Quarantine as cloister: "'experienced populations,' well-organized institutional responses, . . . [integrally] resourceful strategies for survival"

Times of Israel

"One of the chapters of [St. Charles Borromeo’s] Constitutiones [et decreta de cura pestilentiae] is devoted to spiritual activities in public administrative spaces and closed-up homes.  In it, the clergy are told to prepare each household for the devotional activities devised for the extraordinary circumstances by teaching them a variety of prayers, litanies, and Psalms ahead of the quarantine.  During the quarantine, bells across the parish were to be rung seven times a day, approximately every two hours, to call the households to prayer.  Once begun, the bell would be rung again every quarter hour, until the fourth bell signals an end to the hour of prayer.  While the bell rings,

Litanies or supplications will be chanted or recited at the direction of the Bishop.  This will be performed in such a way that one group sings from the windows or the doors of their homes, and then another group sings and responds in turn.

To ensure that these prayers are carried out properly, the decree continues, a member of the clergy or someone trained in these prayers (possibly the head of the household) should also come to a window or door at the appointed times to direct the prayers and stir up enthusiasm for this devotion. . . .

     "Borromeo’s directive to sing at doors and windows was evidently put into practice and impressed a number of chroniclers.  In his Relatione verissima, Paolo Bisciola reports:

[W]hen the plague began to grow, this practice [of singing litanies in public [procession]] was interrupted, so as not to allow the congregations to provide [the plague with] more fuel.  The orations did not stop, however, because each person stood in his house at the window or door and made them from there. . . .  Just think, in walking around Milan, one heard nothing but song, veneration of God, and supplication to the saints, such that one almost wished for these tribulations to last longer.

. . . 

It was a sight to see, when all the inhabitants of this populous city, numbering little short of three hundred thousand souls, united to praise God at one and the same time, sending up together an harmonious voice of supplication for deliverance from their distress.  Milan might at this time have been not unfitly compared to a cloister of religious of both sexes serving God in the inclosure [sic] of their cells, an image of the heavenly Jerusalem filled with the praises of the angelic hosts.

     "We can imagine the astonishment of these chroniclers, hearing the disembodied voices emerging from isolated homes all around, aggregating and blanketing an entire parish in song. . . . .

". . . As Randolph Starn writes, 'the chronic presence of disease suggests that we should not think of medieval and early modern societies as caught in the grip of plague-year panics or as waiting passively to be delivered by [the] modern medicine [of the future].  The newer accounts [of plague history] speak of "experienced populations," of well-organized institutional responses, of resourceful strategies for survival'."

     Remi Chiu, “Singing on the street and in the home in times of pestilence:  lessons from the 1576-78 plague of Milan,” in Domestic devotions in early modern Italy, ed. Maya Corry, Marco Faini,and Alessia Meneghin (Leiden:  Brill, 2018), 38-39, 42-43 (27-44).