Fleeing Plague

With sixteenth century Germany experiencing the ravages of the Bubonic Plague, Martin Luther was asked to comment on whether Christians could flee home and labors on account of the plague. Anna Marie Johnson introduces and comments on Luther's 1527 treatise "Whether One May Flee the Deadly Plague," still surprisingly relevant with the pandemic.

The year is 1665 and the plague has come to the city of London. For Henry Harper, apprentice apothecary, life will never be the same. His father has died of the plague, and his mother and brother have fled to the country. Now Henry is alone and must find a way to escape from the city he loves, before he, too, is struck down ... (From back cover).

It has a plan . . . Leon is stuck in England. Grace is on her way to New Zealand and Freya to the 'New United States' in Cuba. The virus has assimilated all of humanity except for these three communities and now it is prepared to talk with them. How they each choose to respond to the virus, will ultimately decide their fate in Plague World, the apocalyptic finale to the Remade trilogy from bestselling author of the TimeRiders series, Alex Scarrow.

Did you know that many of the greatest and most colourful Ottoman statesmen and literary figures from the 15th to the early 20th century considered plague as a grave threat to their empire? And did you know that many Ottomans applauded the establishment of a quarantine against the disease in 1838 as a tool to resist British and French political and commercial penetration? Or that later Ottoman sanitation effort to prevent urban outbreaks would help engender the Arab revolt against the empire in 1916? Birsen Bulmus explores these facts in an engaging study of Ottoman plague treatise writers throughout their almost 600-year struggle with this epidemic disease. Along the way, she addresses the political, economic and social consequences of the methods they used to combat it.

The first months of London's Great Plague of 1665 give no hope of any improvement, only an ominous warning of worse to come. Those who can are fleeing the city. Those who can't - the poor, the old, and a dedicated few - must stay to face the growing danger. The ancient women of the parish of St Cyneswide and St Tibba, the Searchers, Viewers and Keepers, who have weathered the disappearance of one of their own, face further calls on their courage and resilience. The plot against the King simmers, supported by folk of fire and faith, dismissed by others as the work of fanatics. There are those who will stop at nothing and threaten the whole city. But ... the parish still finds solace in singing; small children play their joyous, sometimes fractious, street games; and young people find each other. Volume 2 of Plague Searchers - Flee quick, go far - continues this gripping tale with its friendships and feuds, songs and psalms, plots and betrayals.

Plague is a terrifying mystery. In the Middle Ages, it wiped out 40 million people -- 40 percent of the total population in Europe. Seven hundred years earlier, the Justinian Plague destroyed the Byzantine Empire and ushered in the Middle Ages. The plague of London in the seventeenth century killed more than 1,000 people a day. In the early twentieth century, plague again swept Asia, taking the lives of 12 million in India alone. Even more frightening is what it could do to us in the near future. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian scientists created genetically altered, antibiotic-resistant and vaccine-resistant strains of plague that can bypass the human immune system and spread directly from person to person. These weaponized strains still exist, and they could be replicated in almost any laboratory. Wendy Orent's Plague pieces together a fascinating and terrifying historical whodunit. Drawing on the latest research in labs around the world, along with extensive interviews with American and Soviet plague experts, Orent offers nothing less than a biography of a disease. Plague helped bring down the Roman Empire and close the Middle Ages; it has had a dramatic impact on our history, yet we still do not fully understand its own evolution. Orent's retelling of the four great pandemics makes for gripping reading and solves many puzzles. Why did some pandemics jump from person to person, while others relied on insects as carriers? Why are some strains more virulent than others? Orent reveals the key differences among rat-based, prairie dog-based, and marmot-based plague. The marmots of Central Asia, in particular, have long been hosts to the most virulent and frightening form of the disease, a form that can travel around the world in the blink of an eye. From its ability to hide out in the wild, only to spring back into humanity with a terrifying vengeance, to its elusive capacity to develop suddenly greater virulence and transmissibility, plague is a protean nightmare. To make matters worse, Orent's disturbing revelations about the former Soviet bioweapon programs suggest that the nightmare may not be over. Plague is chilling reading at the dawn of a new age of bioterrorism.

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.