Narrativity and the discourse of risk in Muratori’s Del governo della peste (1714, 1721) and Defoe’s Due Preparations for the Plague (1722)

This paper sets out to investigate the porous and overlapping boundaries of history, public government, conduct and narrative in two important tracts which, though from different cultural and religious perspectives, attempt to respond to the same factual and discursive occasion (the famous plague outbreaks in Central Europe in1713 and in Marseille, 1720-1722, and the continuing threat of catastrophic epidemic contagion across a continent which appeared to be increasingly interconnected). While these texts are not directly related to each other, they share (and resist) a common background of eighteenth-century popularized discourses and fantasies about the causes, spread and cure of pandemics. More importantly, from the point of view of rhetorical structure and genre, they articulate a common concern for issues of prescription and pre-caution, and for mapping out ethical and civic imaginaries of the well-ordered and disordered city (and defining the place of the individual within their moral economies). Both tracts, moreover, investigate the role of the private and collective imagination in shaping official and popular narratives of the plague, and devote distinct sections to advice and provisions addressing the “due preparation of the soul” (even though they again differ, respectively, in their catholic and non-conformist frames of reference and inspiration). Focusing on discursive strategies, metaphorical aspects and close reading of selected passages, my analysis attempts to outline the inherent narrativity of Muratori’s and Defoe’s treatises on the plague and their contribution to the development of compelling approaches to imagining and describing the real.