New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters

Reconstructing the Ottoman plague experience is vital to understanding the larger Afro-Eurasian disease zone during the Second Pandemic. This essay deals with two different aspects of this experience. On the one hand, it discusses the historical and historiographical problems that rendered this epid...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Medieval globe Vol. 1; no. 1; pp. 193 - 227
Main Author Varlik, Nükhet
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Arc Humanities Press 2015
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Summary:Reconstructing the Ottoman plague experience is vital to understanding the larger Afro-Eurasian disease zone during the Second Pandemic. This essay deals with two different aspects of this experience. On the one hand, it discusses the historical and historiographical problems that rendered this epidemiological experience mostly invisible to previous scholars of plague. On the other, it reconstructs the empire’s plague ecologies, with particular attention to plague’s persistence, focalization, and transmission. Further, it uses this epidemiological experience to offer new insights and complicate some commonly held assumptions about plague history and its relationship to plague science.
ISSN:2377-3561
2377-3553
DOI:10.17302/TMG.1-1.8