A somewhat embarrassing but happy announcement
by
moloch
10/09/2009, 2:56 PM #
I just turned in the bound copy of my doctoral thesis to the registrar this morning, approximately six years late. I'll have the diploma in November.
Just for kicks, I'm appending the lede. Thanks to anyone who has cared! My errant career as a frayster probably postponed this day by a semester or so, though of course it was only symptomatic.
Love,
Moloch
===========================
There are two detective stories: this dissertation fills the space between them. The death of thousands rarely inspires a detective story, let alone a pair; with a crime that big, you usually know the culprit. In fact, if you believe many historians, our whodunits were solved long ago. But I will argue that the files on epidemics in Marseilles (from 1720-22) and Aleppo (1761-62) should be opened up again. Not only do the two mysteries have the same solution, they’re actually the same mystery.
W.H. Auden once remarked of a favorite pulp fiction writer that he was in the business of producing, “not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Grand Wrong Place.”[1] The milieu I am trying to describe may be neither Wrong nor Right, opinions on that question have differed over the past three centuries. Academics sometimes call it ‘modernity.’ In stumbling toward the denouement we learn some interesting things not only about the epidemiology of this place, at least during its early years in the eighteenth century, but also its commerce, law, literature, and social mores. We may even get some insight into the practice of history more generally.
As with any murder-mystery, the place to start is Page One. A pamphlet extracted from the Marseilles city council’s official chronicle during the mortality of 1720 begins: “The coasts of the Levant [are] always suspected of plague…”[2] Because of this eternal suspicion, every ship approaching from the Ottoman Empire was made to dock at certain barrier islands in the Bay of Marseilles. Passengers and crew were kept in isolation for varying periods depending on the news of epidemics from the eastern Mediterranean, while cargo was ‘purified’ through exposure and fumigation by servants (portefaix) of the Sanitary Board.
What was the plague that everyone tried so hard to avoid? Was it a pathogen? A disease? A vague cluster of symptoms? Simply death, even evil in general? Whatever microorganisms were being translated to Europe from the coasts of the Levant—and the list of candidates is long—contact tracing by contemporary observers seems often to be an association of several individuals with a single word, rather than indicating the progress of an illness in the sense understood by biomedicine.
For nearly two thousand years, the Catholic Church used pestis to describe those who were beyond Christian salvation, or to reinforce the necessity of keeping them there. That broad meaning was preserved in the early modern period, though it had come to be rationalized by different institutions, in support of different patterns of social stratification. Whereas ‘cholera morbus’ or ‘malignant fever’ implied no particular regulatory measures, a diagnosis of plague mandated extreme steps to isolate neighborhoods, classes, cities, even whole provinces or countries. The unique juridical character that distinguished la peste from all other maladies made the political and commercial stakes of its diagnosis very high indeed—as the bitter contemporary struggles over the plague of Marseilles give eloquent testimony.
[1] “The Guilty Vicarage,” in The Dyers Hand and Other Essays, New York; Vintage, 1962, at 151.
[2] Pichatty de Croissainte, “Journal abrégé de ce qui s’est passé en la ville de Marseille depuis qu’elle est affligée de la Contagion, tire du Mémorial de la Chambre du Conseil d l’Hôtel-de-ville,” in Pièces historiques sur la peste de Marseille et d'une partie de la Provence, en 1720, 1721 et 1722, ed. Louis François Jauffret, Marseille: chez les principaux libraries, 1820: 1.33-126, No. 2, at 33. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
