Search Results

Beginning in 542, as the Byzantine Roman eyewitness Procopius observed, ‘there was a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to annihilation’. In approximately 550, according to Irish chronicles, the pestilential terror claimed Ciarán, the young abbot of Clonmacnoise on the River Shannon in Offaly, a monastery he had founded in the previous year. In the year of Ciarán's death the young St Columba, some five years younger than the stricken abbot, was studying the scriptures in Ireland. His name, according to later tradition, was Crimthann. In the pestilential 540s, Crimthann studied in Leinster, as well as under the moral theologian Uinniau. Over a span of thirty-four years Columba founded a number of monasteries in voluntary exile. Adomnán calls him ‘father and founder of monasteries’. One of these foundations lay on the little Hebridean island of Í, known today as Iona.

Accounts of pestilence in the historical record help us understand those assumptions about the effects of disease that inform both the creation of the plague narrative and its reception among Roman audiences. Chapter 2 examines Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita in order to suggest that the historical experience and representation of plague in Rome was infused with resonance of civil strife by the Augustan period. Livy refines his source material to address a body politic in need of healing and thus sharpens the correlation between contagium and civil discord (discordia), especially in early episodes recounting the struggle of the orders. The historian’s narratives of contagion draw partly from the language of medical writers, but equally from a historiographic tradition that correlated a diseased body with a diseased body politic. Accounts of plague allow Livy to reflect on distinctions among members of different orders, especially the patres/patricii (highest class of citizens) and plebs (lowest class of citizens). The remedies enacted to combat plague, in forms of both cultural and political innovations, prove alternatingly salubrious and detrimental to the body politic. Livy recognizes, however, that, as a challenge to the people equivalent to strife within and war abroad, pestilentia could have a positive impact on the development of Roman hegemony and prompt coalescence among a divided citizenry.

This chapter refutes present claims that epidemics in antiquity led to blame of the ‘other’. By assembling contemporary descriptions, explanations, and consequences of ancient epidemics, this chapter overturns a second commonplace about ancient epidemics: that contemporaries understood them within a moral universe, in which plagues arose from the evil deeds of individuals usually within the political sphere, such as betrayals, unjust wars, violations of peace, and breaches of justice, and as a consequence, the gods punished communities with epidemic disease. Such explanations, however, clustered in undatable, mythological time. Instead, classical authors explained the majority of epidemics solely by natural phenomenon—climate, famine, bad food and unaccustomed diets, vapours from unburied corpses, polluted rivers, etc. These explanations did not cast blame on anyone, including the enemies of the afflicted, who may have created the preconditions that brought about these plagues.

This chapter begins with human and animal sacrifices to appease the gods during pestilence, but shows that such acts were extremely rare and, when they occurred, quickly disappeared or changed form often to animal sacrifice. It investigates the scapegoat in ancient epidemics, showing the concept as far removed from present-day notions. The ancient one was often a volunteer, exemplary of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the community. Instead of being outcasts, foreigners, or despised minorities (for whom we reserve the term today), in antiquity, almost without exception, they were the elites. More emphatically, from literary and historical descriptions of the fifth century BCE to the sixth CE Justinianic Plague, the chapter charts societal reactions to epidemics, finding that they spawned acts of altruism, public holidays, and self-sacrifice. Instead of blaming or inflicting violence on ‘others’, epidemics were forces for unity, healing rifts between classes, factions, and regions at war.

This chapter focuses on William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat and William Bullein’s Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, arguing that their glossing reflects both the contemporary controversy over the translation, printing, and glossing of the Bible, and a wider curiosity about the impact of print on what a text means. It shows that, although both works reflect Protestant insistence on the plain word of God as sole spiritual authority, their glosses do not simply underwrite the Reformist message of their works, but instead call into question the assumption that the printed word has an authority distinct from that of its contents. Provoking their readers into independent interpretation, they bear witness to the development of diverting glossing as an identifiable genre, characterized by studied unpredictability and play.