The “First Mortality” as a Time Marker in Fourteenth-Century Provence

Abstract

My main research question in this project is to explore how people understood and reacted to the first two waves of plague in 1348 and 1361 by looking at how they talked about the events. Specifically, I analyzed how a group of people who all testified in one canonization inquest used—or did not use—the word “mortality” in reference to waves of plague. A canonization inquest was a large-scale legal procedure sanctioned by the papacy that explored the life events and reputation of a candidate for canonization, primarily by interviewing witnesses to the proto-saint’s life and miracles. This particular inquest took place in Provence in 1363, which means that I can date it to a moment after the second wave of plague in 1361 but before the third wave in 1370. The source is especially useful because it includes descriptions of events during both the first and second waves of plague. Overall, I found that by 1361, some people in this source spoke of a “first mortality” (meaning the first wave of plague in 1348) as a fixed moment around which to date other events. This was not true of everyone in the source, however. For example, many people did not mention the “first mortality” at all, even when it would have made sense to do so. My focused study makes the small, but significant, point that the ways people spoke about catastrophic epidemics could vary, even within a group of people who lived in the same geographic region and shared other characteristics, like religion and affiliation with a proto-saint. I used network analysis in multiple ways in this project. First, I looked for characteristics that might connect the people who used the term mortality and perhaps suggest a network that was not