“Evolutions of Plague and Thought in Sixteenth-Century Italy”

Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., University of Glasgow

Department of History

This paper is based on recent research on Plague literature and a new consciousness of public health among doctors in sixteenth-century Italy from the plague crisis of 1575-77. Sam Cohn’s American Historical Review article, “The Black Death: End of a Paradigm,” (AHR 107:3 [June 2002]) and his book, The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in the Early Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2002), argued that the Black Death was any disease other than the bubonic plague, whose bacillus was discovered in China in 1894, and attempts to explain why the Renaissance arose from the West's most monumental mortality. In two earlier books about the Black Death, he studied wills to understand changing attitudes in light of the plague: Death and Property in Siena, 1205–1800: Strategies for the Afterlife (1988); and The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Cities in Central Italy (1992). Prof. Cohn has published books and articles on popular protest, women, peasants, the state, mountain civilization, plague, and medicine in the late Middle Ages. Among his other books are The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence (1980); Women in the Streets and Other Essays on the Renaissance (1996); Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (1999); Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders (2004); Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (2006).