Abstract
The Introduction to this volume discusses the aesthetic, political and epistemological entanglements of plague’s image and imagination. Going beyond a visual analytical framework, the Introduction will examine how plague’s ‘image’ relates to and cosmological, anthropological, socio-political and medical framings of human society and its interaction with the non-human world. Providing a summary of the volume’s chapters as well as a broader historical and anthropological framing, the Introduction discusses the contribution of plague image and imagination in the rise of shifting epidemiological and public health frameworks and in the emergence and consolidation of the notion of the pandemic, as a pivot of modern epidemiology.
Research leading to this chapter was funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme/ERC grant agreement no. 336564 for the project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic (PI: Christos Lynteris)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai, “The Justinianic plague and global pandemics: The making of the plague concept,” Historical American Review 125, no. 5 (2020): 1632–1667.
- 2.
Sander L. Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness. Images of Identity and Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 10. This volume recognises as its limitation the fact that it does not engage with the study area of the impact of plague on art, something explored in works including: Samuel K. Cohn Jr, The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), chapter 7; Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); Judith B. Steinhoff, Sienese Painting After the Black Death. Artistic Pluralism, Politics and the New Art Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 3.
Martha R. Baldwin, ‘Toads and Plague: Amulet Therapy in Seventeenth-Century Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 67, no. 2 (1993): 227–247; Sheila Barker, ‘Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine’, Art Bulletin 86, no. 4 (December 2004): 659–689; Christine M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); Andrew Hopkins, ‘Combating the Plague: Devotional Paintings, Architectural Programs, and Votive Processions in Early Modern Venice’. In Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Palema M. Jones, Franco Mormando and Thomas W. Worcester (eds.) Hope and Healing. Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague 1500–1800, pp. 137–152 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Louise Marshall, ‘Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1994): 485–53; Alexandra Woolley, ‘Nicolas Poussin’s Allegories of Charity in The Plague at Ashdod and The Gathering of the Manna and Their Influence on Late Seventeenth-Century French Art’. In Jutta Gisela Sperling (ed.) Medieval and Renaissance Lactations. Images, Rhetorics, Practices (London: Routledge, 2013).
- 4.
Franco Mormando, ‘Introduction: Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy: What the Primary Sources, Printed and Painted, Reveal’. In Bailey et al. (eds.) Hope and Healing, pp. 1–44.
- 5.
Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence; H. Avery, ‘Plague Churches, Monuments and Memorials’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 59, no. 2 (1966): 110–116; John Henderson, Florence Under Siege. Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
- 6.
Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence; Palema M. Jones, ‘San Carlo Borromeo and Plague Imagery in Milan and Rome’. In Bailey et al. (eds.) Hope and Healing, pp. 65–96; Louise Marshall, ‘A Plague Saint for Venice: Tintoretto at the Chiesa di San Rocco’, Artibus et Historiae 33, no. 66 (2012): 153–187; Thomas Worcester, ‘Saint Roch vs. Plague, Famine, and Fear’. In Bailey et al. (eds.) Hope and Healing, pp. 153–176.
- 7.
Lukas Engelmann, John Henderson and Christos Lynteris, ‘Introduction: The Plague and the City in History’. In Lukas Engelmann, John Henderson and Christos Lynteris (eds.) Plague and the City, pp. 1–16 (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 9; Rose Marie San Juan, Rome: A City Out of Print (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 221.
- 8.
For discussion see chapters in Engelmann et al. (eds.) Plague and the City.
- 9.
On photography in the Hong Kong outbreak see: Robert Peckham, ‘Plague Views. Epidemic, Photography and the Ruined City’. In Engelmann et al. Plague and the City, pp. 92–115.
- 10.
Lukas Engelmann, ‘“A Source of Sickness”. Photographic Mapping of Plague in Honolulu in 1900’. In Engelmann et al. Plague and the City, pp. 139–158. Nicholas H. A. Evans, ‘The Disease Map and the City: Desire and Imitation in the Bombay Plague, 1896–1914’. In Engelmann et al. Plague and the City, pp. 116–138; Christos Lynteris, ‘Vagabond Microbes, Leaky Laboratories and Epidemic Mapping: Alexandre Yersin and the 1898 Plague Epidemic in Nha Trang’ Social History of Medicine (2019). https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkz053
- 11.
For relevant literature on plague diagrams see: Lukas Engelmann, ‘The Configuration of Plague: Spatial Diagrams in Early Epidemiology’, Social Analysis 63, no. 4 (2019): 89–109; Christos Lynteris, ‘Zoonotic Diagrams: Mastering and Unsettling Human-Animal Relations’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23, no. 3 (2017): 463–485. By contrast, caricatures provided powerful counter-narratives to plague aetiologies or to scientific proclamations of specific outbreaks as ones of true plague; Maria Antónia Pires de Almeida, ‘Epidemics in the News: Health and Hygiene in the Press in Periods of Crisis’, Public Understanding of Science 22, no. 7 (2013): 886–902; Lukas Englelmann, ‘A Plague of Kinyounism: The Caricatures of Bacteriology in 1900 San Francisco’, Social History of Medicine (2018). https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky039
- 12.
Myron J. Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Mark Harrison, ‘Pandemic’. In M. Jackson (ed.) The Routledge History of Disease, pp. 129–146 (London: Routledge, 2017).
- 13.
See, for example: Christos Lynteris, ‘Plague Masks: The Visual Emergence of Anti-Epidemic Personal Protection Equipment’, Medical Anthropology 37, no. 6 (2018): 442–457.
- 14.
Faye Marie Getz, ‘Black Death and the Silver Lining: Meaning, Continuity, and Revolutionary Change in Histories of Medieval Plague’, Journal of the History of Biology 24, no. 2 (1991): 265–289.
- 15.
J. F. C. Hecker, Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin: Herbig, 1832).
- 16.
For a critique of the use of historical images unrelated to plague in plague-related media pieces see: Monica H. Green, Kathleen Walker-Meikle, and Wolfgang P. Müller ‘Diagnosis of a “Plague” Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale’, The Medieval Globe 1, no. 1 (2014). https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/13; Lori Jones and Richard Nevell, ‘Plagued by Doubt and Viral Misinformation: The Need for Evidence-Based Use of Historical Disease Images’, Lancet Infectious Diseases 16 (2016): e235–40. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/tmg/vol1/iss1/13
- 17.
Christos Lynteris, Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2019).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lynteris, C. (2021). Introduction: Imaging and Imagining Plague. In: Lynteris, C. (eds) Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-72303-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-72304-0
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)