Samuel K. Cohn Jr., University of Glasgow Renaissance Emotions: Hate and Disease in European Perspective
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Samuel K. Cohn Jr., University of Glasgow Renaissance Emotions: Hate and Disease in European Perspective Epidemics have always been pictured as hot-houses of emotions, sparking the sudden rise of compassion, fear, hate, and violence. Over the past sixty years or more, historians have seized on the last of these three traits, seeing pandemics across time and space as giving rise to the stigmatization and blame of the ‘Other’. As René Baehrel held in his classic article of Les Annales, 1952, big epidemics have always sparked hate and class enmity, such reactions are part of our “structures mentales [...] constantes psychologiques”.1 With the eruption of HIV-AIDS in the 1980s, these conclusions gained force from a wide variety of well-known scholars across disciplines. According to Carlo Ginzburg, “the prodigious trauma of great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension of all kind could be discharged”.2 By the reckoning of Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman, “Blaming has always been a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable”.3 Roy Porter concurred with Susan Sontag: “deadly diseases” especially when ‘there is no cure to hand’ and the “aetiology [...] is obscure [...] spawn sinister connotations”.4 And most recently, from earthquake wrecked, cholera-hit Haiti, Paul Farmer has proclaimed: “Blame was, after all, a calling card of all transnational epidemics”.5 Scholars post-AIDS have, moreover, introduced at least implicitly a new historical dynamic to this supposed universal ‘fact’ of collective psychology: when the causes and cures of epidemic disease are unknown, hatred of the other becomes more likely, more pronounced.6 By this logic, the ‘decline of magic’ in the sixteenth, the scientific revolution in the seventeenth, Enlightenment in the eighteenth and the laboratory revolution of the late nineteenth century, would have made diseases progressively more comprehensible. Consequently, the search for scapegoats to pin the blame of a disease ought to have been on the wane from early modernity on. The AIDS experience adds another ingredient to this cultural- psychological frame: sexual transmission of diseases has been postulated as especially explosive in propelling hate and suspicion.7 These three elements - the newness, mysteriousness, and sexual character of a disease - came together with syphilis’s appearance8 at the end of the fifteenth century. In the 1980s it became the perfect cultural antecedent of AIDS. Historians have rallied to it, reading from the various names contemporaries gave it, clear evidence of the 1 R. Baehrel, “La haine de classe en temps d’épidémie”, Annales: E.S.C., VII (1952), pp. 351-360. 2 C. Ginzburg, Deciphering the Sabbath, in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. by B. Ankarloo and G. Henningsen, Oxford 1990, p. 124. 3 D. Nelkin and S. L. Gilman, “Placing blame for devastating disease”, Social Research, LV (1988), pp. 362-378. 4 R. Porter, The case of consumption, in Understanding Catastrophe, ed. by J. Bourriau Cambridge, 1992, p. 179. 5 P. Farmer with J. S. Mukherjee, Haiti after the Earthquake, New York 2011, p. 191. 6 From the general literature, similar remarks can easily be found; for instance, Julia Irwin, Scapegoats and Epidemic Disease’ pp. 618-620, in Enclylopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues, ed. by J. P. Byrne, 2 vols., Westport, Ct., 2008: “Throughout history, societies have created scapegoats […] innocent […] to rationalize and explain the origins and course of disease outbreaks” (II, p. 618). 7 For instance, Niall Johnson, Britain and the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic: A dark epilogue, London 2006, pp. 152- 3, cites approvingly Susan Sontag and others on the supposed universal and timeless tendency to name diseases after other peoples and nations and that the naming means blaming. Yet when he turns to the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 called in Britain, “the Spanish Flu”, he must admit that he can find no evidence of blaming or abuse of Spaniards for the disease. He then concludes that such blaming becomes “especially true with sexually transmitted diseases” (p. 153). On the supposed significance of sexually transmitted diseases as the ones more prone to stir hate, see W. Eamon, “Cannibalism and contagion: Framing syphilis in Counter-Reformation Italy”, Early Science and Medicine, 3 (1998), pp. 1-31; and the interesting parallels between syphilis and AIDS in Laura J. McGough, Gender, Sexuality, and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice: The Disease that Came to Stay, Basingstoke 2010, pp. 150-151. 8 Throughout this essay, I use various names interchangeably for venereal disease, lues vernera, despite the fact that we cannot be certain what the pathogen or causative agent may have been for the venereal outbreaks of the sixteenth century. 