The Theme of the Plague in Italian Letters

Vincenzo Traversa, a United States citizen, was born and educated in Italy. He has taught Italian language and literature at UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Kansas. He holds a doctorate in English language and literature from the University of Naples and a Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures from UCLA. He is Professor Emeritus of Italian and Humanities at California State University, East Bay, where he served as chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures for thirteen years. His works include Parola e Pensiero; Idioma in Prospettiva; Frequency Dictionary of Italian Words (coauthor); Racconti di Alberto Moravia; Luigi Capuana: Critic and Novelist; The Laude in the Middle Ages (Peter Lang, 1994); Giovanni Boccaccio, Theseid of the Nuptials of Emilia (Teseida delle nozze di Emilia) (Peter Lang, 2002); Three Italian Epistolary Novels: Foscolo, De Meis, Piovene—Translations, Introductions, and Backgrounds (Peter Lang, 2005); and the complete translation into English of Natalino Sapegno’s Storia Letteraria del Trecento (A Literary History of the Fourteenth Century) (Peter Lang, 2016). The Italian government awarded him the Cross of Knight in the Order of Merit, and he was honored in the 2000 edition of Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers.

Acknowledgements – Prefatory Note: Yersinia pestis – The Plague of Athens – The Plague of Justinian – Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year; or Memorials of the Great Pestilence in London in 1665 – Introduction – The Italian Language – The Texts – The Dawning of a New Age – Milan 1630 – Giuseppe Ripamonti (1573–1643) – Ludovico Settala and Alessandro Tadino – Father Felice Casati – Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, and "Il Caffè" – Cesare Beccaria – Alessandro Manzoni: I promessi sposi – Alessandro Manzoni: Storia della Colonna Infame – Il Timor di Dio (The Fear of God) – Selected Bibliography – Index 369.