The Great Pox in Early Modern Italy: imagining and experiencing (Joint with Early Modern Italian World Seminar)
The Great Pox, along with plague, was one of the major epidemics to afflict early modern Europe. It infected all levels of society, from popes and cardinals to princes, courtesans and the poor, and led to long drawn-out suffering, poverty, destitution and death. This paper is part of an on-going project on how the Great Pox was imagined, received and experienced in sixteenth-century Italy. Building on the approaches and findings of studies in early modern England, Germany and Spain, this paper will compare the experience and representation of female and male Pox patients through both written and visual evidence, and discuss some of the methodological problems encountered in this analysis. Sources will include contemporary descriptions in satirical and moralistic poems and plays, and visual evidence, ranging from broadsheets to medical illustrations and representations of St. Job, the patron saint of the disease. It will be argued, that only by analysing these literary and iconographic sources through the prism of contemporary medical understanding of the Pox and its symptoms that we can begin to understand more clearly how this disease was understood and experienced in early modern Italy.
Date: 23 October 2023, 16:00
Venue: Maison Francaise d’Oxford, 2-10 Norham Road, Oxford OX2 6SE
Speaker: Professor John Henderson (Cambridge)
Organising department: Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology
Part of: Oxford Centre for the History of Science Medicine & Technology (OCHSMT) Seminars and Events
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Belinda Clark