Death by darkness
Plague, fear & culture in Early Modern Europe
An essay written by Felipe de Medeiros Guarnieri, ID 200527256
In answer to question no.1, 'What disease posed the greatest threat to early modern Europe?'
HIST2220 The body, disease & society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1750
Prof. Alexandra Bamji
School of History, University of Leeds
'A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of
the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is
men who pass away […]'
Albert Camus, The Plague
THOMAS NASHE, Elizabethan poet and satirist, did not enter history due to his merits as a
writer, if by divine intervention. Himself dead frightened with the plague, in his play Summer’s Last
Will and Testament he let a character infected with the disease utter:
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!1
Another play of his, The Unfortunate Traveller, deals again with the hideous impressions of
the infection. The plague also figurated prominently in the work of Giovanni Boccaccio and
Geoffrey Chaucer. In painting, it constitued a theme of its own, from Hieronymus Bosch to Hans
Holbein the Younger and after to the Romantics.
In this essay, I shall inquire after the cultural significance of the plague2, drawing artistic and
private primary sources from Italy, France and England in a range of four hundred years (from the
Black Death until the early eighteenth century), then argue why the bubonic plague was the most
feared, thus threatening, disease in Europe during early modern age. Strikingly enough, I have
drawn close attention to two singular paintings, from Bosch and Bruegel, which are not from the
1. The entire poem is nowadays named after its first line, ‘Adieu, Farewell, Earth’s Bliss’. See Thomas Nashe,
‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament’ in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (London, 2006), pp.146-207.
2. I use 'the plague' here as a synonym of epidemic bubonic plague and its cultural ressonance. Isolated occurances have
been ignored; and other types of epidemic diseases, such as smallpox, have all been addressed with their given name.
aforementioned countries, albeit pose classic interpretations of the horrors and social impact of the
plague. There are two reasons I have done so: as the plague is a universal, 'pan-European' concept,
responses to it arose from similar motives in different places; in contrast, being produced by single
artists (and different interpretations of Christianism for that matter), responses were divergent.
Whereas saints and Gods primarily figure on Italian painting, and also on English accounts;
eccentric and more individual approaches concern Bosch's and Bruegel's depiction of the disease.
Anyhow, both Bosch and Bruegel address the overall 'psychological trauma' induced by the plague:
the mass fear, anxiety and despair in response to an engulfing, irredeemable darkness. The plague
was soever culturally predominant.
Franco Mormando argues in the Introduction to Hope and Healing that, in times of social
crisis, artistic renditions of the plague were 'above all, to be an instrument of healing and
encouragement, a mirror and a channel of society's search for solace and cure from heavens […]'3.
The single figure of Boccaccio heaves this statement into question. Writing his Decameron in the
height of the Black Death, the Italian scorns the pathetic frailty of humanity against impending
death. His feeble characters vainly try to flee from the infection; the image he gives of fourteenth
century Italy is one of disorder, bewilderment and mischief. Therefore, although Morando's
generalisation may apply to Italian painting4, it does not proceed to the whole of Italian art, nor does
to Europe. The influence of Boccaccian, Petrarchan and Chaucerian attitudes towards the plague
was enormous. Moving to France, Rabelais treated, in the sixteenth century, the disease with his
usual sarcasm, describing the foul stench of corpses as Pantagruel's garlic breath5.
Morando fittingly addresses the power of images as an important means of 'dealing' with the
supernatural. Even in the most sceptical interpretations of the plague in early modern europe, the
issue of religion is central. Saints were predominant in plague-related art, for they could try to
3. Franco Mormando, ‘Introduction: Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy: What the Primary Sources, Printed
and Painted, Reveal’ in Hope and Healing (Chicago, 2005), pp.1-44.
4. The generalisation is, again, problematic. He is silent on the fearful figures of the 'angry Christ' and the popular
subject of the Danse Macabre. See Louise Marshall, 'Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy',
in Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (1994), pp.485-582.
5. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (London, 2006); also, Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (London,
1995).
appease the wrath of God'. Interestingly enough, their suffering was not only spiritual but
conspicuous in the flesh: the body pierced with arrows from St. Sebastian (plate 1) and the
recognizable buboes of St. Roch (plates 2; 3) resemble the suffering of Christ, as if God had set
upon mankind an ordeal of redemption. The representation of suffering through the flesh is also
embedded in modern and 'lay' theories of medicine; this ‘humanisation’ of the divine is evident in
the contemporary figure of Carlo Borromeo, appearing in paintings speckled with social hues (plate
4). The depiction of disease striking the 'holy flesh' may be also connected to contemporary imagery
of society as an organism, following developments in anatomy during the late Middle Ages. Albeit
soliciting the aid of God was undoubtedly the strongest response, by no means it was the only one.
Epidemics were empirically observed to spread much faster in cities than in rural areas. As
soon as there was an outbreak, people desperately fled to the 'cleaner airs' of meadows. Associated
with uncleanliness, disorder and disease, the city slowly acquired a negative connotation, becoming,
alongside the plague, a depository of human fear and paranoia (plate 5). Ruined temples, bustling
streets, household scenes were increasingly depicted in paintings about the plague; urban life was
seen as an inextricable element of epidemic spread6. Religious figures dwell among men in urban
environments, trod with Greek gods in Athens. The plague also arrests the classic tradition (plates 6;
7).
So great was the cultural predominance of the plague that even social traits were refurbished
during its manifestation. The epidemic became an 'agent of social relation and the filter through
which one can perceive […] groups, modes of behaviour, particular times and places'7. Moreover,
State apparatus implanted in times of epidemics (what Calvi calls 'the dictatorship of health
officials') made normal life quite impossible. The public perimeter drastically invaded individual
privacy, destabilising any kind of given social communication. Victims were locked up in their
houses; citizens were forbidden from circulating; many times entire cities were surrounded and left
6. For the relations between urbanity and the plague, see John Landers, Death and the metropolis (Cambridge, 1994);
and Mark Jenner, ‘The great dog massacre’ in Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester, 1997), pp.44-61.
7. Giulia Calvi, 'A Metaphor for Social Exchange: The Florentine Plague of 1630' in Representations 13 (1987), pp.139163; the Florentine Plague of 1630 is also the subject of her book, Histories of a Plague Year (Berkeley, 1989). Calvi
also insightfully addresses the relation between urban environment and the plague.
alone so the disease would not spread elsewhere. For these reasons, authorities were often more
feared than hailed, as they were also seen as harbingers of doom. The ravenous appearance of the
‘beak doctors’ was not much helpful to the infected.
Feared and loathed, plague was nonetheless strangely familiarised (plate 8). Due to its
suddenness and cyclical character, when not actually living through an epidemic, Europeans were
anxiously preparing for the next one. Even during outbreaks there was strong popular resistance on
abiding to health officials. Giulia Calvi tells us an anecdote of a Florentine, Viviano, who claimed a
'quick profit' from a plague victim. His cupidity was punished with the death of his whole family.
This theme is explored in Hieronymus Bosch's Death of the Miser (plate 9), painted circa 1490. The
sick gazes at death and stands besides an angel who seems to be negotiating his soul with a
mischievous demon. The light emanating from Christ at the top is feeble and does not reach the
dying man, for he dwells on earthly follies even at the time of his fate; nonchalantly accepting a bag
of money from another hellish imp. At the bottom, demons resembling rats, one of them carrying a
basket with golden coins, are connected with filth: a friar is not daunted by these creatures and
claims the money of the victim. Nashe's 'Gold cannot buy your help' notwithstanding, the fear of
death was not strong enough to bar human greed.
