Inaugural Lecture - Professor Neil Murphy
This lecture will take place on campus, in 002, ground floor Business and Law Building, City Campus East (full address at the bottom of the page). The lecture will also be available to stream online - please register for the event and a link will be sent to you to access the live stream.
Pandemics, Governments and "Following the Science": Plague Control, Public Health and Absolutism in France, c.1470-c.1730.
Focusing on the enforcement of
plague measures in early modern France, Professor Murphy argues that
centralised and authoritarian forms of government – such as the absolutist
monarchy which emerged in seventeenth-century France – were more effective than
local authorities in enforcing disease-control measures in large territorial
states. Nonetheless, the anti—plague measures the Bourbon monarchs implemented
rigorously on a national scale were initially devised as municipal initiatives
during the Renaissance.
In the century after 1470, town
governments worked in conjunction with physicians and other medical experts to
establish a comprehensive system of plague care, the key elements of which
remained in place right through until the disappearance of the disease in
France in the eighteenth century. Indeed, interlocking systems of quarantine,
contact tracing, health passports and the use of specialist hospitals, which
were first devised in response to plague, remain the key methods used against
epidemic disease today, including Covid-19.
Placing France in a broader
context, this inaugural lecture will argue that the eradication of mass
outbreaks of plague from Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
was a result of the stringent (and at times, draconian) enforcement of
anti-plague measures.
About the Speaker
Neil Murphy is a
Professor in History at Northumbria University. He is a historian of later
medieval and early modern France, especially the period 1300 to 1600, as well
as war and foreign relations during the reign of Henry VIII. He is the reviews
editor of the journal Archives
To register for this free lecture, please fill in the form below.
