Since time

The Description de la peste de Florence en 1527 (Description of the plague in Florence in 1527) is not just a literary dream of Michelet's: reattributed to Machiavelli by recent scholarship(Epistola della peste, ed. Pasquale Stoppelli, 2019), it is restored to history. This does not, however, deny the literary value of Boccaccio's complex parody. Machiavelli remembers the plague of 1348, but doesn't recount it. Following in his footsteps through a defeated Florence, we introduce the main themes of this year's lecture, looking at the time of the late Middle Ages since the plague.

Contents

• "I hardly dare lay my trembling hand on this page to begin such an atrocious story"(Description of the plague in Florence in 1527)
• Who speaks? In the company of a melancholy narrator, surveyor of disaster
• When the coming catastrophe is not what we expected
• "Epidemics are cursed subjects for historians. For a start, it's always the same story. We know the beginning, the middle and the end by heart..." (Guillaume Lachenal, Libération, February 19, 2020)
• After, from after, since. Why is the plague, in spite of everything, good to think about ?
• Another mourner, but a being of fiction
• "Les morts n'ont peur de rien": Michelet, Machiavelli et l'idylle de la peste(Histoire de France, tome 8, Réforme, 1855)
• "Michelet dreams. In turn, I dream his dream" (Christophe Bataille, Le rêve de Machiavelli, 2008)
• Writing a fugue or describing a still life: "Aujourd'hui mange hier" (Étienne Anheim, "Le nom Machiavel", Médiévales, 2009)
• "Une corneille égarée parmi les aigles" (Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Niccolò Machiavelli, 1954): since the end of the 19th^century , doubts have been raised about the attribution of the Description de la peste de Florence en 1527 (Description of the plague in Florence, 1527)
• Lorenzo Strozzi, Machiavelli and the Oricellari gardens: the comedy of masks
• Back to the sources: codicological, philological and linguistic analysis of a composite manuscript (Florence, National Central Library, Banco Rari 29)
• A text restored to its author and historical dimension (Niccolò Macchiavelli, Epistola della peste. Edizione critica secondo il ms. Banco Rari 29, ed. Pasquale Stopelli, Rome, 2019)
• New dating: the plague in Florence in May 1523 according to chroniclers Giovanni Cambi and Benedetto Varchi
• Mortifera pestilentia : Machiavelli writes after and after Boccaccio
• Urban desolation, demographic depopulation, economic depression and civic decline
• A city stricken byasthenia : praise or parody ?
• The dissolution of the popolo : in squares and markets, there's nothing left to talk about
• Misera Fiorenza nostra : the political and poetic decline of a fictitious community of speaking beings
• Accusing time, that is, both the qualità dei tempi and the dispozizione dell'aria
• " We remember that the same thing happened in 1348 and in 1478 "
• The imperfect chrononym: 1348 as vintage, event and duration in Petrarch
• "Les maux qui naissent dans les cités": the political engine of political narrative in Machiavelli's Istorie fiorentine
• The plague is not an event: it is remembered, but not recounted
• " During this period the memorable plague took place, so eloquently evoked by Boccaccio, which claimed more than ninety-six thousand lives "
• Nel corso del qual tempo : is history written differently today ?
• For the pestis of the Ancients, as for the Yersinia pestis of the Moderns, the epidemic is its own agent of periodization
• Present, future: the two times of the plague, or the untraceable past ("everyone is looking for similar memories")
• And yet, everything has changed: " You have to imagine it entirely different(tutta dissimile et diversa) from the one you're used to seeing "
• How to see it? Painting does not document the plague, but the plague transforms painting (Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, 1951)
• The pharmakon of the plague, or the Renaissance as the inflammation of a generalized dissimilarity
• A disciplined but by no means deflationary reading: Millard Meiss'safter , unhooked from any idea of causality (Giulia Puma, colloquium June 22, 2021)
• The limits of imagination: in the footsteps of Machiavelli in Florence, following " the plague riding his horse
• Piercing the silence of ragionamenti ciompeschi
• The gravediggers sing Ben venga il morbo and Domenico Barlacchi, the town crier, plays the comic actor
• In the churches, lecherous priests and afflicted beauties
• When old Machiavelli tries to console a young widow
• Ancient statues and the blazon of the female body (Maria de las Nieves Muniz Muniz, La descriptio puellae nel Rinascimento: percorsi del topos fra Italia e Spagna, 2018)
• Blackness, oblivion: " I followed her, on the contrary, to her home, where she enclosed my poor heart with her"
• "A sensual, sad piece that smacks of old age and effort", writes Michelet. But what did Machiavelli see ?
• What did he see? He saw the possibility of a "il y aura une fois "
• "If I could formulate a wish, it would be to possess not wealth or power, but the passion of possibility; I would like to have that eye which, eternally young, would eternally burn with the desire to see possibility" (Kierkegaard quoted by Ernst Bloch in Le Principe Espérance, 1944-1959)