Cellular memory of ancient fears

Over the last ten years, advances in paleogenomics have given new impetus to the history of the Black Death, not only through the answers they provide, but above all through the new questions they open up. By attempting to understand the epistemological framework that presides over the phylogenetic reconstitution of Yersinia pestis, we apprehend it both as a periodization tool and as a test of reflection on the heterogeneity of documentary regimes. This redefines the Black Death research program, between naturalism and constructivism.

Contents

• An exquisite corpse: Ramses II at Val-de-Grâce in 1976
• Can a pharaoh die of tuberculosis? (Bruno Latour, "Jusqu'où faut-il mener l'histoire des découvertes scientifiques?", Chroniques d'un amateur de sciences, 2006)
• "Science constructs its objects" (Gaston Bachelard): objects of knowledge, objects in the world
• "(Paul Boghossian, La Peur du savoir. On the relativism and constructivism of knowledge, 2009)
• Loosening the stranglehold of a binary opposition between natural realities and social constructs (ÉtienneAnheim and Stéphane Gioanni, "La nature, la construction sociale et l'histoire. Remarques sur l'œuvre de Ian Hacking" in Michel de Fornel and Cyril Lemieux eds, Naturalisme vs constructivisme, 2009)
• Factual constructivism and radical nominalism: the seductions of peremptory textualism
• "Nos savants au secours de Ramsès II tombé malade 3 000 ans après sa mort": Paris-Match's philosophy lesson
• An experiment in historical time: opening up the past to the future of history
• What is a thought experiment? "We generally give the name of discovery to the knowledge of a new fact; but I think that it is the idea attached to the fact discovered that actually constitutes the discovery" (Claude Bernard, Introduction to Experimental Medicine, 1865)
• Three English words for illness: illness, disease, sickness (Horacio Fabrega, Evolution of Sickness and Healing, 1997)
• Medical power, or how diagnosing a disease transforms illness into sickness
• The social role of the leper in a society of persecution in the Middle Ages
• Les maladies ont une histoire: sur l'historiographie des " années SIDA " (Neithard Bulst and Robert Delort dir., Maladies et sociétés, ^{XIIe-XVIIesiècles} , 1988; François-Olivier Touati dir., Maladies, médecines et sociétés, 1993)
• Histoire de longue durée et histoire immédiate: la pathocénose comme " communauté de maladies " (Joël Coste, Bernardino Fantini and Louise Lambrichs dir., Le Concept de pathocénose de M.D. Grmek. A conceptualization of the history of diseases, 2016)
• The seventh pathocenosis: a periodization tool
• When Yersinia pestis doesn't need us: "man is only its secondary, subsidiary and, from a non-anthropocentric point of view, unimportant host" (Mirko Grmek, "Préliminaires d'une étude historique des maladies", Annales, 1969)
• London, 1348: East Smithfield Cemetery (Barney Sloane, The Black Death in London, 2011)
• Disaster burials and funeral rites. What is a plague cemetery? (Sacha Kacki, "Black Death: Cultures in Crisis", Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2020)
• The East-Smithfield osteological collection: bioarchaeology of population health (Sharon DeWitte)
• Since 2010, a brief history of paleogenomics (Ludovic Orlando, L'ADN fossile, une machine à remonter le temps, 2021)
• When the oldest in us serves to better tolerate what's new: crossbreeding, innate immunity and archaic ingression (Lluis Quintana-Murci, " Génétique et histoire de l'homme: adaptation aux agents infectieux", in Patrick Boucheron dir., Migrations, réfugiés, exils, 2017)
• Should we be afraid of this knowledge? Bad historical memories of a biologization of racial anthropology (Jean-Paul Demoule, Mais où sont passés les Indo-Européens? Le mythe d'origine de l'Occident, 2014)
• La tentation de fin de non-recevoir (Alain Testard, "Les modèles biologiques sont-ils utiles pour penser l'évolution des sociétés?", Préhistoires méditerranéennes, 2011)
• 2011, East Smithfield: a trace of Yersinia pestis (Kirsten I. Boos et al, "A draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death", Nature, 478, October 2011)
• One killer bacterium, many diseases
• From the Justinian plague to the Bronze Age: Yersinia pestis comes of age
• From stemma codicum to phylogenetic tree: the strange familiarity of a graphic form
• La peste justinienne et la peste noire de part et d'autre du " silence pathologique " (Pierre Toubert, " La Peste noire (1348), entre histoire et biologie moléculaire ", Journal des savants, 2016)
• Three pandemics or five plagues? (Monica Green, "The Four Black Deaths", The American Historical Review, 125, December 2020)
• A theoretical event in Central Asia: the "Big Bang" of polytomy before the Black Death
• The treasure map: global history and the heterogeneity of documentary regimes
• Back to Ramses II: how can you be tubercular without having read Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain  ?
• "My body is much older than I am, as if we still retain the age of the social fears which, by the chance of life, we have touched" (Roland Barthes, Leçon, 1977)