Bowers offers this history on the treatment of plague by public authorities in sixteenth-century Seville, serving as a study in early modern governance and balance of competing interests. The first section introduces the political context of Seville and existing priorities of administrators. Beliefs about the plague are then covered, along with discussion of their policy implications. The frequent inconsistency of enforcement is framed as a balancing act between preventative efforts acting on the community and allowing individuals freedom for economic or morale reasons. Communication across the region and differences in management between rural and urban areas receive a chapter, with a final discussion of the more removed role of the Spanish crown, especially in regulating medical licensing. The conclusion recapitulates the common frame of the plague as a double social and medical crisis, but emphasizes a third focus of the everyday adaptation that survivors necessarily had to discover. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville offers a reassessment of the impact of plague in the early modern era, presenting sixteenth-century Seville as a case study of how municipal officials and residents worked together to create a public health response that protected both individual and communal interests. Similar studies of plague during this period either dramatize the tragic consequences of the epidemic or concentrate on the tough "modern" public health interventions, such as quarantine, surveillance and isolation, and the laxness or strictness of their enforcement. Arguing for a redefinition of "public health" in the early modern era, this study chronicles a more restrained, humane, and balanced response to outbreaks in 1582 and 1599-1600 Seville, showing that city officials aimed to protect the population but also maintain trade and commerce in order to prevent economic disruption. Based on extensive primary sources held in the municipal archive of Seville, the work argues that a careful reading of the records shows a critical difference between how plague regulations were written and how they were enforced, a difference that reflects an unacknowledged process of negotiation aimed at preserving balance within the community. The book makes important contributions to the study of early modern city governance and to the historiography of epidemics more broadly. Kristy Wilson Bowers received her PhD from Indiana University and teaches in the History Department at Northern Illinois University.
This study of sixteenth-century Seville offers a new perspective on how early modern cities adapted to living with repeated epidemics of plague.
