I'm delighted to welcome here this evening an old friend and collaborator of mine John Henderson I first knew John in Cambridge in the 90s we ran a Renaissance seminar together which I have very fond memories of John is now professor of Italian Renaissance history in the department of history classics and archaeology at Birkbeck College in the University of London and he's also a research professor Monash University which oddly enough makes him kind of local currently he's based at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Monash Centre in Prato where among other things he's involved in organizing what looks like a stunning conference in mid-december the 14th of December I thought I'd mentioned this because anyone coming to this lecture will surely be interested also in a conference on the theme of representing infirmity diseased bodies in Renaissance and early modern Italy it really looks a tremendous conference so we're very honored to have John here today because he's a very distinguished historian he's made an enormous Lee valuable contribution in the fields of social history religious history and especially in his more recent work history of Medicine history of Medicine precisely in its intersection with social and religious and increasingly also cultural history his principal monographs to date are piety and charity in late medieval Florence which was published for the first time by Oxford University Press in 1994 and in an Italian translation by Lillet that a in 1998 the great pox the French disease in Renaissance Europe which was a co-authored work published by Yale in 1997 and most recently there an Athens Hospital healing the body and healing the soul again with Yale in 2006 and that was translated into German in 2007 and it came out last year as well in Italian with a lawyer in Bologna John has also at a number of important collections of essays including Christianity and the Renaissance with Timothy Verdun in 1990 poor women and children in the European past with Richard war in 1994 the impact of hospitals in Europe ten hundred to two thousand people landscapes symbols with Peregrine Gordon and Alessandro Pasteur day in 2006 and he also has a co-edited book coming out with route which next year with Lukas angleman and Christos Lynn Terrace how you pronounce it winters on plague in the city coming out of a conference in Cambridge John's talk today comes out the same recent research focus on plague and its impact particularly within Florence he has a book on plague in early modern Florence which is due to come out with Yale next year and we're very grateful to him for sharing his research on this fascinating subject with us this evening he'll be speaking again at the Monash Centre in December in Prato again as in the keynote talk for the conference that I mentioned earlier so there'll be a chance for you to catch a second installment there his talk there is on religion medicine and art in the time of plague florence 16 32 33 and before i leave you with john i thought i'd just conclude on an anecdotal note as well as being a historian john is also part of history part of a history very dear to us here at la Pietra he's one of a select and dwindling group of people who can boast of knowing la Pietra in the Acton days he was invited to tea by Sir Harold at an early stage in his scholarly career so I think we should all make a point of interrogating him about that at the reception afterwards so I won't give you the title because you have it here but I'll just I'll see you all to welcome John Henderson Thank You Virginia very much for that introduction and thank you for the invitation and thank you to Bruce as well it's indeed is splendid to come back here I was invited to take tea by Sir Harold act and when I was a very junior research student so it's it's delightful to see at the house again in most extraordinary pristine condition so what I'm be talking about as Virginia mentioned is an aspect of the book that I'm completing at the moment on plague in early modern Florence and I want to begin with a quotation from an extract from a sanitary survey which was conducted of the poorest parts of the city of Florence in August 1630 at the beginning of the outbreak of plague on the 11th of August 1630 they visited the the gentlemen of the court who were undertaking this survey visited the quarter of Sant Ambrogio and this is a quotation from their survey between Villanova and Boca penty in the courtyard of the house of Mona Catarina widow of iacopo and Mona Paradiso no be redo the straw palaces because they stink and it's necessary to burn the old ones because there's a great smell there are seven people to a room and they do everything in the same courtyard to the left of the room of Mona dianora where there is a fetid bed which would create plague burn it and replace it so this passage then reflects the concerns of contemporaries in 17th century Tuscany about the physical environment and how the way that people lived influenced their health here we have a description of a very cramped living conditions of one of the poorest parts of the city with seven people in one room sleeping on filthy bedding and straw palaces furthermore the real fear was that because these conditions created a great stink that the and fetid air that would create plague indeed their fears was realized by mid-june August of 1630 when epidemic broke out in the city now this survey was conducted of the whole city in order to identify and remedy any insanitary conditions which might create plague and as if you seen created included mattresses cesspits drinking water supplies and piles of fetid rubbish well the government paid for the survey and to replace bedding materials landlords and tenants were instructed to make the necessary repairs and clean up the environment sparked by the beginning of the epidemic it should be stressed that these measures were hardly new they sprang from the long tradition of medieval sanitary legislation and were part of the early modern interest and long increased interest in the environment and its impact on the health and disease which led to the multiplication of sanitary surveys and ultimately to the whole movement of medical topographies in the late sixth seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries the Florentine survey was then among a number of preventive measures taken by the health authorities to taken to prevent plague breaking out both from an internal and external causes while on the one hand it was believed that plague could be created locally by the emanation of corrupt vapors from polluted matter on the other hand it was seen from experience that it could be imported from plague stricken areas hence the interposition of cordon sanitaire commercial isolation of whole us infected states the close control of the entry and exit of people through city gates and the regulation of markets and the sale of food and drink all directed by a special plate Commission or Health Board the magistrate or des a Nita as well as one of the measures most typical of early modern Italy that was the establishment of the large lab safety or isolation hospitals so these policies together with a whole raft of proactive measures adopted once plague had broken out in the city were all part and parcel of a war against plague pollution and poverty in the early modern city indeed much of the discourse of the time about plague and poverty has rightly informed the historiography of plague in late medieval and early modern Europe epidemic diseases and here we should also include the great pox syphilis from the 1490s together with population increase and periods of economic crises have been taken to be the cause of increased intolerance of the poor as it's well known new structures of poor relief were put into place typify by increased distinctions between the worthy and the unworthy poor and the banishing and the expulsion of beggar's added to this as seen above was increased visual and olfactory sensitivity to the living conditions the poor based in part on the revival of near Hippocratic ideas about the link between disease and the environment leading to efforts to address problems of urban pollution the nexus between physical dirt poverty and disease thus came to be emphasized in legislation and medical treatises and was linked in the minds of the elite to moral pollution as well this then is the discourse which typifies government reactions towards poverty and disease at the time and was not unnaturally traditionally influenced the history of charity and poor relief however more recently local studies of the mechanisms and practice of welfare have shown a much more nuanced system in action it would appear from legislation and statute alone added to this recent studies of plague have painted a more skeptical picture of the efficacy of public health strategies as in the work of Alessandro Pastore agenor a Roman Bologna Sandra Cavallo an Turin and Christie but Wilson Bowers on Seville and most