Plague infected not only the body but the mind of Europe. Its cultural predominance may
nevertheless be questioned, as we do not know for sure that the Black Death and succeeding
epidemics were really bursts of bubonic plague. Let us compare, then, the 'plague' – both as the
disease and panegiric of cultural representations surrounding it – with the great pox, syphilis, and
smallpox. The initial 'threat' of syphilis was indeed bewildering, but owes less to sheer fear than to
the unknown nature of the pox8. Syphilis, aside from having a highly abnormal rate of mortality in
its first occurrences, was thought to have been brought from America by Columbus; it is not
surprising that its presence evoked confusion. Withstanding, its artistic significance was not nearly
as great as the plague – it sprang but a few lines in Shakespeare’s plays; and mainly satirical
8. For an account of the original onset of syphilis and its following responses, see Winfried Schleiner, ‘Moral attitudes
towards syphilis and its prevention in the Renaissance’, in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 68 (1994), pp.389-410.
imagery, usually with sexual or buffonery connotations9. The overall image abstracted from the two
centuries since syphilis entered Europe is one in which people were not bothering to talk much
about it. Syphilis would become a popular artistic theme only in the eighteenth century onwards,
with Voltaire and Hogarth.
The smallpox alone has killed more than the Plague during history, especially if we count
the deaths of American natives. The huge popularity of Spanish Codices produced by colonists
weighs in favour of the pox's cultural significance – nonetheless, these books were more popular for
giving the first account of American natives than by discussing epidemics in the outer-Atlantic.
Bearing this statement, by questioning the threat posed by the smallpox, we must ultimately address
a theoretical problem: is mortality the sole factor that makes a disease threatening? Is it even the
most important factor? I have argued in this brief essay that this seems not to be the case, albeit the
plague killed daily by thousands, as recorded in the famous Observations of John Graunt10. Plague
was culturally dominant and ushered a whole singular way of writing, the plague tract. Its repetitive
occurrences engendered a deep psychological trauma upon the European mind. In Daniel Defoe's
fictionalised account of the London Plague of 1665 in A Journal of the Plague Year (pub. 1722), H.
F., the narrator, when telling us a story of a plague victim who had escaped the care of health
officials,
I say, What could be more Affecting, than to see this poor Man come out into the open Street, run
Dancing and Singing, and making a thousand antick Gestures, with five or six Women and Children running
after him, crying, and calling upon him, for the Lord's sake to come back, and entreating the help of others to
bring him back, but all in vain, no Body daring to lay a hand upon him, or to come near him.
This was a most grievous and afflicting thing to me, who see it all from my own Windows; for all this
while, the poor afflicted Man, was, as I observ'd it, even then in the utmost Agony of Pain […] I cannot say
what became of this poor Man, but I think he continu'd roving about in that manner till he fell down and
Died.11
9. Cultural representations of syphilis in Elizabethan England are the main theme of Johannes Fabricius’s Syphilis in
Shakespeare’s England (Kingsley, 1994); Fabricius’s work is an amazing collection of British references to the great
pox, from Bacon to Dryden.
10. John Graunt, foremost recorder of the London Plague of 1665, gives us statistics of how many died per day. Samuel
Pepys and Ralph Josselin also comment on the matter in their diaries, observing the flow and following ebb of the
disease. See John Graunt, extracts from 'Reflections on the Weekly Bills of Mortality' and 'Natural and Political
Observations upon the Bills of Mortality', both of which are published in Daniel Defoe's Norton edition of A Journal of
the Plague Year (New York, 1992), pp.199-207. For the diaries, see Alan McFarlane (ed.), The Diary of Ralph Josselin,
1616-1683 (Cambridge, 1991), pp.518-531; and finally Samuel Pepys, The Diaries of Samuel Pepys: A Selection
(London, 2003).
11. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of a Plague Year (New York, 1992), pp. 136-137.
Impersonality, paralysing fear, utter confusion to the point of comic behaviour; the overall
tone, in spite of social and health measures, was one of despair and vulnerability. Whereas it may be
argued that the plague was to some extent ‘familiarised’, the memory of it was overwhelmingly
traumatic; one cannot get used to the ‘Bring the Dead!’ uttered by corpse-bearers12.
In analysing Modern Age artistic depictions of bubonic plague, I have argued that a disease,
to be threatening, must be above all feared and have strong social and cultural resonance, not
necessarily be mortal. The plague became a symbol of an entire period in history. Sudden, swift and
devilish in appearance, the ‘old hag’ was not only a cause, but a symptom of a broader context of
growing urbanity, social ‘disorder’, and political turbulence: a threat to the whole of society. For
centuries the plague constituted a major theme in European painting, literature and overall culture;
expressed through art in manifold ways, from scepticism in the poetry of Petrarch and Donne; grim
ribaldry in the tales of Boccaccio and the popular subject of the Danse Macabre (plates 10; 11);
serene appeal to God in the Italian paintings; to ironic anarchy in the paintings of Bosch.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Flemish Renaissance painter, offers us a staggering visual depiction
of the horrors of the plague. Painted circa 1562, The triumph of Death (plate 12) is filled with
nightmarish imagery deeply influenced by Bosch; its tone akin to the Danse Macabre. Death is
personified by walking skeletons leading a rig with the sick; peasants, nobles, soldiers, kings, friars
lay hopelessly desperate: reapers make no judgement among status. In the background, the sky is
dark and gloom; you can almost smell the smoke from the burning corpses and stench of disease.
Bruegel's view is rather sceptical and pessimistic insofar as God seems totally powerless in this
bleak wasteland. The painting recalls Rocco Benedetti's description of sixteenth century Lazzaretto
in Italy, '[…] All these things represented a sad and sorrowful triumph of death.'13 A cross stands
12. Ann G.. Carmichael disagrees with what may apparently seem as a ‘familiarisation’ process. In ‘The Last Past
Plague: The Uses of Memory in Renaissance Epidemics’ in Journal of the History of Medicine, 53:2 (1998), pp.132160; she discusses the important role of memory during outbreaks.
13. Quoted from ‘The Struggle Against Plague’ in Venice: A Documentary History, 1450-1630 (Toronto, 1992), pp.117119.
alone in the middle of the canvas, surrounded by ghastly priests. Jesus is unable to redeem mankind
in its ultimate doom. Death triumphs.
Plate 1. St. Sebastian interceding for the Plague Stricken (ca. 1497-1499)
Josse Lieferinxe (active 1497-1505)
Oil on wood, 81.8 x 55.4 cm
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA
Source: http://thewalters.org/
Plate 2. St. Roch in the Hospital (1549)
Tintoretto (1518-1594)
Oil on canvas, 307 x 673cm
Scuola di San Rocco, Venice, Italy
Source: www.wga.hu
Plate 3. St. Fabian, St. Sebastian and St. Roch (ca. 1565-1568)
Jacopo Bassano (1510-1592)
Oil on paper pasted on canvas, 57.5 x 45 cm
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia
Source: http://idlespeculations-terryprest.blogspot.com/
Plate 4. St. Charles Borromeo Among the Plague-Stricken of Milan (ca. 1647)
Pierre Mignard (ca. 1575- ca. 1632)
Oil on canvas, 125 x 91.5 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, Caen, France
Source: Hope and Healing, pp.226-227
Plate 5. Largo Del Mercatello during the Plague of 1656 in Naples (ca. 1656-60)
Domenico Gargiulo (1612-1679)
Oil on canvas
Museo di S. Martino, Naples, Italy
Source: Hope and Healing, p.97
Plate 6. The Plague at Ashdod (1630)
Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665)
Oil on canvas, 148 x 198 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris, France
Source: www.wga.hu
Plate 7. Plague in an Ancient City (ca. 1652-54)
Michael Sweerts (1618-1664)
Oil on canvas, 118.75 x 171.45 cm
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA
Source: Hope and Healing, pp.188-189
Plate 8. Memento Mori (Death Comes to the Dinner Table) (ca. 1635)
Giovanni Martinelli (1604-1659)
Oil on canvas, 123.15 x 174 cm
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, USA
Source: Hope and Healing, pp.184-185
Plate 9. Death of the Miser (ca. 1490)
Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450-1516)
Oil on wood, 93 x 31 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA
Source: www.wga.hu
Plate 10. ‘The Idiot Fool’
Drawing XLIII of The Danse Macabre (1538)
Hans Holbein the Younger (1498-1543)
Source:
http://www.godecookery.com/macabre/holdod/holdod.htm
Plate 11. ‘The Pope’
Drawing VI of The Danse Macabre (1538)
Hans Holbein the Younger (1498-1543)
Source:
http://www.godecookery.com/macabre/holdod/holdod.htm
Plate 12. The Triumph of Death (ca. 1562)
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525-1569)
Oil on panel, 117 x 162 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Source: www.wga.hu
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BAILEY, Gauvin; JONES, Pamela M.; MORMANDO, Franco & WORCESTER, Thomas W. Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time
of Plague, 1500-1800 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005)
BOCCACCIO, Giovanni. The Decameron, trans. by George Henry McWilliam (London: Penguin Books, 2003)
CALVI, Giulia. ‘A Metaphor for Social Exchange: The Florentine Plague of 1630’ in Representations, 13 (1986), pp. 139-163.
CALVI, Giulia. Histories of a Plague Year: The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989)
CAMICHAEL, Ann G. ‘The Last Past Plague: The Uses of Memory in Renaissance Epidemics’ in Journal of the History of Medicine, 53:2
(1998), pp.132-160.
CAMUS, Albert. The Plague, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1991)
CARLIN, C. L. (ed.). Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
CHAMBERS, David; PULLAN, Brian & FLETCHER, Jennifer. Extracts from ‘The Struggle Against Plague’ in Venice: A Documentary
History, 1450-1630 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp.113-119
CHAUCER, Geoffrey. ‘The Canterbury Tales’ in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Christopher Cannon (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), pp.3-328
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DIXON, Laurinda. Bosch (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003)
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Europe, 1500-1800: A Sourcebook (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp.140FABRICIUS, Johannes. Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England (Kingsley: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1994)
GIBSON, Walter S. Bruegel (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977)
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Mortality' in DEFOE, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), pp.199-207.
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Press, 1994)
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NAPHY, William G. & ROBERTS, Penny (eds.). Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)
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(1994), pp. 389-410.
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Assessment from Prof. Bamji
FOCUS ON THE QUESTION
While including the original essay question, you also provide an alternative title for your essay: this isn’t an advisable tactic given that focus on the question is one of the key criteria
by which your essay is assessed. Your introduction also sets up the parameters of your essay as beginning with the Black Death: the module documentation specifically states that the
essay should concern the period 1500-1750. So Boccaccio and Chaucer are not relevant examples. Focus on the task at hand.
ARGUMENT & ANALYSIS
If one leaves to one side chronological focus, this is in many respects an outstanding essay: original, rich and making insightful use of primary sources, notably images. There is a
powerful argument in favour of plague due to its cultural predominance, but also recognition of other diseases, namely syphilis and smallpox. Good use of Morando. Sophisticated to
the extent to which mortality is a key element in a threat.
PRESENTATION & LITERACY
Exceptional presentation, notably due to the inclusion of the images to which you refer in your discussion. Lively writing style. There are some additional points made in the
footnotes – notably regarding the historiography. History essays expect you to integrate such discussions into the body of the essay itself.
ACCURACY & RANGE OF READING
Exceptional range of reading. Early modern scholarship refers to ‘plague’ rather than ‘bubonic plague’.