Abstract
After more than a year of epidemic crisis, the current health situation has been one of successive experiences: first, stupefaction, faced with the arrival of a new disease which, like the previous ones that occurred at the beginning of the 21st century, was initially thought to be confined to a distant Chinese horizon ; astonishment, then, at the resurrection of measures thought to have been forgotten since the cholera epidemic of the 1830s, measures now taken on a planetary scale, with a few exceptions; astonishment and impatience, finally, at doctors' inability to immediately find answers other than prophylactics to prevent the circulation of an unknown virus. More broadly, we can see that the crisis brings together different temporalities, not all of which have the same requirements: those of disease, politics and medicine, not to mention the economy and society. In looking at the medieval societies that faced the plague, it is not so much the idea of illuminating our present through the past that underpins the analysis, as that of reflecting on how the present situation gives us cause to rethink the past. We're all familiar with the classic a priori of traditional historiography, which is often quick to cast a condescending, if not contemptuous, eye on the way in which public authorities, but even more so doctors, have responded, or indeed been unable to do anything, against the advance of a terribly deadly disease. Drawing on documentation that combines archives and medical treatises, the study aims to shed light on the representations, reactions and responses formulated in the face of a disease that was at first new, then familiar, while remaining attentive to the diversity of situations and to the temporalities of an epidemic that has lasted for a long time.
