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This edited collection features fourteen newly commissioned articles, each of which responds to the theme of plague from different disciplinary perspectives. Contributors focus on the effects of COVID-19 on everyday life, drawing also on insights from different historical experiences of plague as a way of exploring human responses to epidemics, past and present.
Each chapter opens with a different illustration that serves as a source for subsequent discussion, enabling readers to make connections between everyday objects, experiences, and broader critical debates about plague and its impact on humanity. Thought-provoking commentaries stem from a variety of humanities disciplines including archaeology, electronic literature, history, linguistics, media and cultural studies, and musicology.
Encountering the Plague explores ways in which humanities research can play a meaningful role in key social and political debates, and provides compelling examples of how the past can inform our understanding of the present.
Acknowledgements
Contributor biographies
List of illustrations
INTRODUCTION
- Encountering the Plague
Wojciech Sowa and Tony Whyton
RITUALS AND RITES, RIGHTS AND BEHAVIOURS
- Heritage, Escapism and Anxiety: Visits to Corfe Castle During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Jo Sofaer
- Ritualization of ‘Distance’ in Christian Liturgy During the Plague
Piotr Roszak and Piotr Pawel Orlowski
- Protesting in defence of human rights in the time of pandemic: Freedom of assembly and COVID-19
Grażyna Baranowska and Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias
PLAGUE IN HISTORY
- Recounting the Plague in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century London
Charles Giry-Deloison
- Representation of the Plague in Ancient Greek and Byzantine Texts and responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Florian Steger
- ‘Let every man drinke in his own cup, and let none trust the breath of his brother’: Encountering Plague in Early Modern Port Cities
James Brown and Gabrielle Robilliard
COVID-19: TEXTS AND DISCOURSE
- Coronavirus in times of the late internet: compulsive visualization and a data-hungry society
Agnieszka Jelewska
- How Language Conceptualized the Pandemic
Malgorzata Majewska
- Pandemic Discourse: From Intimidation to Social Distancing
Rūta Petrauskaitė and Darius Amilevičius
CREATIVE RESPONSES TO PLAGUE
- Nights of Crises and Resistance: (En)countering the Politics of Disease and Death in Bacurau (2019)
Sara Brandellero
- A Pandemic Crisis Seen from the Screen: A Reflection on Pandemic Imagination
Anna Nacher, Søren Bro Pold, and Scott Rettberg
- Repetition and Revision: The Plague, ‘St James Infirmary’ and the Humanities in times of crisis
Tony Whyton
CONCLUSION
- The Power of the Humanities
Wojciech Sowa