relevant to the present paper the Julia calve is excellent 1983 book on Florence histories of a plague year now emphasis in these studies has been placed instead on the permeability of these structures the flexibility in the way that relations were enforced and ultimately her in some cases they broke down under pressure so in my talk today I want to examine this theme in relation to one particular epidemic which lies at the center of the book I'm completing and he's through a total of plague in Florence in one year 1632 thirty three which was the last fling of this epidemic disease to affect central and northern Italy in the introductory part I want to describe briefly medical theory and developing government policy and on the surface this was a story of opposition's the rich and the poor health disease cleanliness and filth however they shall argue is one looks beyond the rhetoric one discovers greater compassion towards the poor often couched in a glow of counter-reformation piety and charity but in the bulk of the paper I want to look at the other side of the coin in other words the perspective of those of the lower end of society to see what were their reactions to living through a period of massive regulation through analysis of trial records of those who broke played laws these records enable one to provide a more nuanced animated and less passive view of the life of the lower sort than that presented by official accounts furthermore they offer a less trakone ian's view than that presented in normative records at the same time throw light on life or the life of the level of the neighborhood Street and even family reflecting the survival strategies but adopted at a time of crisis so plague arrived in Italy in November 1629 during the Italian phase of the 30 Years War it arrived on the tailcoats obverse the French and then the Imperial armies and gradually traveled south until it arrived in Tuscany and if you look at the map you can see the two black squares where the two areas were played first was introduced to to Italy it robotically traveled south and it arrived in Tuscany in the summer of 1630 it wrecked havoc on the way Briggs two of the largest cities in the north Milan and Menace lost 46 percent and 33 percent of their respective populations of a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty thousand are the smaller cities such as Padua and Verona suffered even more they had mortality rates ranging between 59 and 61 percent of the resident population by the time it reached central Italy in the spring of 1630 the epidemic had apparently become less severe so only 25 percent a quarter of the population of bologna was killed in late June sorry a late July the first cases in Tuscany were recorded up the road from here in a small village called Paris Piana which is marked on the map a settlement at that time of about five hundred people living on the main road to bologna brought they said by a certain paula jaan law or chicken dealer returning home from selling his chickens in the Bolognese it wasn't long before the disease spread to the city itself the epidemic gradually took hold and the period of worst mortality was in the autumn the slow tailing off as you can see of the subsequent seven months during the whole period in which plague was in the city between august 16 30 and July of the following year about 11% of the resident population of 75,000 people died so relative 11% is still high but relatively low compared with places in further north despite differences which they aired in a debate within the College of Physicians and here's one of the gents involved in it or an image of one plague doctor most medical experts agreed about what caused the immediate and the and readily observable effect of the epidemic higher mortality among the poor who suffered recently from a series of severe deaths when they'd been forced to consume food and drink of poor quality this had led according to one member of the College of Four since dr. Antonio dg2 the generation quote in the bodies of the poor of a great mass of bad humors which had led in them to an extraordinary putrefaction which even from a long distance and even from any occasion has become plague so clearly this medical advice gave the authorities somebody and something to blame and from this flowed a whole series of measures already adopted in periods of recent mortality in sanitary conditions as we've seen in the most squalid parts of the city were believed to be the cause of plague combined with the hardship suffered by the poor themselves despite the constant vigilance of the Health Board the closing of the Tuscan state through the placing of mounted guards along the borders the close regulation of everybody who attempted to empty enter the city plague did break out in Florence at this point the government instituted another raft of regulations the banning of public assemblies the prohibition of the sale of cloth which was believed to transmit plague the quarantine of the sick in their houses or in isolation hospitals and the burial of plague victims in special pits outside the city walls legislation introduced at the beginning of the epidemic laid down that the head of household had to report any suspicious death or sickness to the Health Board who then sent their surgeon to identify if it was indeed plague once the sick or dead person had been removed from the house it was locked up with all the inhabitants inside and none are allowed to leave for 40 days any materials which have been in contact with the sick such as clothes bedclothes were taken away to be disinfected or burned and here's a satirical image from from plague in Rome in 1657 where you see this rather energetic pro-forma thorry the throwing stuff out of a first floor apartment where presumably plague had broken out and then it's taken off in these in these correctiy in fact this is a you may know as a series of remarkable prints which were produced at that time showing different aspects of the of the fight against plague in Rome in that period which was that more severe than it was in Florence in in the 30s so at this point a locksmith was then employed to put and I'm giving these details thank it's important for my story later on a locksmith was employed put a bar nailed in place across the door and the Health Board officers made daily inspections of the locked houses to make sure that nobody had tried to enter or to leave further neighbors were then encouraged to make secret denunciations of anybody transgressing any of these laws and each one was paid ten scudi for anybody who successfully was successfully prosecuted the final plank of plague policy in mid-january 1631 was the enforcement of a total quarantine of the city with all residents having to remain within their houses for forty days with one adult male allowed out to buying food once a day the Health Board the senator immediately then put into operation a highly efficient investigative system when a sick person was reported the account of the first cases by the official historian Francesco Rondinella this or the grim-looking gentleman who is appointed in 1635 to be the Grand Dukes librarian in fact in reward apparently for writing his history identified the names of the main actors and their actions a familiar feature of other contemporary plague tracts the first place or the case of plague in Florence was in Via del gaba which is number one you can see it which is now you probably know it better with Via della cantata and in it this plague broke out in as rondelay described it quote in a large old house inhabited by many tenants among whom lived a poor widow with four children the widow was in fact the victim of the episode because both she and three of her children became infected as well as a neighbor Senora Madalena del Garbo and her daughter and her servant then because the inhabitants ignored the health boards instructions to stay inside they were then taken off to the new luxury tour of mezzo Bonifacio which is this is Via del Cabo Nevada Lacan daughter and this is the mess of bony factor which was you probably know as a late 14th century hospital which was converted into the Lazaretto in 1630 you may be more familiar with the image of it as the questura today eventually only six of the 37 inhabitants returned home alive underlining the severity of the epidemic of at this stage the health board officers Hauer didn't leave it there they returned to find out how the widow and her family had become infected as Ronda nearly recounts when they went to investigate from whence the sickness came they discovered that sister amici who had a wool shop a cloth shop around the corner had brought his to his storehouse a lot of cloth guests from where 4s piano and that one of the windows of his storeroom overlooked the courtyard belonging to this poor Widow Rhonda Nellie's a detailed description of these initial episodes reflects the aim of the Health Board to discover the cause of the sickness which affected the