This seminar offers a friendly provocation. Against a global backdrop of bustling preventative-health activity in response to COVID-19, it questions the helpfulness of a scholarly focus on disease, and especially lethal pandemics, from the long-term perspective of public health history. Taking the Black Death (1346-1353) as a case study, it suggests that this focus, whatever its goals, reinforces several misconceptions and biases already inherent to social, anthropological and historical scholarship on health. This will serve as a frame of reference to a group discussion.

Helpful background reading are:

• Guy Geltner, 'Healthscaping in Medieval Europe and the Premodern World', in Roads to Health Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 131-165. [you can find an open access, preprint version of the chapter on the Humanities Commons repository here: pp. 196-246]
• Guy Geltner, 'The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death', Past & Present 246.1 (2020), pp. 3–33.
• Maurizio Meloni, 'The politics of environments before the environment: Biopolitics in the longue durée', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 88 (2021), pp. 334-344.

G. Geltner is professor of history at the University of Amsterdam and Monash University and the author, most recently, of Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy. You can explore his publications on his website: www.guygeltner.net.