Notes to Pages 13–16 • 307and Poor Relief in Italian Cities from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century,”
Continuity and Change 3 ( 1988 ): 177 – 208.
33. Biraben,Les hommes et la peste, 1 : 186.
34 .Journal d ’Antoine Denesde, marchand ferron à Poitiers et de Marie Barré sa femme
( 1628 – 1687 ),ed. E. Bricauld de Verneuil (Poitiers, 1885 ), 226. We thank Nicole Pellegrin
for sharing this account and others with us.
35 .The Pest Anatomized, 13.
36. See Carlo M. Cipolla,Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in
the Pre-industrial Age,trans. Elizabeth Potter (New Haven, 1992 ).
37. The outstanding authority on this subject is Carlo Cipolla, whose relevant books
include Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany,trans. Muriel Kit-
tel (New York, 1979 ).
38. Brian Pullan, “Support and Redeem,” 184 , 186.
39. Amelang,Journal of the Plague Year.Jeremy Boulton begins his remarkable mi-
crostudy of the early modern London neighborhood of St. Saviour Southwark by ac-
knowledging the “little [that] is yet known of how the capital’s inhabitants actually
lived.” Jeremy Boulton,Neighborhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth
Century(Cambridge, 1987 ), 5. Calvi,Histories of a Plague Year,uses criminal trials re-
corded by Florence’s Public Health Magistracy to uncover some ways of coping by
working people—notably illegal use of dead persons’ clothes and other possessions and
the transfer of the male members of a shopkeeper’s family from the infected house to
the shop, where they continued to make and sell their goods. But most adaptation tech-
niques escaped the eyes and ears of the authorities.
40. Giovanni Boccaccio,The Decameron(written 1348 – 53 ), quoted in Defoe,Journal
of the Plague Year,Norton ed., 235 , 237.
41. On the literary tradition, see “Contexts,” in Defoe,Journal of the Plague Year,Nor-
ton ed., 231 – 64. Among historians of the Great Plague, see Bell,The Great Plague,ix–x,
124 – 29 , 247 , 253. “The Great Plague of London,” he concludes, “was a tragedy of errors.
If only those fated people could have known.” Stephen Porter,The Great Plague
(Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1999 ), 133 – 45 , continues the tradition with a focus on eco-
nomic difficulties and weaknesses in the public safety net. Françoise Hildesheimer ex-
presses a similar stark view of early modern plague epidemics in France: “The plague
constituted an undermining of life, a crisis of the economy, a temporary undoing of the
social order, a profound psychological trauma.” Hildesheimer,La terreur et la pitié: L’an-
cien régime à l’épreuve de la peste(Paris, 1990 ), 154. Cf. Hildesheimer,Fléaux et société: De
la Grande Peste au cholera(Paris, 1993 ). The twin themes of the unraveling of society and
the abandonment of the poor by the authorities are prominent in the documentary film
by Toba and Hardy, cited in our preface, n. 4.
42. Pullan, “Support and Redeem,” 117.
43. Roger Finlay,Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580 – 1650
(London, 1981 ), 17 – 18 , 130. There is a brilliant analysis of an English community’s post-
plague reconstitution by Roger Schofield, “An Anatomy of an Epidemic: Colyton, No-
vember 1645 to November 1646 ,” in The Plague Reconsidered: A New Look at Its Origins