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- Title
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND: ITALIAN LAZZARETTI AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA IN FOURTEENTH- AND FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ITALIAN CITIES.
- Authors
Forniotis, Brittany
- Abstract
Following the Black Death--a pandemic that swept through Afro-Eurasia from 1331 to 1353, killing as much as two-thirds of the population--a major shift occurred in caring for the sick. In the fifteenth century, cities in the Italian peninsula began constructing hospitals, called lazzaretti, specifically for the treatment and confinement of plague victims. These lazzaretti were physically and metaphorically removed from the urban fabric. They forcibly removed those deemed terminally ill from their communities, revoking the access of the sick to facets of daily life necessary for participation in the community, such as socializing in marketplaces, engaging in familial activities in the home, laboring to provide for the family, and partaking in rituals in neighborhood churches. Current scholarship on hospitals as quarantine methods addresses the social rationalizations and repercussions of quarantine but does not address the architecture of these spaces of isolation. This paper brings scholarship on the individual traumas caused by the Black Death and successive waves of plague in the fourteenth century into conversation with the subsequent construction of lazzaretti in the fifteenth century to suggest a significant architectural response to collective trauma in Italy. Using the framework of trauma studies, it addresses the construction of lazzaretti outside of Italian city walls as loci of collective, communal trauma in which the traumas of the Black Death aggregated into a broader societal response of mandatory isolation that restructured the exurban environment. Ultimately, it argues that these pestilential fortresses concretized the communal trauma outside of the urban fabric of early modern Italian cities, transforming hospitals from spaces of communal, charitable care into places for the banishment of human social stressors and thereby preserving the cities' sense of community.
- Subjects
BLACK Death pandemic, 1348-1351; TRAUMATISM; URBAN studies; HOSPITALS; CITY walls
- Publication
Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval & Renaissance Studies, 2021, Vol 52, p137
- ISSN
0069-6412
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/cjm.2021.0005