SoSe 19: S-Culture-Gender-Media II: The Plague in Prose
Sarah-Jane Briest
Kommentar
In 1348 bubonic plague hit Europe with devastating force, killing nearly 50 percent of the population. Intermittent outbreaks throughout the following centuries continued to take a high toll, especially on urban communities. Until its disappearance from the British Isles in the 1660s the plague was a permanent threat as well as a serious factor in the social and economic life of the kingdom. Major epidemics in London in 1603, 1625, and 1665 – killing up to 20 percent of Londoners on each occasion – prompted civic, religious, medical, and literary reactions. Prose pamphlets like Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), Newes from Graves-end(1604), and A Rod for Runawayes (1625) commemorate the effects of the infection on the city. They serve variously as chronical, satirical indictment, entertainment, and consolation for the survivors. In the seminar we will discuss Dekker’s pamphlets but also look toward ‘non-literary’ texts like sermons and medical tracts in order to gauge the wide social impact of the plague. Religious responses stressed the need for public and private repentance, fasting, and obligatory communal plague prayers. While religious writers focused on human sin as the cause of the disease, physicians generally regarded the aetiology of the plague in (at least slightly) more complex terms. Medical texts describe the effects of the disease on the body, present case studies, list preventive and curative drugs but must often ultimately capitulate before the plague. Still, in the face of death and defeat, the printed word does not tire to engage (with) the disease time and again.
Course materials will be made available on Blackboard. Requirements for credits: thorough preparation of assigned texts, regular attendance, term paper (2000 words).
Schließen13 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung