In medias res (general introduction)

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The passage of death into the life of a woman in Marseille in 1348: so begins this year's lecture in medias res. We talk about experience and narrative, following on from last year's lessons, but also about mourning and scientific progress, presenting the main issues at stake in a history of the Black Death that is both global and social.

When the lecture is in progress, begin " in the midst of things "
Marseille, August 1349: Alayseta Paula before her judge, " deprived of all her loved ones, pregnant and weakened, continually filled with sorrows and afflictions "
The plague arrives in Marseille (Ole Jørgen Benedictow, The Black Death 1346-1353. The Complete History, 2004)
"The terrible stench of the dead": a hallucinatory vision of the Black Death, from Boccaccio to Antonin Artaud
Notarial resilience and social resistance in Marseille, Perpignan and Bologna (Shona Kelly Wray, Communities and Crisis. Bologna during the Black Death, 2009)
Alayseta Paula in a group portrait of female workers in Marseille (Francine Michaud, Earning Dignity. Labour Conditions and Relations during the Century of the Black Death in Marseille, 2016)
Propter pestilentiam : the dampened echo of catastrophe in public documentation (François Otchakovsky-Laurens, La Vie politique à Marseille sous la domination angevine (1348-1385), 2017)
A political society that resists and adapts (Daniel Lord Smail, "Accommodating plague in Medieval Marseille", Continuity and Change, 1996)
Pandemic and pestis universalis : "the violent mortality due to the plague is at this moment atrociously sending its arrows everywhere" (Elisabeth Carpentier, Une ville devant la peste. Orvieto et la peste noire de 1348, 1962, republished 1993)
Anno mortalitatis terribilis proxime decurso : a crossed-out name and the evidence of history
April 2020, a historian posts a video postcard on the Internet about the Black Death (Daniel Lord Smail, " ALife in the Black Death: The Inventory of Alayseta Paula [Marseille, 1348] ")
In April 2020, another historian posted another video postcard on the Black Death (Patrick Boucheron, "Propos de chercheur")
Coincidence or coincidence of times? To pretend to learn from the past is to prepare to "think late" (Marc Bloch): Guillaume Lachenal and Gaël Thomas, "L'histoire immobile du coronavirus", Comment faire?, 2020
Globalizing the Black Death (Monica Green ed., Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World. Rethinking the Black Death, 2014) and making global health history (Monica Green, "Emerging diseases, re-ermerging histories", Centaurus, 2020)
Historiographical progress through the accumulation of knowledge: a social and political history of the Black Death (Jean-Louis Biget, La Grande Peste noire, audio CD "De vive voix", 2001)
Le progrès historiographique par révolution des paradigmes (Pierre Toubert, "La Peste noire (1348), entre histoire et biologie moléculaire", Journal des savants, 2016)
Genomic sequencing and environmental history: is a deep history of the Black Death possible? (Daniel Lord Smail, Deep history and the Brain, 2008)
Who will tell this story? Back to Walter Benjamin's The Storyteller (1936), when the chain of "experience following its lecture from mouth to mouth" is broken
Starting again from Boccaccio and his "horrible beginning" (lecture on January 16, 2018, "Boccaccio, the survivor and the tyranny of death")
Freud on the work of history and Trauerarbeit (Laurie Laufer, L'Énigmedu deuil, 2006)
"Death can no longer be denied; one is forced to believe in it" (Sigmund Freud, "Current Considerations on War and Death", 1915)
Philippe Ariès and the "customary and resigned humanity" of pre-1914 (Stéphanie Sauget, "En finir avec le déni de mort? Around Philippe Ariès", Sensibilités, 2020)
When "the shadow of the object has fallen on the self" (Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia", 1917)
Melancholic collapse and the test of truth