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On June 25, the Acad茅mie Fran莽aise announced its . The American University of Paris is thrilled to report that聽Professor Brenton Hobart of the Department of Comparative Literature and English has been awarded the Prix Monseigneur Marcel for best book in the field of history of philosophy for his book La Peste 脿 la Renaissance. L鈥檌maginaire d鈥檜n fl茅au dans la litt茅rature au XVIe si猫cle (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2020). 鈥淚鈥檓 simply stunned,鈥� says Hobart. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like winning an Oscar in my field. To win such a prestigious prize, recognizing a work, in French, dedicated to history and sociology, is all the more humbling.鈥�

Hobart explains that historians often deal with writing on the Black Plague by exposing scientific documentation such as evidence of mass graves, bacterial infections, reports of suddenly deserted towns or death registers kept by church parishes, as well as comparative narratives written by medieval and early-modern chroniclers. 鈥淭o reproduce historical attitudes of people faced with the plague, historians necessarily rely on the latter of these examples鈥�鈥� the written word鈥�鈥� including plague narratives in works of literature,鈥� says Hobart. La Peste 脿 la Renaissance looks at the mobility of clich茅s in historical and literary plague narratives to prove that our historical understanding of the disease is still today, to a large extent, based on a codified鈥痩iterary genre. 鈥淭his fictional account of the disease, rehashed time and again over the course of the past three thousand years, necessarily ignores other, most likely more pertinent, facts.鈥�

Such accounts may also influence how humans carry themselves in times of contagion. 鈥淯ndoubtedly the same thing is happening right now with Covid-19,鈥� says Hobart. He notes that journalists reporting on the disease, as well as fiction writers currently producing Covid-related works, are necessarily relying on the written word of others, likely more than their own objective worldviews. 鈥淲e have an innumerable quantity of media from which we gather our information,鈥� he explains. 鈥淚f we were to take a good look at the content of these diverse, global sources, we鈥檇 probably recognize common traits, or clich茅s, which draw on an astoundingly limited corpus.鈥