or quite a terrifying picture
by Micco Spadara,
"The Plague of Naples in
1656."
While we look at this,
let's think of the reference
that it's making.
 
You can see that things are
happening in the heavens.
And this is Naples being
devastated by the plague.
There are plague pits and all
the rest of it in this picture.
I think we should remember how
people thought of this.
It seemed to be an acting-out
of the Book of Revelations,
the day of the Apocalypse.
 
The Dies Irae,
the day of wrath,
and the Lord's judgment,
when the lamb opened the Great
Book, closed with seven seals;
and that's the reference in
Bergman's film to The Seventh
Seal.
And in the Book of Revelations,
let me remind you of what
people were thinking at times
like this.
In Chapter VI it says:
"And I saw when the lamb
opened one of the seals.
 
And I saw him behold there was
a white horse.
And he that sat on him had a
bow, and he went forth
conquering and to conquer.
 
And when he'd opened the second
seal,
there went out another horse
that was red,
and power was given to him that
sat thereon to take peace from
the earth,
that they should kill one
another.
 
And when he had opened the
third seal, I beheld a black
horse, and he that sat on him
had a pair of balances in his
hand.
 
And he opened the fourth seal.
 
I looked and beheld a pale
horse, and he that sat on him
was death, and hell followed
with him...
At last the lamb opened the
seventh seal and seven angels
appeared, bringing the wrath of
God.
There was thunder,
lightening and earthquake.
The sea turned to blood.
 
The grasses were burned up.
 
The waters turned to wormwood.
 
The sun and moon were smitten
and a bottomless pit opened.
And I saw another sign in the
heavens, great and marvelous:
seven angels bringing the seven
last plagues.
For in them is filled up the
wrath of God.
And I heard a great voice out
of the temple saying to the
seven angels,
'Go your ways and pour out the
vials of the wrath of God upon
the earth'.
And the seventh angel poured
out his vial into the air.
And thence came a great voice
saying, 'It is done.'"
I think that's what's happening
in the heavens here.
Well, other examples of death
unleashed are portrayed in the
theme that was common in
European painting in the time of
bubonic plague,
during the plague centuries,
and that's the theme of the
triumph of death,
which is often complete with
the horsemen of the Apocalypse,
that I just read to you about,
and a usual scene is a great
cart,
pulled by oxen,
driven by the figure of death,
wielding a great scythe,
while before him there goes the
Angel of Death blowing a
trumpet.
 
And all around you may see dead
people and graves that are
opening and skeletons.
 
Let me give you one of the
scariest paintings I know.
This is Pieter Bruegel the
Elder, who lived in the
sixteenth century.
 
And this is "The Triumph
of Death,"
now hanging in the Prado in
Madrid.
And if you look at the details,
I think it becomes all the more
disturbing, the closer you look
at it.
You see death coming with his
scythe and mowing down the
population in their masses,
which is what bubonic plague
does in particular.
 
We can look at another artist.
 
This is Andrea Mantegna,
who died in 1506,
his painting "The Triumph
of Death."
There were other new themes in
European art that emerged during
the plague centuries.
 
And one of these,
that I'll show in a
minute--which is not this--but
will be the theme of
vanitas;
a new theme in European art
during the plague centuries,
when death was unleashed in
Europe repeatedly.
 
Vanitas,
as a theme, flowered in the
sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
Now what did it mean?
 
Well, vanitas paintings
were meant to display the
temporal goods of this world:
flowers perhaps;
fruits;
symbols of learning and culture
such as musical instruments or
books;
or signs of earthly achievement
and wealth, like gold and
jewels.
 
But they're juxtaposed to
striking and more shocking
symbols of what's meant to be
the deeper reality of this
transitory,
fragile life that we live,
and the imminence of death.
 
And, so, alongside these
earthly things,
you'll see a skull;
a candle whose flame has just
gone out;
an hourglass marking the
passage of time;
the crossbones.
And the message is--that also
is a biblical one--vanity from
Ecclesiastes.
 
Let me just read you a sentence.
 
"What profit hath a man of
his labor under the sun?
One generation passeth away and
another generation cometh."
In an age of sudden mass death,
human achievement was futile
and impermanent,
and you should instead be
preparing yourselves for the
true reality of death and the
ever-lasting life.
 
Now, this we can see directly
linked to what you're reading
about in Defoe.
 
Here we have the London Bills
of Mortality,
in 1664 to 1665;
years that you know and are
coming to love.
 