poor so by taking appropriate measures to attempt to spread prevent its spread as the official historian Rhonda Nellie was also concerned to contrast the wisdom of the sunita with a willful ignorance of the poor who by disobeying the commands of the magistrates led to their own death but their actions was also endangered the rest of the population especially threatening to their social betters as in the case of Senora Madalena Delgado whose palace stood in the road named after her though it should be emphasized then that all these measures to deal with the sick the dead and their contacts was based on fear fear that they would spread plague by moving around the city or by carrying possessions which might contain what they called the seeds of disease if the health board survey with the provision free mattresses enforced repairs of wells and pot see nary as well as arms to the poor represents the more charitable side of official policy the other side reminds us of the contemporary early modern distinction of between resident and restless and rootless poor thus the Health Board decreed that all non Florentine beggars should be banished from the city and locals housed in the recently established beggars hospital the speedily demean decon team furthermore entry was forbidden to quote all beggars rogues and gypsies so these then were the first measures and the concentration on the blaming of the poor begins to explain why the idea of the Lazaretto or isolation hospital was popular among the governing classes who clearly didn't end up there themselves the main LULAC zerator was established the whole series were established around florence but the main one was established it's a mini otto Almonte apart from being a substantial site it also had the advantage that it was separated from the city by the walls surrounding the fort itza built originally by Michelangelo and expanded under Cosimo primo these policies all these policies together then implied a massive investment of time manpower and above all finance especially is over ten thousand people were sent to the main Luxor 80 of the city during the plague when pop went when plague was in the city that in itself represented something like 13 percent of the city's population but this evening I want to concentrate less on official or medical rhetoric and more on the impact of all this plague legislation on the everyday life of in habitants who remained in the city not having either fled or been carted off to a lot Cerreto I'll seek more over to provide a more nuanced picture of the identity of the poorer levels of society than that provided by contemporary descriptions and accounts of patrician classes the questions I want to address today then were how effectively was the law put into practice how far were the draconian punishments outlined in the decrees for imprisonment to the strappado and even death actually enforced an above all what were the reactions of the population to these restrictions on their lives and in order to explore these attitudes I want to present the results of a preliminary analysis of some 560 court cases of prosecutions undertaken by the special court of the Health Board which cover the period when plague was in the city building on and I taking further the discussion by Julia Calvin these lively and often raucous responses of those arrested and were the witnesses to events demonstrate that local inhabitants who lived in the city during the plague were not a passive mass of who accepted all regulations living in a city in which the senator had power led to the infringement of numerous privileges and freedoms normally taken for granted the question arises though is how far'd is self-interest or indeed fear of death lead Florentines to depart from the model of civic responsibility which was a stressed as essential by the health boards proclamations and underlined in sermons an octopus will decrees and the corollary of this is how far was the threatened punishments actually put into effect the specific reasons that people were brought to trial can be divided into five different categories and I'll briefly give examples bearing in mind with these many trials probably presented only represented a small proportion of the actual activity which took place in the period in other words they're only the people were actually caught now first then the pattern of prosecutions over these eleven months these cases were not evenly spaced over the year they increased rapidly over the autumn from a low of 16 in September September to 116 in November from which point they gradually fell over the course the following 8 months initially they followed the pattern of mortality which remember was that though prosecutions as you can see continued at quite a high level in January and February because these months saw the imposition of the 40 day quarantine of the city when residents were shut up in their houses and clearly people got so fed up that being shut up that they risked being arrested the second feature is the relationship between male and female prosecution's men predominated over women with 78 cases percent of cases attributed to them this is not a surprising result since it follows a general pattern of criminal prosecutions in the past and present reflecting in the characteristics of Florentine male sociability and work patterns but before examining the actual prosecutions in more detail I want to discuss the type of punishments given to lawbreakers contemporary histories of the plague represent punishments as draconian indeed according to legislation passed at the beginning of the epidemic anybody who left a locked up house or admitted anybody by removing the bars on the front door was severely punished the men were sent to Livorno to work on the state's galleys while women were put into prison however as was common practice at the time it was also possible to petition the Grand Duke to ask for him permission granted remission of the sentence on payment of 200 scudi now after reading the somewhat severe character of the laws enacted at the beginning of the epidemic it comes as something of a surprise that 77% of punishments were relatively mild consisting of imprisonment with or without a fire a fine humiliation was at the basis of other punishments such as being flogged in a public space which was hoped to act as a deterrent to others breaking plague regulations a small number were condemned to ride backwards on an ass with the crime written on a card around the individuals neck more potentially threatening life threatening were those sent to serve in Lancer 80 but even worse was the dreaded strappado being hoisted up with a rope wrapped around the armpit and dropped to the ground and dislocating arms and shoulders the number of times the person was dropped was a depended on the gravity of the crime only 12 or 2% were actually sent to serve on the Gala's which was actually later on commuted to banishment the overall oppression then of was a relatively nian enforcement of the law indeed Florence makes an interesting comparison with judicial measures taken by other cities during plague epidemics in Rome for example in the 1650s there was an exceptional rigorous system for punishment leading to frequent torture and brutal public executions while generally in the same years had a more lenient moderate policy it's been suggested that the differences stemmed from the greater strength of the state in Rome compared with Genoa where this interpretation can't be applied to Florence it's possible the less severity in the Tuscan capital may been linked to much lower mortality rate compared with either Rome or Genoa leading the author Authority z' to adopt a more lenient and pragmatic policy so let me now turn to look at the in more detail at the specific cases of people prosecuted and this is where it gets lively the major crimes associated with residents the major crimes associated with resident work with residents against people leaving or entering locked up houses where somebody had been identified as having been sick or died of plague these included what ostensibly sounded quite innocent cases with entering or leaving to visit and go and stay with relatives more sinister they equally understandable on a personal level with those who'd been discovered hiding and not reporting the sick or even those who died in the house from plague there was also deliberate criminal activity involving forced entry theft two possessions and locked up houses now the major offences include what I've characterized as crimes of sociability meeting together in the street to play cards or having a drink or going to the pub there were also crimes associated with work people mostly men were discovered to have left locked up her locked up houses and gone to their workshop this was a phenomenon associated particularly with the textile trade which of course employed up to a third of the Florentine population but was real time regarded as particularly dangerous because cloth was regarded as