Plague and pestilence in literature and art

In the year 1720 plague found its way to Marseilles. It was believed to have been brought by a ship, the _Grand-Saint-Antoine_, which arrived on May 25 from the Levant. As usual...

There is no need to rewrite the history of the Black Death: that has been admirably accomplished by Hecker and by Abbot Gasquet. It is still profitable, however, to investigate...

The scattered records of literature afford a valuable, but neglected, contribution to the study of epidemic pestilence. They show us pestilence as an affair of the mind, as medi...

The conception of pestilence as a punishment for sin is as prominent in Greek as in Hebrew literature. We have seen it in the Homeric story, and we see it again, where we should...

Unlike Greece, young Rome was subject to repeated pestilence: plagues punctuate the pages of her history. We shall see how deep an imprint they left on the nascent religion, lit...

Until recent years it was generally believed that no certain record of bubonic plague existed prior to that of Procopius (_c._ A.D. 490-560). It would seem to be necessary to re...

For three centuries and more after the Black Death plague was endemic throughout central and southern Europe, and its presence is indelibly recorded in the productions of contem...

In the summer of A.D. 680 Rome was again gripped in the toils of an appalling plague that had spread over the greater part of Italy. Paul the Deacon[141] says that eclipses of b...

Milan had suffered from the Black Death far less than other cities of Italy: maybe she had acquired a transient immunity. For the three succeeding centuries her history is one l...

Into his great poem ‘On the Nature of Things’ (_De Rerum Natura_) Lucretius has grafted a description of the plague of Athens, converting the record of Thucydides into Latin hex...

The Great Plague of London, which reached its height in 1665, has left an abundant aftermath both in literature and art. The main story of its ravages is too well known to call...

Throughout the fourteenth and two succeeding centuries Venice was visited by a constant succession of epidemics of plague. This was the price she was doomed to pay for the enjoy...

Throughout the sixteenth century plague epidemics follow each other in almost unbroken succession throughout Central Europe. In Rome alone, during this century, there were no le...