YLMS: Abigail Agresta (George Washington University) “Plague Fama and Quarantine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon”

Abigail Agresta specializes in medieval European and Mediterranean history, with an emphasis on environmental history, urban history, and history of public health in late medieval Spain. Her first monograph, The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Cornell University Press, 2022) investigates how the rulers of a religiously mixed society–the city of Valencia, Spain–understood the relationship between God, human beings, and the natural world. It argues that the city government moved from a fairly technocratic approach to environmental crisis in the late fourteenth century to a primarily religious one by the mid-fifteenth, and that this shift reflected the city’s changing relationship with its own Christianity and its crusading past. The book received the European Society for Environmental History’s Turku Book Award for best book in environmental history and was a finalist for the American Society for Environmental History’s 2023 George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history. Dr. Agresta has also published peer-reviewed articles in Speculum, Journal of Medieval History, and Viator. Her current book project is tentatively titled The Rise of Quarantine in Late Medieval Spain. Stay tuned for an article in Past & Present in 2025 related to the research for her YLMS talk entitled “Plague Fama and Quarantine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon”.

 

Her talk at YLMS is entitled ”Plague Fama and Quarantine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon.” It will be part of Prof. Agresta’s current book project, on the adoption of quarantine in the late medieval Crown of Aragon, and she’ll be talking more specifically about plague correspondence–letters about plague and how municipal governments used them to mislead one another.

 

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