being the medium through which plague was spread the the seeds of plague was supposed to be absorbed by the cloth and therefore spread it from place to place however even here there was some official ambiguity since during the total quarantine the city in January to March 1631 the Health Board did in fact allow some textile workers to go to work as long as they didn't return home in order to help overcome the poverty associated with unemployment as many sectors of the economy had been affected by the epidemic all this activity then reflects the desire of individuals on the one hand to attempt to continue to follow a normal way of life even during the plague another hand to either protect or require possessions and seems to have little to do with on the one hand a sense of civic responsibility or even and this is perhaps more curious a fear of being or being infected through handling goods which had come into contact with those diagnosed with plague so just just to go through this types of crime as well but they're really breaking in and out of houses which is what caused the most concern to the authorities so we'll now turn to examine more detail the specific examples of the categories of why people were brought to trial and as we'll see these radically change their relative importance over time so first of all let's look at crimes associated with houses breaking out of houses and so on entering or leaving a locked house with or without criminal intention represented about 39% of these five hundred and sixty odd cases most were people leaving their houses when they'd been stirred in sickness or death associated with plague and then during the quarantine being caught and being in the street after curfew let me begin with a couple of cases are quite innocent people who arrested because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time thus the widow Sandara DiMatteo was arrested on the 23rd of January because as she said in answer to her judge the judge I left the house as I heard the clack clack of a hen when I returned inside I was arrested and taken off to prison if this is an example of somebody who left a house when they shouldn't have done so there are others who are in the street and conversing with people in locked up houses and here's an example of the trial on the 7th of October 1630 of antonio de francesco terrible AZ last wednesday I was walking towards Porter alla Croce and when I was close to the gate a woman called Maria who was locked up in the house by the sun-eater called out of the window and asked me how I was comiste I I said - I was fine esto beany and while I was talking to her the police officers came and took me to prison when questioned he declared that the window through which Mona Maria talked was on the ground floor but it's okay I was standing at the side of the street so this is an example of a person Mona Maria who could potentially have in fact an acquaintance since if she was sick she would have breezed out infected air over definitely since he was standing some distance away this wasn't regarded as a risk and you'll be pleased to know he was released after questioning so in these two cases then the offices of the senator were following the letter of the law however because they were perhaps being too enthusiastic because after a further investigation the judge decided that neither sander DiMatteo nor Antonia terrible AZ had done anything wrong even in principle the officer's actions were correct since leaving or talking from locked up house could potentially spread plague if the inhabitants were sick with plague activities for obviously criminal intent were those involving forced entry and theft from houses and they accounted for some 12% of all trials as in the case On January 16 31 a Salvadori de vincenzo thought thoroughly who is a baker at the port de vikke according to the chargesheeted quote entered the house of giovanni de acaba Dulci who died at the contagion together all his children and mother Salvatori was accused of taking objects including an alien a kalana from this locked up house which to make matters worse he gave to his prostitute then during the trial it was discovered in fact that Giovanni de a cobbled dulce when the house was in fact his father-in-law therefore our friend Salvadori claimed initially that they were just his family's possessions suggesting that he had to consent from the family to remove the objects and it proved the point he said postorder re-sod la Pietra sacra however once he was tortured he recanted and rather a different story came out and admitted that he did indeed just been stealing without permission thus here in addition to the crime of theft which he would have been prosecuted even in normal times he risked becoming sick through absorbing the corrupt air a plague in the house where people had died recently and into which he'd broken and thus spreading the disease in the city through his potentially infected breath by carrying with him the seeds of disease attached to both the goods he'd stolen and to his clothes now in these cases all these people had been discovered by the employees of the Health Board but the following example also involved theft from a locked up house points to a different system for discovery and reporting of crimes at the neighborhood level thus it was recorded in the trial of two lads on the 3rd of November that they'd been denounced by Anamika segreto on the 31st of October had reported that he'd seen two lads climbing a wall of an orchard of the palace of the Guarani family at the time initially they hadn't been recognized however they had been spied upon both by woman who is a neighbour and by the gardener's gardener they were reported as having been broke tried to break into a house which had been locked up by the death of the old man after this was reported the health officers an officer went to investigate he was well prepared he took a ladder with him and inspected the wall and discovered quote a hole had been made in the said wall where a foothold had been made to allow the lads to scale the wall so this trial then speaks of the ties of local community indeed the neighborhood watch this type of infall reporting is part of a wider phenomenon familiar from studies of Witchcraft Trials in the early modern period which has been found at often cases of denunciation stemmed from local rivalries or dislikes or petty jealousies while this may not have played an important part in this case as in others prosecuted by the Health Board and may have been rather linked to resentment of the occasion of outsiders but it's also important to recognize that there were financial incentives to the report but petty theft four people are encouraged to make secret denunciations of anybody transgressing any of these laws but they were rewarded by being paid ten scudi first its success anybody successfully prosecuted so lets me now move on to the next category of person to boss said persecution prosecution which was hiding or not reporting sickness once again there was a variety of reasons somebody might be arrested from the potentially innocent to deliberate activities against the law the first place involves senor antonio de john batista delta valya who is arrested in december and this is what he replied and to his to that in in answer to the questions last night sandra my servant came down with a fever and this morning i came to the senate are to bring the certificate of her sickness as we obliged to by law after I'd given in the certificate to the senator I went to Mass and after Mass and I taken a walk I then returned home and found that the house had been locked up by the officers of the Health Board after lunch so here then one can see the various stages in operation for reporting sickness but also even a more affluent person could fall foul of the law although antonia d druvan Batista had a listened explicit excuse for his absence from the locked up house nevertheless it was observed that because he'd come into contact with a sick person he could quote have caused some Mally de cantar jaw by taking unnecessarily walked through the streets this was after all as a time when mortality was still very high knows us heightened sensitivity to potential for spreading plague in contrast to what reads like a rather careless attitude towards the disease there is the case of the fishmonger Giovanni de Bruno Brunelli who is accused of deliberately hiding disease through not declaring that somebody had died of the malcontents in his house he been arrested on the 4th of November for he'd been seen to have been carrying with the help of another man furtively and at night the body of his grandson who of plague in via Delhi Rorty to his own house in veer Sansa nor be the reason he provided for his actions was so that people who lived in the house where the child had died wouldn't be locked up which may have been a consideration for them but inconsiderate for the rest of the city however he'd compounded his crime because quote the said Giovanni that gone on to mix with a number of people and particularly in selling fish in the miracle vecchio where he could infect the whole of Florence although no more details provided presumably his motivation had been to support his own children so that his son could continue to work that clearly hadn't thought through the implications of then infecting the rest of the city if indeed this was a consideration it's hardly surprising that individuals and family should attempt to continue working at a time when occupations were affected by plague regulation and as we've seen there was something like 21 percent of cases retribute it to people breaking the law because they were working unlawfully and here is an example of a woman who was arrested because because she was attempting to sell second-hand clothes which had and which was obviously her normal way or a husband's normal way of keeping bread-and-butter sort of feeding themselves this is a trial of mona antonia Giovanni who was arrested on the 16th of November 1630 the judge began by asking what is your occupation I weave I sew so in fact I do whatever I can to survive what were you doing yesterday evening I was arrested yesterday evening sir on Piazza straat see where I was carrying two shirts to sell because I didn't have anything to eat who was in your family I have two children one male and one female were very small and my husband who was a second-hand clothes dealer but now does nothing so here we see the problems caused for families when specific economic activities were banned we've seen we've seen that the Health Board feared corrupt vapors were spread through cloth and although they sanction the continuance the textile industry they prohibited the sale of second-hand clothes during the epidemic because of the likelihood it might have belonged to some who died from play this however deprived the household head of the livelihood and his family for the benefit of the major wage earner hence the desperate efforts of the wife to sell shirts I want to turn now in the time which remains to examine the way in which the people reacted to the period of the total quarantine as reflected once again in court cases it'll remember that this meant that all residents had to remain shut up in their houses for forty days with one male member allowed to buy food once a day in the case of the poorest the government paid for the daily sustenance of 35,000 people however even during the quarantine Health Board regulations the city do not appear to prevented a very considerable amount of social activity in February the three main categories of crimes sociability breaking into her out of locked houses and working on lawfully constitute 79 percent of all cases many broke health board couldn't regulate ins through sheer frustration either as a result of financial hardship or being shut up in cramped apartments with their families or even alone as in the case of Lucrezia DeFrancesco Bianchi who's interviewed in by the judge on the 22nd of January 16 31 and this is what she replied in the trial I live in Via del Campo in Anja Santi and about a month ago I returned to the House of Lorraine's of the Miller in Via della Salvia in order not to remain alone in my house during the quarantine I returned to Via del kampachi as I said but because I didn't know anybody there and I didn't want to remain alone I went to stay in this house of the Miller's wife who is my friend then the Miller's wife is interviewed and it emerged from that interview that there was more to the story because of Lucrezia had no nor ordinary profession which in fact worked as a prostitute and was registered in the sun-eater's records as living in compassion to cover herself the Miller's wife provides a very human story for why she'd allowed Lucrezia to live with her Lucrezia's employed me lured me many times her allowed to return and anyhow she's my friend so this case then talks to the problems of solitude and boredom not normally recorded in official documents the interruption of normal economic activities the fear of moral pollution and informal networks of sociability and affection between individuals which proves stronger than the law indeed this is a theme which is repeated over and over again in these records which reflect the close proximity in which families lived and the bonds which bound members together to provide support the sick and dying even in the face of state regulation and fear of their own fate there are examples of people climbing over rooms to visit friends carousing together on balconies and roof tops to wile away the time in January 16 31 three men mata redonda Reza Khan Nene Giovanni de Nicola Foley re-injure Vani Sarto who'd been arrested because quote each day they'd climbed over two roofs and the terrace belonging to better you woody calm and with the said Sylvester and his sons but played cards all day our worse was to come from the 22nd of January they broke down the bar across the entrance of the flat belonging to two prostitutes Maria Domenico and Benedetto DeFrancesco where they were all discovered together and taken to jail when interviewed the protagonist closed ranks for example Benedetta when she was interviewed replied to questioning as follows I don't know to play the guitar I didn't hold the guitar on the roof even though I was on the roof a matteo and the man called Giovanni were on their own roofs on the roof of better.you DeCoster I didn't see anybody at all so in this case then these people were interestingly enough following the regulations of the Health Board for as instructed they were taking air on the roofs however by climbing over roofs they were of course mixing together which the quarantine had been imposed to prevent exacerbate it's still further when they break down the bar put up by the Health Board across the entrance to benedetta and Maria's flat the protagonists were therefore punished for leaving a locked up house with their occupations compounded their felony for moral pollution was added to the corruption caused by plague I want to end they with a case in which people arrested because they're engaging in what the Health Board regarded as being particularly inappropriate behavior in other words they're enjoying themselves at a serious time in the middle of the night have been unfortunate enough to have left open their door when the patrols of the senator were walking along their Street however it's significant that here as in the other instances once investigated this was simply the tip we've been in moral iceberg and this it takes place in via Sangala and this is a report from the policeman captain parada Pontoise see away from the guard labelled jello in reference the evening of the 24th the current month was with I was with my troop and the Corporal in very Sangalo at three hours of the night and found in the house Dona Maria di giovanni battista from Impala Dona Francesca do Lorenzo and Don allowed at least a phone or they were in company with a priest dressed in fancy dressed in mascara with a guitar in his hand who said they said they intended to go to the house of a neighbor so the Corporal gave orders to take their names and they then left then because of the events that night they were these women who were arrested and taken to the secret prison so they could be punished for having broken the orders of the health board and maria giovanni battista de MP one of them replied I live in Via della were behind sandrina they arrested me in the house belonged to my brother in via Sangalo behind the stables of the senior Cardinale about ten days ago how were you found in the house of your brother yesterday evening the door was open and in the house there was nobody else except for us three sisters and Domenico Fantini our brother the priest and in order to pass the time we dressed up our brother in fancy dress and made a joke of him among ourselves and while he was mounted on the stairs dressed up like that the Corporal passed by and heard us laughing he came closer to the door and saw what was going on inside the house so in this incident then the group was unfortunate enough to have left their front door open so that is the Corporal of the guard passed along via Sangalo he was attracted by the jollity and then seen the the priest dressed up in fancy dressed outlined on the stairs the women had obviously broken the law having left their houses something prohibited to them during the whole quarantine of the city maria furthermore had doubly sinned because she was ill with morrible and should instead have been taken to the Lazaretto rather than enjoying ourselves with her family in the middle of the night it's significant however the priest himself was not apparently arrested even though he'd behaved in decorously and had left his front door open so these extracts from piled trial records then point to a complex interaction between Authority and residence they raised the whole question about how far rules and regulations were really