A wave of plague swept the cities of northern Italy in 1630-31, ravaging Christian and Jewish communities alike. In Writing Plague Susan L. Einbinder explores the Hebrew texts that lay witness to the event. These Jewish sources on the Great Italian Plague have never been treated together as a group, Einbinder observes, but they can contribute to a bigger picture of this major outbreak and how it affected people, institutions, and beliefs; how individuals and institutions responded; and how they did or did not try to remember and memorialize it. High self-consciousness characterizes many of the authorial voices, and the sophisticated and deliberate ways these authors represented themselves reveal a complex process of self-fashioning that equally contours the representation and meaning of plague. Conversely, it is under the strain of plague that conventions of self-fashioning come to the fore.
In the end, what proves most striking is how quickly these accounts retreated into obscurity. Why was this plague, which was among the most documented of all outbreaks since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, ultimately consigned to silence in Jewish memory? Did the memory take shape outside the written or material remains that we typically consult, in ephemeral forms that were lost over time? How much were the official genres of commemoration responsible for the erosion of historical particularity? How much did these conventionalized forms of mourning help individuals find language for private experience? And how, conversely, was private experience reconfigured to signify public grief?
Throughout Writing Plague, Einbinder unearths and analyzes a cluster of little-known texts, reading them as much for the things about which they remain silent as for the things they seem openly to express. It is a compelling hybrid work of literary criticism and historical reflection about premodern constructions of self and community.

A wave of plague swept the cities of northern Italy in 1630-31, ravaging Christian and Jewish communities alike. In Writing Plague Susan L. Einbinder explores the Hebrew texts that lay witness to the event, reading them as much for the things about which they remain silent as for the things they seem openly to express.

About the Author
Susan L. Einbinder is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. She is author of After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration Among Iberian Jews and No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Reviews
"With its close readings and reconstructions that are at once imaginative and provocatively tempting, [Writing Plague] operates as a master class in literary sensitivity and literary interpretation in historical context. The final product is a book is written with a sensibility that is informed by sophisticated self-consciousness, drawn from insights from the social sciences but in a manner of the author's own originality. Einbinder muses on the very mechanisms and media through which we come to grips with epidemic events, pushing back against the absolute claims of narrative in favor of a panoply of ways of writing, thinking, and experiencing plague. In Einbinder's hands and through her eyes, the texts come to life with empathy and in their fullness, opening up windows into the collective and personal experiences of plague, and onto plague as an occasion to understand the very values that made up a selection of early modern selves." * The Marginalia Review of Books *



Book Information
ISBN 9781512822878
Author Susan L. Einbinder
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press