And this is the illustration
that introduced the bills.
It helps us to make the direct
connection between plague and
the iconography I've just been
talking about.
You'll notice that the symbols
are the classic vanitas
symbols of the seventeenth
century.
You see the skeleton,
the crossbones,
the shovel and all the rest of
it, all around the edges.
The skull, the hourglass here.
 
The time is running out.
 
And indeed you'll see right
here that this is--the
inscription is a memento
mori.
This is to remind you that
death is coming and could strike
at any moment,
and you had best prepare.
Let's look at another painting
of these centuries.
This is Lucas Furtenagel--well,
this actually isn't,
I'm sorry.
 
This is a different one.
 
But let me move--you can see in
this painting again the candle
going out.
 
You can see the skull and human
achievements.
All are vanity, is the lesson.
 
Or this, rather--this is the
one I was mentioning;
Lucas Rutenagel,
in the sixteenth century in
Germany.
 
This is "Hans Burgkmair
and His Wife,"
a painting of 1527.
 
And the point is that looking
in the mirror,
they see the true reality of
themselves, which is their
skulls after death.
 
And, so, this is reminding us
that this is the true reality
that lies beneath all of us.
 
Or let's look at another
painting.
This is Harmen Steenwyck,
a painting called
"Vanitas,"
of 1640.
I'm trying to show you
paintings from different
countries, from England,
France, the Low Countries,
Germany and so on.
 
This is the Low Countries.
 
And this painting,
housed in Leiden,
and is quite clearly about
exactly what we've been talking
about;
the candle, the skull,
the books that are evanescent.
 
Or more subtly but quite
famously,
this is Hans Holbein the
Younger's painting called
"The Ambassadors,"
which now hangs in London in
the National Gallery.
 
It's an ironic commentary on
the court of Henry VIII.
All about the painting you see
the display of symbols of
wealth, power and learning:
elegant costumes,
the globe, the book,
musical instruments.
But in somber juxtaposition to
them all is the apparent smudge
in the foreground of the
painting.
But if you look at it closely,
what it actually is,
is a large and perfectly
constructed skull,
seen from a different
perspective;
a technique known as an
anamorphosis.
Let's look at one more vanitas.
 
This is Renard de Saint-Andre's
seventeenth-century painting
called, appropriately,
"Vanitas".
I think you get the picture.
 
Another theme of these
centuries, of death unleashed,
is the theme called the
danse macabre,
the dance of death.
 
Now, let me stress that once
again this is not a school of
painting.
 
This is part of the iconography.
 
It's the theme in the painting.
 
It appears as a common motif in
European Art,
from the mid-fourteenth century
to the sixteenth;
in paintings,
in prints and very importantly
on tombstones.
 
It began with the Black Death.
 
And with the eighteenth century
and the vanishing of the plague,
it becomes rarer and rarer,
it more or less fades out.
The danse macabre
portrays death as a skeleton,
inviting people of all ages,
ranks and sexes to join in the
merry dance of death.
 
And death is usually armed with
a scythe, or an arrow,
or a dart, and often plays a
musical instrument.
In the words of The Catholic
Encyclopedia:
"The Black Death brought
before popular imagination the
subject of death and its
universal sway,
as never before.
 
At this time,
death appeared as the messenger
of God, summoning men to the
world beyond the grave.
During those years,
many churches enacted literal
dances of death,
or transformed it into a play
conveying the idea of the
fragility of life and the
nearness of death and the need
for repentance."
There are other examples.
 
I'd like to show you five
slides from St.
Mary's Church of L�beck in
Germany.
A glorious mural from 1463,
one of the glories of the
Renaissance in Germany.
 
But unfortunately it was
destroyed by Allied bombing in
the war, and so there's only a
black and white reproduction
that I can show you.
 
But the theme comes across
quite clearly,
and is a good example of the
danse macabre.
What it is, is a portrayal,
in separate paintings,
of a whole society suddenly
summoned by Angel of Death,
the bubonic plague.
 
The first one is the pope and
the emperor being summoned by
death.
 
It doesn't matter who you are,
everyone falls victim in time
of plague.
 
Well, here we see another level
of society, a canon and a
nobleman being called again by
death.
Or the third is the parish
priest and the artisan,
who are also being asked to
take part in the dance,
and then the priest and
peasant.
The whole of society,
in other words,
is being stricken by mass
death.
And here we have youth,
a maiden and a baby.
So, we have a portrayal,
in a sense, of universal death.
This was important in the time
of bubonic plague.
There was another major
development of the plague
centuries, and this was the
emergence of cults of famous
plague saints.
 
