"Pestis Manufacta": Plague, Poisons, and Fear in Mid-Fourteenth-Century Europe

Abstract

Fear in time of plague is one of the greatest chapters in the cultural history of this emotion in Old Regime Europe, as Jean Delumeau stressed in his classical study on this topic. Anticipation of an almost certain death was the main cause underlying this intense and ambiguous fear, which prevailed under multiple masks and which explained social behaviour when people were faced with words like plague ("pestis"), pestilence ("pestilentia") and other similar terms. Needless to say, in the past, ali these words evoked not only the fearsome infectious disease caused by the "Yersinia pestis" bacterium B, but also any human ailment, not necessarily contagious, involving a great mortality. Indeed, the condition nowadays known as 'plague' emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the context of the reformulation of infectious diseases successfully prometed by the followers of the germ theory. In contrast, the terms 'plague' and 'pestilence' referred in pre-modern Europe to 'any malignant disease with which men and beasts are stricken', particularly an 'infectious disease or epidemic attended with great mortality', and to any 'affliction', calamity, evil, 'scourge', often with reference to 'the ten plagues of Egypt', as the authoritative "Oxford English Dictionary" reminds us.