Warsaw Late Antique seminar 28 V 20206: Kristina Sessa (Ohio State University), Disaster at Scale: Experiencing Ruinous Events in Late Antiquity

This talk examines how men, women, and children in Late Antiquity responded to the material, social, and cultural contingencies of disasters on different scales of time, space, and social organization.  Using Gregory of Tours’ accounts of the 571 Clermont plague outbreak as a case study,  I’ll argue that Gregory worked with inherited scripts and motifs, which complicate how we interpret his accounts, and when taken seriously, shed light on how he understood disaster. I’ll then switch gears to investigate what Gregory’s disaster writing tells us about the social burdens of survival on the levels of the household and individual by looking at different experiences of displacement, a documented phenomenon that’s received limited attention from scholars. I’ll end with a brief discussion of plague’s complex disease ecology by presenting a case of comorbidity – a scale of disaster that Gregory couldn’t see but that science-forward research helps us understand as a contributing stressor.