Saint Sebastian,
San Rocco and Saint George.
And let's look then at four
pictures of Saint Sebastian,
from four of the great artists
of the Plague Era.
You remember why Saint
Sebastian was so important?
Because the arrows were symbols
of the plague,
and Saint Sebastian is offering
his body to defend humanity
against the wrath of the Lord.
 
And Saint Sebastian is a theme
who becomes very important in
these centuries,
for the first time in European
painting.
 
This is Sandro Botticelli's
painting of Saint Sebastian of
1484.
 
Or let me show you another
major painter,
Raphael's "Saint
Sebastian."
Or let me show you Guido Reni's
picture of him.
Or finally, from the Low
Countries, Hendrick ter
Brugghen's
early-seventeenth-century
painting, 1635,
Saint Sebastian.
It was also,
as I said, --the time of the
cult of another saint--and this
is Saint Roch,
or we can call him San Rocco.
 
You know his life already.
 
He was from Montpellier in
France, and devoted himself
during his travels to tending
the plaque-stricken in Italy,
and protecting the faithful.
 
After his death,
then, his intercession was
invoked across Europe,
and his cult spread from
country to country.
 
Often we see Sebastian and
Rocco painted together.
This is Andrea da Murano,
"Christ Embracing the
Saints,"
Sebastian here to his right,
and San Rocco to his left.
 
And you can almost always tell
that San Rocco has the bubo in
his thigh.
 
It's clearly the bubonic plague
that's being referred to here.
Or Francesco Vecellio--this is
the Madonna, between Sebastian
here and San Rocco there.
 
In addition,
it was larger scale than just
paintings.
 
It also affected architecture
across Europe,
and churches were built to San
Rocco across Europe,
in France, in Austria,
in Vienna, in Rome.
But I think if we're going to
talk about plague and its impact
on the built environment and
architecture,
as well as painting,
I think the best place we could
go is Venice.
 
Venice, as you know,
because of its site in the
Mediterranean,
at the center of the trade
routes, was scourged again and
again by bubonic plague,
and was the place that first
devised the anti-plague
measures.
 
So, Venice has a deep
association with bubonic plague,
and it left its imprint in
stone and on canvas.
I'd like to look at some of--if
you were to visit Venice,
you would see that its whole
urban landscape is deeply
affected by bubonic plague.
 
Also, even the gondolas are,
in fact, a reference--that's
why they're black--to bubonic
plague;
from conveying the bodies at
the time.
This is the church of Saint
Mary of Health,
built in the 1530s.
 
And what it's doing is after
the plague had passed,
this is a church that's built
to commemorate the passage of
plague,
and to thank God for allowing
his wrath to be assuaged,
and for health to be returned.
And, so, that's why we have one
of the most important churches
in Venice is Saint Mary of
Health.
And these are a couple of
closer pictures of it.
And that's moving into the
interior.
Let me also show you another
church.
This is the Church of the
Redeemer,
and it's a church also built at
time of plague to thank God for
the assuaging of his wrath and
the survival of the city.
A closer picture.
 
And we'll move on.
 
This is again one of the
glories of Venetian art.
It's called the Scuola Grande
di San
Rocco,
which is the Great School of
Saint Rocco.
 
Let's remember what the school
meant.
There were three-hundred or so
so-called "schools"
at Venice in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
What they were is
confraternities,
associations of laymen,
including the leading trades of
the city.
 
Some of them had large and
wealthy memberships,
and played a major role in the
government of the city,
and amassed enormous wealth.
 
The functions of the
confraternities were originally
devotional.
 
And given the exposure of
Venice to the plague,
it's not surprising that the
very largest and most powerful
of the schools chose Saint Rocco
as its patron saint.
And this is--it bears the name.
 
It constructed a magnificent
building,
and commissioned the greatest
Venetian artist of the century,
Jacopo Tintoretto,
to decorate it,
in veneration of Saint Rocco,
and in direct rivalry to the
Sistine Chapel in Rome.
 
So, let's move inside.
 
There we are.
 
And we'll see that we're
looking at--in these plague
scenes, we'll be seeing that
we're going to look at the
magnificence of the art.
 
And this is the interior of it.
 
I just wanted to show you that
at the height of the painting is
Tintoretto's painting of the
Triumph of San Rocco;
San Rocco, the great plague
saint, achieving his reward in
heaven and going up to God.
 
Plague also affected across
Europe.
Let me also say another theme
in the urban landscape involved
plague columns.
 
