History 397PP - ST- Premodern Plagues

Human civilizations have repeatedly weathered the onslaught of vicious and mystifying disease. This course will focus on a number of examples from the ancient and medieval western worlds, including the plagues that assailed fifth-century-BCE Athens, Late Antique Rome, and fourteenth-century Europe. We will consider how, in the absence of modern medical knowledge, individuals and societies struggled to understand the calamities, how they responded, and how they survived. We will look at how people coped with fear, loss, grief, and social upheaval. Further, we will consider how these experiences shaped their world views and transformed their culture and society, sometimes in surprising ways. At the end of the class, we will briefly consider modern outbreaks, especially the HIV epidemic. Finally, we will turn to works of speculative fiction that imagine modern societies in the wake of a global pandemic. Many of these works are dystopian, but some imagine more hopeful transformations that might occur in the aftermath of catastrophe.