The Medieval and Early Modern Studies Seminar
Montclair State University 2020-21 Special Series: Social Distance/Remote Intimacy
And the MSU Medical Humanities program welcome
Christopher Hutchinson (University of Mississippi)
The English Sweating Sickness and the Rhetoric of Virality
Wednesday, October 28, 4-5pm EST
Remote meeting: See Zoom link and password below
Christopher Hutchinson is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Mississippi. His research focuses on early modern German literature, print history, and the history of disease. He holds a Ph.D from Stanford in German Studies and a B.A. in Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge.
When a deadly new epidemic, the English sweating sickness, struck Germany in the Summer of 1529, it sparked a wave of short, vernacular, printed pamphlets on the disease, which some writers and doctors accused of spreading fear and lies. In this talk, I argue that this spread of harmful information on the sweating sickness is indicative of medical writers’ growing anxieties about the spread of cheap, vernacular pamphlets in the first century of print. In their responses to the sweating sickness, these writers draw parallels between the spread of the disease and the spread of fear and misinformation on the disease, suggesting the pamphlets might be taking more lives than the sweating sickness itself. In doing so, they develop what I call a “rhetoric of virality” to give voice to their anxieties about the printed word.
Zoom link: https://montclair.zoom.us/j/83081617089?pwd=aDFvK2RIUEdjWGlWK0lHNFhOZzQyUT09
Password: 017627