Research: I am currently working on contemporary reactions to the decline of plague in Europe in the 18th-century. I’m therefore interested in how people identified the end of the second pandemic of bubonic plague (if they did), and how they explained it. The topic includes exploring reactions to single epidemics – around the Baltic after 1709, in Marseilles in 1720, in Moscow in 1770 (and perhaps looking back to 1665 in England, and the 1650s in Italy) – and asking what kinds of intervention were thought likely to be effective by different observers – doctors, clerics, rulers and citizens and so on. The sources used are largely contemporary texts, and I’m particularly interested in how contemporaries sometimes tried to compare the impact of one epidemic with that of another.
See https://www.hsmt.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-paul-slack-emeritus-professor-early-modern-social-history for more information.
Relevant publications include:
The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Routledge, 1985, Oxford UP 1990)
‘Introduction’ to Terence Ranger and Paul Slack, eds., Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence (Cambridge UP, 1992)
Plague. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2012; 2nd edn in the press)