1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9911047662903321

Autore

Cole Lucinda

Titolo

The Fifth Plague : Cattle, Contagion, and the Medical Posthumanities / / by Lucinda Cole

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer Nature Switzerland : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2025

ISBN

9783031927935

Edizione

[1st ed. 2025.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (330 pages)

Collana

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, , 2634-6346

Disciplina

636.20896

Soggetti

European literature

Veterinary medicine

Literature, Modern - 17th century

Literature, Modern - 18th century

European literature - Renaissance, 1450-1600

Literature, Modern - 19th century

European Literature

Veterinary Science

Seventeenth-Century Literature

Eighteenth-Century Literature

Early Modern and Renaissance Literature

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Chapter 1-Cattle, Disease, and the Stories We Tell.-Chapter 2- Dire Plague Creeping: Vermin, De Mortibus Boum, and Christian Disease Ecologies -- Chapter 3-Zoonotic Shakespeare: Merchants and Livestock in Venice -- Chapter 4-Journals of the Plague Years: Flesh Markets and Easterly Winds.-Chapter 5-Bovine Elegies and Bioinsecurities, 1740-1790 -- Chapter 6-Steppe Disease and Cholera During Britain’s Last Great Outbreak.

Sommario/riassunto

This book examines murrain, or mass mortalities of cattle, in ways that bridge the gap between animal studies and the health humanities. Beginning with early modern European disease ecologies but informed



by contemporary epidemiological and ecological concerns, The Fifth Plague offers a new historical approach to literary plague studies, one taking seriously real and imagined relationships between human outbreaks, such as bubonic plague and cholera, and a series of even more mysterious animal diseases that killed in equally great numbers. Chapters include careful readings of literary texts by, among others, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, and Sophie Amelia Prosser. Uniting these readings is a shared history of murrains recorded in Virgil, but also the powerful legacy of the Ten Plagues of Egypt narrative, in which human and non-human afflictions are materially and theologically bound. “Great mortalities” of cattle, Cole argues, brought with them feelings of individual and collective vulnerability. As scientists and humanists face increasingly politicized information networks, this book calls for an exploration of the past, present, and future of humanity’s decidedly interdependent and zoonotic existence. Lucinda Cole is Associate Professor in the Department of English at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. She previously published Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (2016).