put into effect with a picture of a confrontation of authority and subject is to black and white to reflect the complexity of social life and individual reactions to play although by their very nature these records reflect the structures and aims of Italian judicial systems trial records also reflect a more numerous a sorry more nuanced animated and less passive view of the life with a porous sort than presented by official records this was not as simply a top-down process for many accusations were made to the authorities by people of the same social background this would suggest that awareness of the dangers of the spread of plague and infection was not as official records often suggest simply confined to the magistrate's we also widespread among the proper law but many instances of neighbours reporting each other for breaking regulations however as we've learned from trials of witchcraft in early modern Europe we should also bear in mind motivation of these leveling actors Asians may very well have been mixed from petty jealousies and animosities and local communities and of course the promise of 10 scudi as a reward for reporting infractions of law however as we've seen these records above all throw light on life at the level of the neighborhood Street and even family indeed many of the so-called crimes reflected the survival strategies adopted at times of crisis by those at the lower end of society their aims were therefore principally to protect family and property despite the potential risks of being arrested or more grave of dying when they came into contact with the sick or infected clothing thank you very much yeah should we um should we have questions that was fascinating material I have one very like little technical question could you give us a sense of how much the ten scudi I'm not sure but I think Galileo was making like 1,000 something in a year so well of course yeah I mean that's why he left start over to come back to Florence yeah I was just wondering like how many days or we don't remember any for the kind of people that they wouldn't have been paid in scooty at all they would have been paid in impeach Tony and so 10 scooty probably represented something quite significant for for the poor close to their annual salary maybe something like that watch this space so as long as I have the microphone I have a question are these provisions of this year 16 32 31 the unusual or characteristic of strategies that had already been used during previous outbreaks of the plague or do they represent a kind of new and more scientific approach to trying to contain the contagion oh no they were I mean they they they've been developed in a sense from a long tradition or plague measures which go right back to the the 15th century which gradually became more sophisticated and more sort of better worked out Florence interesting enough had not had plague for hundred years the last episode was in in the 1520 so there was this enormous gap that didn't mean to say they didn't know what was what to do elsewhere because clearly plague continued to be breaking out in the in the whole of Italy throughout 16th century in particular 15 seventies which was was which was particularly severe but I mean the whole panoply of plague measures was was was essentially grew up over the 15th century with the sarrish and all that so 80 the establishment of the health boards the Senate are the burial of people in plague pits and so on and the inspection and the shutting up in inspection of people in their houses already by the 1520 I mean I've looked to the 1520's to the hundred years before already by then the systems were incredibly sophisticated one of the one of the institutions which was most closely involved in the inspection and the carrying of people off to the latter 80 or the plague pits was the misericordia and the archive still has a lot of the records of those of those people who were carted off lists of people who were carted off in the 1520's there's an identical identical system that had been in operation for a long time actually I think probably what go got more sophisticated ultimately over the 15 16th century at least was the sort of massive communication between health boards across Italy and indeed across Europe so we've you know all the archives of all these health ports in different places in Italy and different parts of Europe contain the correspondence or a lot of the correspondence so you could you know that they were you know some incredibly intent on finding out where it was what it was and it wasn't just played Blues other types of epidemic disease too and so once it's what perhaps slightly different characteristics of Florence because it hadn't had plague for a hundred years it had no purpose built lacerate so they adopted as I showed San Miniato the body FES Alana and other buildings of ecclesiastical buildings and also villas as lots of ATO quarantine centers where places like Venice Milan and Genoa and in Livorno for that matter built their own purpose-built not sir eighty which then particular court support cities were used for what were used for quarantine in goods which came from from abroad or from the plague inspected out infected areas if I may be so so the last outbreak of plague before this was fifteen thirty the end of the siege of Florence so this was the first time that any Grand Ducal government had had to deal with this they had no prototype for how to do this under grand ducal administration it came from the from the from the Republic from the end of the Republic yes I mean well I suppose I mean I think money to end needs to put plague in context so for example there was a very severe epidemic of typhus in Florence in the early 1620s and a lot of the provisions which were for example sanitary surveys and so on and the inspection of houses and so on was put into place then and that in itself was actually based on santeri surveys which have been established in the late 16th century and many parts of Tuscany once again within Grand Duke of Tuscany but you know powers within within Italy within Europe as I said we're in constant communication with each other and asked for copies of regulations to be sent to them they were printed and I mean one it was an interesting example in England at this period where meaning rule was somewhat more behindhand in plague regulations that Italy was being a sort of backward nation until a bit later not as sophisticated as Italy and therefore their provisions were much more primitive and it's interesting ly enough under in the 1570s in fact the physician the chase of real mario was the physician the queen who is requested by the Privy Council to provide a copy of plague regulations from Padua which he copied out and did and they actually remain you can see them still in England so there was an enormous circulation of ideas that in a sense even though Florence and the Grand Duke hadn't actually had played for a hundred years what hadn't been in the city of 100 years they knew very well from other examples what was happening and from the ambassadors and some really fascinating what a terrible fearful time to be living I've got a couple of questions and I'll just stick them all together it was this the worst epidemic of the plague in in Florence of all of the times that the plague came to Florence I'm assuming the one that you've shared with us it was the worst and I assume that the reason that people hid plague victims in their houses was because they were terrified of being locked up but as you called it and I'm wondering to what extent people denounce their neighbors to see you know who were hiding victims and then finally we've you know we've studied and been told to research that the plague was spread by rats and please what led them to believe that was in the seeds of plague were in the fabric of the clothing that this was actually the mildest epidemic which would hit Florence it's only had 11 percent the population which was very low compared with in other places and other times and with the famous Black Death you know in 1348 it's debated exactly how many people died but it was anything between a third and a half of the population and then the population was was larger than it was in the 17th century 110,000 and then from plague then basically returned every 10 to 15 years in late 14th century continued to return in the 15th century to the 1520's was actually much much more severe than the 1630 epidemic and it was much more severe as I've shown in Roman Milan and Genoa in the 1650s as well so and I think that's what I mean I think you know I keep asking myself and people asked me to is why were these punishments relatively mild and I got no real answer to that but that contemporary don't don't really talk about it because they represent them the literate class is representing being very punitive whereas in fact in action action they weren't but I think it may be down to the fact that it was quite a mild epidemic and therefore in a sense they didn't