Starting in the fifteenth century, European city governments began to respond to the threat of plague by introducing quarantine measures, which presumed that risk arrived in the bodies and goods of travellers. The adoption of quarantine was long considered a milestone on the road to modern, rational public health and was linked to increased centralization and the rise of state power in the early modern period. Recent quarantine scholarship, however, is revealing a more contingent story. This paper uses surviving plague correspondence between the governments of Barcelona, Valencia, and Ciutat de Mallorca (now Palma) to uncover the chaotic practice of early quarantine in the late medieval Crown of Aragon. All three cities adopted quarantine in the later fifteenth century, but all of them also obscured their own health statuses and distrusted one another’s information about plague. Municipalities in the Crown of Aragon embraced quarantine during this period even as their correspondence thwarted cooperative plague control. The exigencies of quarantine demanded plague information in the form of fama (rumour or reputation), often linked to the behaviour of elites.

中文翻译：

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瘟疫通信、谣言和对中世纪晚期阿拉贡王冠的不信任


从 15 世纪开始，欧洲城市政府开始通过引入检疫措施来应对瘟疫的威胁，这些措施假定风险会到达旅行者的身体和物品。长期以来，检疫措施的采用一直被认为是通往现代、理性公共卫生道路上的里程碑，并与近代早期集中化的加强和国家权力的崛起有关。然而，最近的隔离奖学金揭示了一个更偶然的故事。本文利用巴塞罗那、瓦伦西亚和马略卡城（现为帕尔马）政府之间幸存的瘟疫通信，揭示了中世纪晚期阿拉贡王冠早期隔离的混乱做法。这三个城市都在 15 世纪后期采用了隔离措施，但它们也都掩盖了自己的健康状况，并且不信任彼此关于瘟疫的信息。在此期间，阿拉贡王室的市镇接受了隔离，尽管他们的通信阻碍了合作的鼠疫控制。隔离的紧迫性需要以 fama（谣言或声誉）的形式提供瘟疫信息，这些信息通常与精英的行为有关。