The Space of Quarantine: Connecting the Early Modern Mediterranean

Luigi Pallavicini, fresco in Palazzo Benincasa showing the courtyard of the Lazzaretto, Ancona, 1788

Abstract

Quarantine was an extremely common experience in the early modern Mediterranean. Sailors, merchants, travellers, and ambassadors travelling from the Ottoman Empire and nearby regions were isolated inside extensive quarantine complexes once arriving in central and western European ports. Precious goods and commodities such as textiles, grains, leather and wax traded to Europe through the Ottoman lands and North Africa had to undergo complex disinfection practices as the threat of plague was believed to hide within the packaged goods. This book presents a wide-ranging study of the system of quarantine centres established in the Mediterranean during the early modern period. The book unravels the impact of quarantine on the shared Mediterranean context by analysing the transnational coordinated effort in preventing plague outbreaks through the control of the movement of people and goods. By adopting a cultural history perspective, quarantine is analysed in its full complexity: from the everyday experience and the spaces of quarantine, the mobility and trade in the Mediterranean area, to the medical theories upon which quarantine was developed.

Project Summary

The book examines the role of the system of quarantine centres (lazzaretti) in shaping the shared context of the early modern Mediterranean from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. The book analyses quarantine in its full complexity: from its political and economic roles and repercussions, to its impact on the history of medicine, contemporary culture, societal impacts and everyday life in the early modern Mediterranean. Through the analysis of more than 24 archival collections and printed sources on 19 different cities and their quarantine facilities across the Italian peninsula, the Balkan peninsula, the Ionian islands, Malta and France, the project shifts the analysis of the history of diseases from emergency procedures adopted during epidemics, to sophisticated preventative medical practices. While the emergency of several epidemics has undoubtedly shaped the history of the Mediterranean, this book argues that prevention practices played a key role in the history of the region. The history of prevention is indeed a neglected side of the history of epidemic diseases; however, especially in our post-COVID 19 world, it is extremely important to understand how past societies tried, and sometimes succeeded, in avoiding disease outbreaks. Focusing on disease prevention in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the project also reframed the history of transnational cooperation on public health matters: it shifts the birth of such cooperation from the nineteenth century to the pre-modern period. The history of quarantine covers more than four centuries of Mediterranean history: in analysing the practice of quarantine and its spatial and transnational dimensions, this book illustrates the many ways in which the culture, the societies, and the relationship between different Mediterranean states was shaped by disease control and prevention. The project pays specific attention to the role of space focusing both on the larger scale of the region and on the smaller scale of quarantine centres between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In doing so, itdemonstrates the pivotal role of quarantine centres and plague-related medical theories and practices in shaping Western ideas of the East, and the circulation of people, ideas, and goods in the Mediterranean.

The monograph is divided into two parts: one analysing the macrocosm of Mediterranean quarantine and how these practices played out on the larger scale of the region; the other focuses on the microcosm of quarantine, analysing the everyday life and cultural practices inside quarantine centres, and the architecture of lazzaretti.

Plague apparatus from a lazaretto in Venice; a machine for disinfecting letters and papers. Photograph. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.