Four Hundred Years of Quarantine

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Erin Maglaque talks to Thomas Jones about the lockdown imposed by the city of Florence in January 1631 in response to a plague outbreak, the similarities with our current situation, and the differences. Maglaque wrote about the plague in Florence in a recent issue of the LRB, reviewing Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City by John Henderson. Read her piece here: https://lrb.me/maglaquepod Read Tom's piece on Italy and the coronavirus pandemic: https://lrb.me/jonesitalypod Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the LRB podcast. If you subscribe to the LRB, you can get the first 12 issues for just £12.
0:07.6	To find out more, go to lrb.me forward slash pod. That's lrb.combe forward slash pod.
0:15.8	Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to Aaron McLaughie, who teaches early modern European history at the University of Sheffield. Aaron wrote in a recent issue of the LRB about the way the city of Florence responded to a plague epidemic in the early 17th century. We're speaking over the phone, of course, as we would have to be, even if we were next door to each other, given the need for social distancing to limit the spread of COVID-19. But as it happens, we aren't next door to each other. Erin is
0:43.5	in Sheffield, and I'm in central Italy in Oviedo, about 100 miles south of Florence. And I've written
0:50.2	a piece in the current issue of the LRB describing the first 15 days of the lockdown in
0:54.5	Italy, which began two weeks before the lockdown in the UK. There's a strange sense I've had
0:59.8	when talking to people in Britain that I'm speaking from the near future or to the near past,
1:04.5	though ever less so as the situation there comes closer to the situation here in Italy. Hello,
1:10.1	Erin, and thank you very much for joining
1:11.7	us. Hi, Tom. Thank you so much for having you. How are things under lockdown in Sheffield?
1:17.3	Well, it's quite surreal, really, quite surreal. I mean, I feel like I'm talking to a quarantine expert.
1:23.9	But things in Sheffield, yeah, it's very strange.
1:32.2	I mean, I'm taking my government allowed one walk a day, which is very nice.
1:37.1	The weather has been beautiful recently, which feels like it's sort of mocking us now that we can't go outside because it's not nice very often in Sheffield.
1:39.5	But, yeah, we're battling through.
1:42.7	And so to begin, why don't you just tell us briefly the story of what happened in Florence in 1629?
1:49.1	Sure, yeah.
1:49.9	So the plague arrived in in Europe originally in 1347 for this kind of period of epidemics.
1:59.3	But the one in Florence began in 1629 when troops from the 30, who were fighting in Central
2:05.9	Europe during the 30 years war were kind of making their way through northern Italy.
2:10.6	And so they were carrying with them fleas, and the fleas were carrying with them Yersinia
2:15.5	pastis, which is the bacterium that
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from London Review of Books, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of London Review of Books and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.