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Experiencing the Apocalypse: The Black Death and the Cittadini of Italy
by Matthew Chechotko
This thesis examines urban Italian citizens’ (cittadini’s) responses to the Black Death (epidemia) through the emotional scripts and social rituals that guided their decisions. This analysis of cittadini’s responses is focused on three main questions: How did people feel about what they were doing, or what was being done unto them? What did they do about how they felt? What were the limits of what could be done, and who set those limits? Accordingly, this analysis of the epidemia portrays what cittadini understood about the disease, its cause, origins, and prognosis, and what they perceived as their available avenues for proper responses to the disaster. This research concludes that, during the epidemia, cittadini adopted emotional scripts and social rituals provided by the cultural institutions of urban Italy; however, when these failed, cittadini developed their own scripts and rituals or modified existing ones to interpret the pestilentia and respond to the sick and dying who suffered from it, thereby altering their responses to the pestilentia, and fundamentally shaping their distinct experiences of the epidemia.
Thursday, December 9, 2021
12 p.m.
Room: C620
Contact:
Jenny Oseen | oseejs@uleth.ca | 403-329-2551