Perhaps it stems from having more time on one’s hands, or from a desire to look back to more certain and carefree days, but lately I’ve found my thoughts drifting back to my years as a Modern Languages undergraduate. More specifically, to my second year – a fabulously easygoing time for any linguist. The dreaded Prelims of the first year were over, and the enticing prospect of a third year abroad – in my case, in Paris and Venice – beckoned. I was living with five friends off the Cowley Road in Oxford, and, in my memory at least, every evening comprised a houseparty in one of the dank surrounding Victorian terraces, dipping plastic cups into binfuls of cheap cocktails as we danced along to Angels or Brimful of Asha.
But it’s not just nostalgia for the social life of 1997 that’s been playing on my mind. It’s memories of the literature I studied that year, and the curiously prescient echoes it has of the current pandemic. This first began to make itself known last Spring, when Covid was tearing through Northern Italy, but was yet to make itself fully felt in England. As I received alarming text messages from friends in Milan, and saw those dreadful reports on the news, I began to remember a novel called I Promessi Sposi with a clarity I hadn’t felt in decades.
Published in 1827, but set in the first half of the seventeenth century, I Promessi Sposi – or The Betrothed – is a canonical text in Italy, the country’s first great novel. It’s not that well known in England, which is perhaps unsurprising given the embarrassment of riches we have when it comes to nineteenth-century novelists. For us to know all about The Betrothed would be as improbable as Italians studying the English Renaissance when they had Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian to choose from. Anyway, the book was, as I recall, an enjoyable Romantic read, but it only became truly gripping when it reached a section that dealt with the spread of plague in Milan in 1630. At this point, the author, Alessandro Manzoni, allows himself to pull away from the plight of his two main characters, Renzo and Lucia, to describe in meticulous detail the affect that the Plague had on the everyday people of the city – the panic, the heroism, the terrible rumours. One aspect that kept coming back to me concerned a mythical group of people known as untori, or ‘anointers’. These villains were said to be sneaking around Milan smearing droplets of plague onto people and public places, so spreading the disease. If the cry went up that you were an untore, and fingers were pointed, you were likely to be chased down, and torn limb from limb by the mob. Super-spreaders beware.
This year, my mind has been turning more to a French author I studied alongside Manzoni – Voltaire. In his Lettres Philosophiques (1733), Voltaire describes life in England in order to shine a critical light on what was going on at the time in France. As is to be expected, he finds himself as unable to resist mocking the English as everyone else he writes about, but one figure he touches upon receives nothing but unalloyed praise – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Whilst living in Constantinople as the wife of an English diplomat, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu witnessed the practice of Turkish women taking pus from a smallpox blister and introducing it to the scratched skin of an uninfected person. Having developed such faith in this early form of vaccination that she had her son inoculated in Turkey, Wortley Montagu had the same physician carry out the procedure on her daughter when she and her family moved back to London. This operation, performed in April 1721, was a huge and highly publicised success, laying the foundations for the enthusiastic embrace of vaccination that the English have shown ever since. Why, Voltaire laments in his Lettres, can the French not follow the English example? Plus ςa change.
As to where this unexpected university nostalgia will drift next, I’m not sure. In the last year of my course, the syllabus moved to Dante’s Inferno. Hopefully, the grislier details of that particular text will remain clouded in the mists of memory…
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