FLORENCE UNDER SIEGE - BOOK LAUNCH
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
John Henderson, Professor of Italian Renaissance History, discusses his latest book, Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City, with Dr Jane Stevens Crawshaw (Oxford Brookes) and Professor Carole Rawcliffe (East Anglia).
Each age faces the challenge of new diseases from cholera to AIDS and Ebola, but plague remains the paradigm against which reactions to epidemics are often judged. This book, while focussing on seventeenth-century Florence, examines the Tuscan capital within a wider Italian and European context to assess the real impact of policies on the city, the neighbourhood, street and family. Writing in a vivid and approachable way, Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City goes beyond traditional oppositions between rich and poor, and provides a nuanced and more compassionate interpretation of government policies in practice. Medicine and religion play central themes in the narrative, as contemporaries grappled to understand the cause and nature of plague and led, on the one hand, to quarantine and isolation, with the establishment of vast Lazaretti and, on the other hand, to public processions through the streets of the city. John Henderson recreates the very human reactions and survival strategies of families and individuals at all levels of society through a wide range of contemporary sources from the personal diaries of the literate to the testimony of the poor as reflected in court cases.
You can read more about the book on the blog on Yale University Press’s website.
The Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck has a distinguished tradition as an international centre of excellence. We are the only university department in London to include archaeologists, classicists and historians investigating every period from prehistory to the early twenty-first century. Join us to discover the past and engage with the present across continents and cultures.
This event is part of Birkbeck's Discover the Past series. To see the full list of events, click here.
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Contact name:
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck