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REVIEWS
| Die leidige Seuche: Pest-Fälle in der Frühen Neuzeit. Edited by Otto Ulbricht (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2004. 344 pp.).
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| This is an outstanding collection of essays on a surprisingly neglected topic: plague in early modern Europe. Scholarly work on plague has tended to concentrate on the initial outbreak in the fourteenth century, although plague epidemics were a regular feature of life throughout Europe until the eighteenth century. The essays in this volume seek to redress this imbalance. While the authors challenge common assumptions about the plague, what makes this volume especially valuable is that the contributors also use analyses of plague to offer new perspectives on the religious, political, economic and psychological lives of early modern Europeans. |
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Esther Härtel explores the different effects of plague on men and women. Although women were more likely to contract plague than men, female plague victims had a lower mortality rate than their male counterparts. Moving beyond an analysis of demographic data, Härtel argues that the effects of plague epidemics were different for men and women. For men, the loss of a spouse to plague could be psychologically devastating, but for women this could be economically and socially devastating as well, entailing a loss of support and protection. |
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Otto Ulbricht examines the establishment, functions and contemporary perceptions of plague hospitals in early modern Germany. While other historians have assumed that the purpose of plague hospitals was primarily the isolation of the sick, Ulbricht argues that contemporaries intended plague hospitals to provide medical care and spiritual comfort to poor plague victims. Further, demographic data suggest that these institutions made a positive difference in the survival rates of poor plague victims: "For the poor the plague hospital was undoubtedly the best place to receive good medical treatment and care." (p. 122) At the same time, these institutions had universally poor reputations for embezzlement of funds, violation of cadavers and abuse of patients, including sexual abuse of female patients. |
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Matthias Lang questions the assumption that there were no significant changes in religious explanations of the plague between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. He examines a large collection of sixteenth-century plague tracts by Lutheran theologians and shows that many rejected the medieval notion that God was the primary cause of plague, but acted through secondary, natural causes. Instead they saw God as the direct, immediate cause of plague. Such theologians were reluctant to accept theories of contagion as these took no account of the moral status of the infected person. Their position was in keeping with the anti-Aristotelian, anti-rational strain in Lutheran thought. Lang thus demonstrates that religious views of plague were inflected by confessional differences and further suggests that study of plague tracts could provide new insights into the processes of confessionalization. |
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Boris Steinegger presents an intriguing microhistorical account of a gravedigger charged with caring for two young pastor's children orphaned by the plague. Both children died soon after the gravedigger moved in with them and the gravedigger was accused, tried and ultimately convicted of murdering them. Steinegger's masterful unpacking of this event highlights the psychological effects of plague on families and communities. By rights the children should have been cared for by family, friends or neighbors, but fear of contagion necessitated paying an outsider to perform this task. Thus the gravedigger's very presence signaled the rupture of bonds of kinship and neighborliness brought about by the plague. Steinegger persuasively argues that the accusation of the gravedigger sprang as much from profound guilt over the failure of the family and community to care for the young orphans as from any objective evidence of the gravedigger's complicity in their deaths. |
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