No need to panic

Did the Black Death send medieval societies into a frenzy of religious reason? To answer this question, we undertake a genealogy of the notion of " panique ", as a crisis of interpretation and ritual frenzy, in the historiography of religious practices and mentalities at the time of the " religion flamboyant ". Analysis of both the Flagellants movement and the Jubilee of 1350 shows that, while the Black Death set medieval society in motion and created tension, it in no way precipitated its culpability.

Contents

• "Everything will pass. Suffering, torment, blood, hunger and pestilence. The sword will disappear, and only the stars will remain, when there will be no trace on earth of our bodies and our efforts" (Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard, 1926)
• The contagion of fear: "the plague in the time of the plague" (Ludmila Ulitskaya, Ce n'était que la peste, 2020)
• Panic, or the over-interpretation of signs
• A look back at the Compendium de epidemia published by the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1349: raising our eyes to the stars without giving up on understanding, treating and preserving
• A simple, straightforward question: did the Black Death send medieval reason into a frenzy ?
• A historiographical ideal: the ritual frenzy of the Flagellants movement
• 1260 and 1348, two waves of the same disciplinary dynamic (Catherine Vincent, "Discipline du corps et de l'esprit chez les Flagellants au Moyen Âge". Revue historique, 2000)
• In 1349, a change of attitude on the part of the civil authorities : " que cette secte damnée et réprouvée par l'Église cesse "
• Paroxysmal violence and depth psychology: the panic wave of French historiography since the 1980s
• "Le tréfonds panique de l'humain bascule en un exister-en-Dieu" (Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu. La violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525-vers vers 1610, 1990)
• Pierre Chaunu et le temps long des réformes, or the troubled history of modernity since the Black Death
• "Une réponse collective désangoissante à l'expérience paroxystique de la mort de masse éprouvée à partir de 1348" (Christian Ingrao, Le Soleil noir du paroxysme, 2021)
• Alphonse Dupront and Jungian psychoanalysis (Hervé Mazurel, L'Inconscient ou l'oubli de l'histoire. Profondeurs, métamorphoses et révolutions de la vie affective, 2021)
• Poétiser l'histoire par l'exigence de la langue (Dominique Iogna-Prat, "Alphonse Dupront ou la poétisation de l'histoire", Revue historique, 1998)
• An "identifiable idiotect where a few lexemes are jostled about in all directions combined: depth/pulsion/panic/collective/soul etc." (Maïté Bouissy, "Alphonse Dupront et le mythe de croisade", Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2000)
• Does history have to accept what overflows it? A Lacanian critique of panic as fiction
• "For in reality, this "panic" is the name that a prodigiously extended knowledge gives to its own limit, to the unknown that it reveals and encounters in its advance" (Michel de Certeau, L'Écriture de l'histoire, 1975)
• The notion of "flamboyant religion", to counter the traditional historiography of the Church's decline (Jacques Chiffoleau, in Histoire de la France religieuse, 1988)
• Uprooting, melancholy and impossible mourning at the origins of the mathematization of salvation
• There's no funeral panic, yet the plague becomes a metaphor for disaffiliation in a society in tension
• "It is in tears, fear and melancholy that modern rationality is born" (Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l'au-delà. Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d'Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1320-vers vers 1480), 1980)
• A good client for the historiography of guilt reduction through ritual frenzy: Francesco di Marco Datini
• The Prato merchant and the economy of salvation: "I have sinned in my life as much as a man can sin", he writes to his wife, "for I have not known how to dominate my desires. And I gladly pay the price for my faults" (Iris Origo, Le marchand de Prato. The life of a^14th-century Tuscan banker, 1995)
• When false brothers "bow with deference to Retribution" (William Langland, Piers Plowman)
• Enrichment of the Church and social resentment against the Mendicant Orders (Aude Mairey, Une Angleterre entre rêve et réalité. Literature and society in ^14th-century England, 2007)
• The anguish of a beautiful death and the remission of sins: in search of surrogate relatives
• "They died more willingly, leaving to the Church and to the religious a quantity of inheritances and temporal goods, for they had seen their heirs, their relatives and their children depart before them"(Chronique dite de Jean de Venette)
• Back to the Datini correspondence: anticipating the passage of the plague, cunning with itineraries, fearing disease and mourning the dead (Ingrid Houssaye-Michienzi, presentation at the December 13, 2021 symposium)
• The plague as hazard, danger and risk
• La fortune sémantique d'un mot: du rizq arabe au resicum du droit maritime italien au XIIe^siècle (Sylvain Piron, "L'apparition du resicum en Méditerranée occidentale, ^{XIIe-XIIIesiècles} " in Pour une histoire culturelle du risque. Genèse, évolution, actualité du concept dans les sociétés occidentales, 2004)
• Declaration of plague and "trade jealousy" (Guillaume Calafat, "La contagion des rumeurs. Information consulaire, santé et rivalité commerciale des ports francs (Livourne, Marseille et Gênes, 1670-1690)", in Silvia Marzagalli ed., Les consuls en Méditerranée, agents d'information [^{XVIe-XXesiècle} ], 2015)
• After the Black Death, medieval societies in tension and movement
• Montauban merchant Barthélémy Bonis's pilgrimage to Rome in 1350
• Clement VI, pope of the plague, at work on plenitudo potestatis
• Theology of the jubilee year, theory of the thesaurus ecclesia and canonical doctrine of indulgence (Étienne Anheim, Clément VI au travail. Lire, écrire, prêcher au XIVe^siècle , 2014)
• When jubilee time spans the plague: the Roman pilgrimage of 1350, anticipated but by no means precipitated
• Dying and healing in times of plague: the testimony of survivors at Delphine de Sabran's canonization trial (Nicole Archambeau, Souls Under Siege: Stories of War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence, Cornell, 2021)
• Deep joy without guilt: Alassia Messelano's experience of illness
• Again, the anthropological distinction between illness, disease and sickness: plague sufferers were not pestiferous