And you can see these,
particularly in Central and
Eastern Europe,
a great plague column in the
center of Vienna,
or also in Pilsen in the Czech
Republic.
 
Or in--here's yet another in
Hungary.
Now, in these plague scenes,
of course,
remember that by definition
we're looking at works by
survivors,
whose sense of horror was
tempered perhaps by a bit of
relief.
If it were possible to have
works by the victims,
perhaps the scenes would be
even more wrenching.
There are also aspects that
aren't mentioned in the
literature and are unknowable,
but perhaps probable.
What happened to those who
suffered from the plague and
then were recovered?
 
Was their fertility affected?
 
Were there long-term sequelae
and neurological deficits?
Were there psychological
effects that we would now term
posttraumatic stress syndrome?
 
But in our discussion of
plague, I also want to say that
there were a couple of
speculative, large-scale
conclusions that I want to hint
at.
The presence of plague over
four centuries,
as we've just seen,
had a major impact on religion,
on culture, on societal
attitudes toward life and death,
and left a major imprint on
architecture,
on painting and sculpture.
 
In addition,
I want to speculate for a
moment and say that we might
also think that perhaps the
plague--
and especially not the plague
itself,
but the triumph over it,
by the means we described last
time--
may have been a factor that
helped to transform European
intellectual history.
 
Now, it's one of the great
clich�s that the eighteenth
century, the Age of
Enlightenment,
was a great age of optimism and
belief in progress.
But I'd argue that perhaps the
belief in progress required some
tangible material foundation,
and that this was grounded in a
new sense that life,
in fact, was becoming more
secure, and that perhaps mankind
could master its environment and
its destiny.
 
And, so, I would argue that
it's very significant that the
first great medical conquest--
at least public health
conquest--resulted from the
application of the power of the
state,
of administrative measures in
the plague regulations.
 
And it's no coincidence then
that the eighteenth century--
and during this time,
the State came to be seen as a
source of redeeming power,
that could transform human
lifeand society.
 
Here was an impetus towards
reform, and a re-thinking
intellectually.
 
Medical history,
in a sense, one could argue,
was one factor that helped to
sound the death knell of the old
regime,
dramatically and successfully
demonstrating humans' capacity--
that is, man's capacity to make
his or her own history.
 
Here was a basis for a new
faith in reason,
and the creative potential of
political power.
Perhaps it's suggestive to
remember that Jean-Jacques
Rousseau,
the founder of modern
revolutionary political thought,
began his--and one of the
heroes of the Enlightenment--
began his career in Venice,
which for a time he regarded as
a model regime.
And that his time there
included a month of reflection,
as he underwent a term of
quarantine in the great Venetian
lazaretto.
 
But again, I want to avoid
giving any suggestion that I
want to propound a germ theory
of history.
As a historian,
I'm opposed,
by training,
to mono-causal explanations of
major events.
 
And, so, what I'm not saying is
that the conquest of the plague
caused the Enlightenment;
I'm not saying that.
I merely want to note that the
conquest over the plague first--
and we'll be talking next week
about smallpox second--
were extraordinary influences,
triumphs over the two most
feared diseases of the
seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries,
the first conquest over
infectious disease.
 
And I would say that that
wasn't a million miles away from
being a background influence on
the coming of the Age of the
Enlightenment.
 
I would also speculate that the
triumph over plague first,
and then smallpox,
also played a role in the
coming of the industrial
revolution;
that the plague and smallpox
had been enormous brakes on
demographic growth and the
growth of the economy.
And the conquest of the plague
by the eighteenth century,
followed by victory over
smallpox, had a major impact on
launching a great age of
European population growth.
And population growth,
in turn, was a precondition for
the coming of the Industrial
Revolution.
Again, note that I'm not saying
that the conquest of plague was
a mono-causal explanation for
the coming of the Industrial
Revolution.
 
I'm saying simply that it was
one of many pre-conditions;
that it was a growing
population that provided that
endless supply of free laborers
for factories,
mines and sweatshops.
 
And it also provided a growing
market for industrial products.
Demographic change then
supplied a large home market for
industry.
 
Having made that argument with
regard to plague,
next week what I'd like to do
is to turn to the second major
epidemic disease.
 
If plague was the greatest
feared disease of the
seventeenth century,
and from the fourteenth through
the seventeenth,
in the eighteenth century the
most feared disease was
smallpox.
And I'd like to look next at
smallpox,
its impact, and on the second
great development of a public
health measure,
a very different one,
which was the public health
measure of vaccination.
So, that's where we're going
next.
 
 
