ABSTRACT
Since bubonic plague recurred time and time again, people living in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries eventually began to cope with the disease in a different way than their predecessors had. While fourteenth-century Europeans saw the plague as an unparalleled event, those in the fifteenth century recognized plague as a normal, albeit unfortunate, part of life. Hays explains:
[B]y the fifteenth century the members of health boards gradually began acting on more clearly contagionist assumptions. Those assumptions led to more direct interference with both individuals and groups. Occasions that brought crowds together became suspect, and were thus objects of regulation: schools, church services, and-especially-the very religious processions that so many towns had sponsored to propitiate God’s wrath. The movements of the suspiciously transitory classes-especially beggars, soldiers, and prostitutes-came under scrutiny. Boards of health also, in their attempt to stay informed, began recording the causes of death in their cities. The early censuses of death themselves contributed to changing conceptions of disease. (54)1
The changing conceptions of disease created a new discourse in which the individual became responsible for protecting himself or herself from disease. It became possible to avoid the contagion, and literature was one of the avenues by which the discourse about plague protection was disseminated.