have to be quite as dramatic in the measures they took as during the the most severe epidemics then yes there's this whole I hold debate about what was the disease you know which has been exercising has been exercising historians and anthropologists and biologists and so on over the last twenty years and I mean as you probably know it was a well-known historian called Samuel Cohen who challenged the paradigm I mean Graham tweed was another person who did the same thing in for London in in England in the medieval period suggesting that it wasn't actually given in plague in other words you know up till now the medical historians and public health health historian had associated the all the plague epidemics in the past as being those which caused by bubonic plague as identified in the post laboratory revolution in the 1890s and early 1900s in Hong Kong and Bombay and so on the discovery by just senior and so on of the plane as caused by infected rat fleas jumping onto rats and so on so what Sam did in in his first of all an article in the American historical review and then in a major book on the Black Death was essentially compared the the seasonal pattern of bubonic plague or bubonic plague in inverted commas during the Black Death with the pattern the seasonality and the sort of gender distribution and the age characters of the people who died with those people who died during the third pandemic in the late 19th early 20th century and he showed that the patterns were actually quite well rather different so this began a whole debate which is which has been fascinating you know traditional historians have said always absolute rubbish and just just take me discounted it completely but I think what is I mean I think it's very healthy to to question you know these these later assumptions about what diseases were in the past I mean you know rather than retrospective diagnosis to try and understand which is what I try and do what the disease was at the time and therefore what caused what they thought caused it and that way you can understand why they take certain measures like shutting up people themselves and yeah more recently there's been a reaction or further that the field has sort of moved further wrong so a series of teams across Europe of made up of archaeologists and anthropologists and biologists have been doing analysis of the DNA of plague victims and particularly the tooth pulp it contained in the in the in the teeth of plague victims from plague pits in different parts of Europe and they've identified the signature of just in your pesters from the Black Death and from subsequent epidemics so you'd think that that would close the debate but in fact the debate does actually continue which I think you know I think it's I think it's a very healthy and it's a very interesting debate and I'm sure it'll just go on and on or not I mean one of the responses to that is oaken's if it was bubonic plague in the Black Death how was it then spread so rapidly across the whole of Europe because it arrives in Massena in in late late autumn 1347 it's in Florence by the spring 1348 you know it goes to France it goes to England by the full of 1349 50s in England goes to Scandinavia and so on how does it transmit itself so rapidly so you know therefore people started talking about pneumonic plague spread by people sneezing and so on but I think what is interesting I think that as I say the debates not over and and I think it's I find students always find it fascinating so it's always something that I debate and I get students to take different sides and to think about it but I think the important thing I felt to take away from it all this is not to judge them contemporaries in the in this period by our standards in traditionally people who said oh well they're idiots they didn't understand what plague was which i think is completely completely wrong thank you sir I have a little strand question it are can you describe in his book plague does when the play come people will like pretend to live on their normal life even though the law totally changed their life but they will pretend to have this conflicts emotion in their hearts so I just wanna ask is this Fenneman real happen in history or this is just a literature part I mean like people's conflicts inside their hurts this kind of confliction this kind of emotion is that really happen is there any record about that visit you mean did did the did contemporaries record among people's emotional reactions yeah yeah yeah I think the answer is yes I mean I think some of these court cases that I've presented do reflect you know the emotions of people what it was like to have people you know members your family taken off to to the isolation hospitals the fear that generated being shut up in the houses there and I think one of the extraordinary things I've never that's just I haven't read this time record before but the the the fear of loneliness I mean loneliness is a very intangible thing and it's very rarely recorded in in official records so I think the emotions are very very real I mean certainly there are literary records I mean literary descriptions only people like obviously Manzoni wrote about much later or or 2fo again writing about the nature or cameo I mean all these literary descriptions which I think do justice to what it was like living through the plague as well and for example I'm it's you know the well-known fascinating chapter in man sonnets put a Macy's fuzzy about the Lazaretto and what it was like to visit a lot Sarita and it was an enormous great space which was used not just I have the sort of purpose-built houses but also sort of basically created a sort of camp inside this enormous area and he I think does generate a a very good picture what it was like okay it's literary literary description but I think one can believe to a certain degree and I think that is what is is amazing about these court because they really do I mean a court court records a problematic one can't just read them literally but I think they still taking all that into account I think I can get a very good idea reading reading back into what it was like to live through an epidemic or indeed reading in epidemic just think as well of recent epidemics of epidemics AIDS chicken flu or whatever maybe implore whatever it might have been I think they're similar reactions I mean we haven't changed that much in our sort of basic reactions to crises into personal threat and also sort of recreated in films like contagion and sell with the meningitis epidemic that's been when epidemic is a big word because there's not been that many cases but the museum where I work at many schools last year canceled that were outside of Tuscany because they did not the parents would not allow the children to come to Tuscany due to the meningitis cases that have been reported out of fear that their children would get meningitis by coming to Florence for an educational week so you know so that those fears are still around today about whether to get to vaccinate or whether or not to get vaccinated whether to travel even within the region or from outside of the region I was wondering about the the financial aspect because some of those people were one quite frequent infraction of the rules with sneaking out to work that's not particularly in the textile industry and if large numbers of the populace are being quarantined and not allowed to leave the house and these are quite you know poor people living on the breadline I mean it's always surprising there wasn't more kind of rebellion these people must have been in in kind of financial distress I mean what's there were there funds made the certainly were I mean people everybody shot up in their house during the call total quarantine of the city but then they were allowed I mean they were provided with food on a daily basis food food was provided and paid for by the grand dude and then actually the always exceptions to all these rules so that anybody who at the beginning of the quarantine who worked in a workshop even if he was a textile workshop was allowed to go to the workshop and work but he wasn't allowed to return home then during the course of the epidemic people did continue working so they weren't deprived of their livelihood but clearly if you dealt with second-hand clothes that was a real problem yeah but I mean the financial site is fascinating I mean the expense of these enormous these measures that were taken was absolutely enormous and all funded by the government and largely also by the grand duke himself who as you know just sort of taken part over the reins of government was young and was keen to impress himself as the sort of long tradition of you know Medici and generosity and charity it did him a lot of good in the public's I know it's makes a fascinating story and maybe it's because the plague wasn't so bad but the grand you and the court stayed I mean not in Florence but sort of went up to a battle squad all and sat up there sort of above the miasma