The plague of 1630 in the territory of Parma: Outbreak and effects of a crisis

Abstract

The plague of 1630 in the territory of Parma: Outbreak and effects of a crisisThis study analyses the diffusion and intensity of the plague in the territory of the Duchy of Parma in the 17 ~h century.Thanks to a large availability of data, the analysis has been carried out both at the macro and micro level. The first was used to investigate the outbreak of the epidemic, its spread in the territory and the final recovery of the population in terms either of mortality or birth rate. The second level was based on the particulatly rich ecclesiastical documentation of two small parishes, mandregolo, located in the plain, and Celia di Palmia, a hilly village. The linking of information between vital and census registers allowed us to enter more in details in the description of the diffusion and effects of the plague. Death and birth rates have been in fact computed along with detailed analyses on the spreading of the infection at a household-level, issue rarely investigated by scholars of historical populations.

A survival analysis of the last great European plagues: The case of Nonantola (Northern Italy) in 1630

“…In fact, an earlier study on Nonantola that analysed excess mortality by age group concluded that the plague affected the group aged 11-20 with the greatest intensity, followed at a distance by those aged 21-30 (Alfani and Cohn 2007 and section A2 of the supplementary material). Such findings are in agreement with the aforementioned studies of the 1630 plague that also analysed excess mortality (Abrate 1972;Manfredini et al 2002), as well as with a study of the 1575-76 plague in Mantua (Belfanti 1981). Our study demonstrates that: (1) the aforementioned literature detected correctly the fact that the young (<10 years of age) were less affected by the plague; but that (2) the risk of death increased with age, peaking much later than earlier believed, that is, between ages 40 and 60 (Table 4 and Figure 8).…”

“…Source: Statistical estimates based on the same historical sources indicated for Table 1. reached similar conclusions (Abrate 1972;Manfredini et al 2002).…”

“…From a macro-demographic perspective, one such study recently focused on the last great plagues of the seventeenth century, suggesting fundamental differences across Europe, both in the epidemiology and the overall demographic impact of the disease (Alfani 2013a). The research situation is better at the micro level, where recent works have covered such diverse aspects as the household structure of plague mortality and its patterns of transmission (Cohn and Alfani 2007;Whittles and Didelot 2016), the within-city diffusion of plague and the seasonal pattern of mortality (Galanaud et al 2015;Cummins et al 2016), the age and sex structure of excess mortality from plague (Manfredini et al 2002), and the post-crisis 'economic recovery' that went hand in hand with the 'demographic recovery' (Alfani 2010a). However, research on plague has been steady in other fields, like general and global history, history of medicine, and palaeo-biology/palaeo-demography (Cohn 2002(Cohn , 2010aHenderson 2003;Green 2015).…”

A digital reconstruction of the 1630–1631 large plague outbreak in Venice

“…Furthermore, the literature on the effect of the plague on different age cohorts is still ambiguous. Nevertheless, our data are in line with previous studies 1,18,[26][27][28] indicating that the plague had higher relative impact among age cohorts of typically low mortality, in particular adolescents and adults between 14 and 44 years of age, as shown in Figure SI3c and Figure SI3d. Figure 2c shows the heatmap of reported cases, for each of the parishes of Venice, for the entire time window ( N tot_deaths = 43088 ).…”

Death in Venice: A Digital Reconstruction of a Large Plague Outbreak During 1630-1631

“…Furthermore, the literature on the effect of the plague on different age cohorts is still ambiguous. Nevertheless, our data are in line with previous studies [26,27,18,28,1] indicating that the plague had higher relative impact among age cohorts of typically low mortality, in particular adolescents and adults between 14 and 44 years of age, as shown in Figure SI3c and Figure SI3d. Figure SI5d.…”