Le mot de peste : archaeology of evil

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When it appears in the Chronicle of Jean de Venette or in the writings of Petrarch, the word pestis does not have the meaning we know today. The session explores mentions of pestis, pestilentia and epidemia in Latin texts, and goes back to the Greek loimos . From Boccaccio to Defoe and Camus, the plague is that which escapes the measure of man.

Videtur quod author hic obut : Brother John Clyn and the Annals of Ireland in 1349
"Everyone freezes. Perhaps all will end. After a few seconds, everything begins again" (Samuel Becket, Le dépeupleur, 1970)
The Chronicle of Jean de Venette, or the failure of a "time foretold" (Colette Beaune)
" This disease or plague was called an epidemic by physicians "
Epidemia in the Hippocratic corpus (Véronique Boudon-Millot)
Gallien and pestilentia as narrative framework
"What else? We'd heard the word 'plague', we'd read about it in books. We had never heard of a universal plague that would exhaust the world" (Petrarch, Seniles, X, 2)
The original scene: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War and the plague of Athens
See what's coming: Thucydides'autopsia and the acribia of history (François Hartog, L'évidence de l'histoire. What historians see, 2005)
"Words are powerless to describe the characteristics of this evil. It inflicted on those affected an ordeal beyond human strength" (Thucydides, II, 50)
Limos and Loimos : two names on the tip of the tongue (Jacques Jouanna)
There was no oracle, there will be no cure: when doctors " give in to evil "
La guerre commence, la belle mort est finie (Nicole Loraux, "Un absent de l'histoire. Le corps dans l'historiographie thucydidéenne", Métis, 1997)
What illness did the Athenians die of in 430-327 BC? The endless round of retrospective diagnoses
Emotional impact, latency and theatrical conjuration (Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Plague and the Athenian Imagination, 2008)
Translating Thucydides: the theater of cruelty and the world's universal woes (Brenton Hobart, The Plague in the Renaissance. L'imaginaire d'un fléau dans la littérature au ^XVIe siècle, 2020)
From Thucydides to Boccaccio, through the filter of Lucretius (Giovanni Getto, "La peste del Decamerone e il problema della fonte lucreziana", Giornale storico della Letteratura italiana, 1958)
"To be able to look at everything with a mind that nothing disturbs" (Lucretius, De natura rerum, V, 1203): the plague becomes a "philosophical myth" (Monica Gale, Myth and Poetry in Lucretius, 1994)
L'ekphrasis pathétique du récit thucydidéen chez les auteurs latins: entre mimésis du vrai et mimésis du texte (Benoît Rossignol, ANR PSCHEET meeting at the Ecole française de Rome, June 2019)
Pestis in Plinian pharmacopoeia: the exuberant world of pernicious danger and fear (Valérie Bonet, Loimos, pestis, pestes colloquium , Marseille 2020: Musées de Marseille)
Fear as a means of contagion of spirits in cases of pestilentia (Diane Ruiz-Moiret, Loimos, pestis, pestes symposium , Marseille 2020)
"He understands that he had not hitherto understood Thucydides and Lucretius" (Paul Demont, "Le journal de Philippe Stephan dans la première version de La Peste d'Albert Camus", Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 2009)
La Peste, la séparation et la guerre d'occupation (Frédéric Keck, Signaux d'alerte, 2020)
"It is as reasonable to represent one species of imprisonment by another as to represent any thing that really exists by something that does not" (Daniel Defoe, Diary of the Year of the Plague, 1722)
Plague, evil, writing: " ... still that nothing that will be said about it can give an exact idea of it to anyone who was not there, except that it was very, very, very awful and that no language can express the horror of it "
"The plague, before being the plague, will have allowed itself to be so infected by the plague's imagination. Its previous futures. Its premonitions. Men, in the plague, will remember (future tense) that there had been (plus-que-parfait) omens. They will adjust their memories to what will happen to them ," writes Thucydides in answer to the question: "How does the memory of times keep itself anyway?" (Georges Didi-Huberman, Memorandum de la peste, 1983)