and they actually and relatively few members of the court or indeed the patrician left Florence but it's very surprising because again it's against all the sort of normal sort of sort of motivation of people of more affluent class although they were told the decrees were pass that said you know if you want to go after your Villa you can't so clearly some did but Ronde really suggest that not many did and then the grand ducal court assigned jobs to a lot of the members of the gentlewoman of the Senators and it was they who went round and took the surveys of the sanitary conditions they who went round and made descriptions of the poverty and were totally shocked in this survey I mean said palling conditioned ever see anything like in my life you know clearly they hadn't really ever gone into the poor part of the city and so they so therefore they were involved in the in you know in the fight against plague and the the people who ran the Senate are the magistrate who st. are also lots of patrician class they was correct there's a there's there's a fascinating diary which was kept in this period by Giovanni Belden oh gee I don't know if you know it but it was recently translated by Brendan Dooley and in and he stayed in his palace in via DG nori and describes on a daily daily basis almost of what it was like to live through plague and then with the motions were there and what how terribly was so so it was very different from some of the other epidemics yes I was very much intrigued by the ongoing social life during the plague times and I like very much the last case you presented about the three sisters in this case opposed to the continuing denouncing and also then maybe the financial interests of people announcing other neighbors was this case of the three sisters that kind of naively just stated well yeah we just went out to to see our brother and we just came together there even though there must have been perfectly aware of the fact their current and living and and I was wondering if you've found more cases that stated this ongoing social life and also neighbors or witnesses and the community as people that yeah somehow ignore the fact of the plague and in an earthly way stated that social life was just a common feature of of these years I think before the quarantine was imposed there's a lot of social life there's probably a bit there social activity during the play during the quarantine itself the total quantity in the city but I mean from the cases which survived for the quarantine even then there seems to be lots of activity yes I mean these the I don't have typical the the three sisters in there brother well but you know and obviously you know clearly a lot of people did go around visiting each other and the fact that one person one male member of the household was allowed out every day there's no guarantee that he actually went home and we did he um he bought its food and then you probably to visit friends and people were accused of you know gathering in cafes and bars and playing games and and enjoying themselves as they weren't supposed to yes so I mean it's difficult to know you know how much activity that was because clearly court cases are only those people who were actually called so therefore there was probably a lot more than was indicated even in the in the court cases so I think that the the you know the way that clearly the law was enforced but there must have been a certain amount of flexibility was there some trace in the fleecing clause spreading them disease and when was the when was discovered it was actually the vets so nobody knew about rats or fleas before the 1890s so there was this discovery I mean through the laboratory by Yersinia who was this French French scientist who was in Hong Kong and attempted to investigate and understand what caused the plague and he identified the the bacillus which was the was the cause of your senior-junior pestis which caused the plague which was had been was absorbed by the by the by the flea but then who then jumped on to a rat and then the rat died and then after the rat died flea jumped off and onto a human a bit the human and that was the basic process so nothing was known about it before at this period there was some belief that perhaps dogs spread plague so for example for a lot of plague epidemics in early modern period there were decrees about shooting dogs and you were given a bounty for every every dog that you shot there a vivid pic once you say once you wanted this this association is made between flea bubonic plague rats and so on that sort of there's a scheme of transmission in the 1890s then people then people did take dictate measures so for example when when plague broke out in Bombay late 1890s and early 1900s and then moved to Australia in Sydney for example there are photographs at the time and in the newspapers of large numbers of rats you know hundreds of rats all having been killed with the proud people in front of them having killed them and they were also given bounties but nothing was known before the time you know people again people medical historians have said oh well why aren't the lot why why weren't rats mentioned in the literature why weren't they shown in pictures at the time it's because the Association wasn't made so it's only what's the laboratory discovery and had had been made then they could make that Association and so whether they made that connection or not in some ways they must have recognized that there were health benefits to keeping animals they didn't want to keep the ones I've looked at don't mention rats I'm sorry I'm afraid the fleas weren't mentioned because the idea was do you see that plague was caused by corrupt air and there's this famous night mid 16th century medic humanist medic called Geronimo fracas Dora who wrote a treatise called de cantar Johnny which was about essentially what contagion was and it was his idea that was that essentially what happened was that there were so-called seeds of disease in the atmosphere which contained the disease of plague or other types of diseases were blown around by the wind and they arrived in a city over a city I mean get representations of course of arrows in the earlier period which represented the corrupt yeah and they would fall down onto the city and people would absorb them of course then there's the problem of trying to work out why if you had this corrupt vapor which fell down on the city and everybody absorbed it why did not everybody die so you then bring in the sort of galenic idea of people's predisposition to disease or not or their cut the humoral makeup which made them more likely to get disease or not so so your neighbor died but I didn't dies because you know basically better I've been taking vitamin C on a regular basis with a rights-based echinacea because the textiles were considered was actually absorbing the the seeds of disease so these seeds of disease which actually goes back to soul accretion idea but these seeds of disease have a sort of sticky element to them and they would stick to your clothes but they were also sticky so they could stick to the walls and say you've got you know there's this famous famous description in in manzoni and other people of these of these own Tory who spread plague around the city deliberately in order to try and kill people because those seeds of disease being sticky they could stick them onto people onto walls onto furniture whatever it might be but so played from the time with the black death was seen as sort of cloth was seen as being one of the ways that plague was transmitted so for example one of the earliest sets of regulations we've got about plague in during the Black Death with those in pistoia and there was enormous emphasis in that about not allowing play any cloth to be imported textile industry to be stopped completely and any cloth that had come into contact with infected people would therefore be burnt or anything sort of fumigated so that was the role of cloth from textile leather goods with it were these because it is part of the problem never not because if we go back to my gentlemen so if we go back to my friend the plague priests the played priests the plague doctor he actually is wearing this costume in order to keep plague away from him swapping ill so it's actually covered completely in leather so leather is regarded as not being able to absorb any sort of these infectious seeds of disease so he's obviously got a red leather cloak coat and he's got leather shoes long boots and leather gloves and also he's got leather covering must been rather hard to his to his head and his funny little hat on the top and then obviously as you know this enormous beat which contained chubs in order to to purify the area's breathing so leather was regarded as fine fur not but cloth and and and furs were were certainly burnt whenever they quickly or certain fumigated this is so fascinating probably concludes that's a reception waiting at wait five so let's just thank Joe [Applause]