Pandemic Politics: Deploying the Plague

Summary

In the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, medievalists around the world began drawing parallels to well-known outbreaks of various plagues in the Middle Ages, notably the Black Death, which arrived in Europe in 1347, and the earlier iteration of the Yersinia pestis strain known as the Justinian Plague in the mid-sixth century. They cited other outbreaks of disease in Europe, noting for example that the bubonic plague was not eradicated for several centuries and came round in many summers for another wave. The last great plague in London was in 1665; a generation earlier, in the seventeenth century, Shakespeare and his company famously toured the counties or penned new plays when the live theaters of London were closed by the city fathers. These narratives were reassuring on two fronts in March and April 2020: first, medievalists were thrilled to have their expertise suddenly become obviously relevant and useful in non-misogynistic and non-White-supremacist ways, so they rushed to explain that previous pandemics had indeed struck harder in urban areas, and had given rise to rhetorical outbursts and various varieties of apocalyptic mania – just as this one was doing. Medievalists, improbably, had answers that were relevant and timely. Second, this outpouring of information, generally in legacy media outlets such as newspapers, but also in online blogs and social-media commentaries, provided a profoundly reassuring historical context to the problem of an incipient pandemic, and a context more directly applicable and comforting to the modern mind than the standard comparison to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Unlike that disease, the bubonic plague virus – like the coronavirus – would not freeze and vanish during the winter. Like the Black Death, the coronavirus would stick around both literally, attaching itself to protein receptors in human cells, and also metaphorically, as people were already discussing the new normal of post-pandemic living. However, although civilization was very different in the fourteenth century and doctors did not properly understand the transmission vectors of the disease, they did find a way to endure it and its effects, and despite massive losses of between one-quarter and three-quarters of the population in most European locations, humanity survived and found a way to thrive. By analogy and by precedent, then, humanity would find a way through in the modern era of a global pandemic as well.

This reassuring narrative also offers a brief genuflection towards the gods of progress, in two forms.