Humanimals: A Socio-Ecological Reading of the Marseille Plague of 1720

Abstract

The aim of this article is to return to a small number of historically significant first-person testimonies of the Marseille epidemic of 1720 in order to analyse in detail their construction and depiction of human exceptionality as a form of life in a time of plague. We are specifically interested in how this sense of early modern human selfhood is compromised and problematized by its various interactions with other animals in the plague-infested city and, by extension, how plague reconfigures the dynamic forms of socio-ecological agency in eighteenth-century Marseille.