From Healthscaping to Disease Tracing: Plague and Public Health After the Black Death

Pandemics in the Past: from Prehistory to (almost) the Present

Seminar series of  the Program in Medieval Studies and the Climate Change and History Research Initiative, supported by  Humanities Council.

This talk will discuss the development of plague-focused public health measures over the course of the fifteenth century, as urban governments adapted to what was no longer a new disease. Recent scholarship has shown that at the time of the Black Death urban public health measures were primarily hygienic: designed to create an environment conducive to human health. By the outbreaks of the later fifteenth century, however, medieval city governments began to employ plague measures concerned less with hygiene than with human movement. As municipal responses to plague became more sophisticated, in other words, they came to have less to do with creating a healthful environment.

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Registration URL: https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAocuiqrT4qHNdQSxwQsPoPmwbRIU6eLIgg