Overview
- Presents a history of plague, bringing together scholars from early modern and modern history as well as anthropologists working on plague in historical and contemporary contexts
- Examines the visual record of the plague and explores the relationship between the epidemic image and human imagination
- Integrates geographical perspectives beyond the usual Eurocentric plague frame, appealing to scholars of global history and colonialism
Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History (MBSMH)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This edited collection brings together new research by world-leading historians and anthropologists to examine the interaction between images of plague in different temporal and spatial contexts, and the imagination of the disease from the Middle Ages to today. The chapters in this book illuminate to what extent the image of plague has not simply reflected, but also impacted the way in which the disease is experienced in different historical periods. The book asks what is the contribution of the entanglement between epidemic image and imagination to the persistence of plague as a category of human suffering across so many centuries, in spite of profound shifts in our medical understanding of the disease. What is it that makes plague such a visually charismatic subject? And why is the medical, religious and lay imagination of plague so consistently determined by the visual register? In answering these questions, this volume takes the study of plague images beyond its usual, art-historical framework, so as to examine them and their relation to the imagination of plague from medical, historical, visual anthropological, and postcolonial perspectives.
Reviews
- Jennifer Tucker, Associate Professor of History, Wesleyan University, USA
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Christos Lynteris is a social anthropologist working on the anthropological and historical examination of epidemics, zoonosis, and epidemiological epistemology. He is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK, currently leading a Wellcome-funded project on The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis. He was Principal Investigator of the ERC funded research project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic (University of Cambridge, 2013-17, University of St Andrews 2017-2018).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times
Editors: Christos Lynteris
Series Title: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-72303-3Published: 30 July 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-72306-4Published: 30 July 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-72304-0Published: 29 July 2021
Series ISSN: 2947-9142
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9150
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 298
Number of Illustrations: 34 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Science, History of Medicine, Cultural History, Audio-Visual Culture, Arts