1 search for scapegoats.9 This essay challenges this chorus of consensus and in so doing seeks to explore aspects of the history of emotions that do not easily square with present-day assumptions about the relationship between disease and hatred. Certainly, Europe’s most deadly and devastating disease, the Black Death of 1347-51, unleashed mass violence: the murder of Catalans in Sicily, clerics and beggars at Narbonne, and especially pogroms against Jews with over a thousand communities annihilated down the Rhineland, into Austria, Spain and France. Yet subsequent strikes of plague in late medieval and Renaissance Europe failed to spark waves of hatred against Jews or any other minorities (a trend historians have yet to reflect upon).10 Even when plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries once again aroused collective violence against supposed plague spreaders, Jews rarely then appeared as the targets.11 Instead, a 9 This conclusion on naming and blaming is clear across the literature, even in the most sensitive handling of the disease within a broad and sophisticated framework - Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French disease in Renaissance Europe, New Haven 1997 - where the authors strenuously refrain from treating the disease in transhistorical or universal terms. See for instance p. 166: “As during epidemics of plague, it was convenient to find a scapegoat to blame for the epidemic, the Great Pox”; and their conclusion: “It is a truism of such societies that bad and new diseases come from somewhere else. They are generally brought by people with bad habits, especially your neighbours. Thus the Italians so effectively blamed the invading French [...]” (p. 279). 10 An exception occurred for parts of Poland around Kraków and Miechów in 1360-1361 during the second wave of plague. However, these were areas that had escaped plague in 1348–51. In effect, 1360 was these regions’ 1348; see S. K. Cohn Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe, Oxford 2002, p. 232. 11 After 1349, the only incidents of anti-Semitic riots sparked by plague in Italy that Paolo Preto (Peste e società a Venezia nel 1576, Vicenza 1978, pp. 52-53) uncovered were in Udine in 1511, when Jews were chased from town after the cessation of plague, and in 1556 when Jews were accused of bringing the plague to Padua. In contrast, he cites the example of the Jewish physician, David de Pomis, whose publications during the Venetian plague of 1576 received acclaim from the Venetian state and the public alike. A local Mantuan chronicle asserts that the plague of 1463 was carried there by Jews from Ferrara. But no action appears to have been taken against them (Andrea Schivenoglia, Cronaca di Mantova dal 1445 al 1484, ed. by Carlo d’Arco, Mantua 1857, p. 32). Yves-Marie Bercé, Revolt and revolution in early modern Europe: An essay on the history of political violence, trad. J. Bergin, Manchester, 1987 [1980], p. 19, cites the single example of the notorious massacre of Jews in Lisbon during the plague of 1506 to argue that sudden outbreaks of plague normally led to the scapegoting and massacre of Jews. (Also, Y. H. Yerushalmi, The Lisbon massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shebet Yehudah, Cincinnati 1976, pp. 7-8, 18; and others make similar claims, going so far as to claim that the plague “aroused suspicion that it was “punishment for secret Judaizing of converses”; see Ami Isseroff, “Lisbon Massacre”, in Zionism and Israel – Encyclopedic Dictionary: Zionism and Israel on the Web Project 31 March 2009. In fact, none of the seven sixteenth-century sources describing the Lisbon massacre even vaguely hints that plague was its trigger. Instead, it resulted from a “New Christian” questioning the appearance of a miracle that supposedly appeared in the Lisbon Domincan church. By one eye-witness account, the chronicler Gaspar Correia, a German merchant, whose daughter had supposedly been cured by the miracle, instigated the massacre because a New Christain’s doubts; see F. Soyer, “The Massacre of the New Christians of Lisbon in 1506: A New Eyewitness Account”, Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas, 7 (2007), pp. 221- 243. Plague does not even appear in Solomon Ibn Verga’s contemporaneous Hebrew account (see Yerushalmi’s translation in The Lisbon Massacre, pp. 1-3), and in the other primary sources it is mentioned only in the background to explain King Manuel’s absence from the city. The humanist Damião de Gois, writing a half century after the massacre, perhaps goes the furthest, claiming that “the most honorable” citizens of Lisbon, because of the plague, had left the city and therefore were not around to protect the New Christians. “Nestes dia perecerão mais de mil almas sem aver na cidadequem ousasse de resistir, pola pouca gente de sorte que nella avia por estarem os mais dos honrados fora, por caso da peste” (Chronica do feliccissimo rey dom Emanuel da gloriosa memoria [...], Lisbon 1619, p.