The Early Modern Travel Pass: Controlling the Plague and Jewish Mobility in 16th Century Tuscany

August 2, 2021 - August 3, 2021, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

In the wake of the Black Death, governments in the Italian states began to enlarge their departments of health and sanitation in an effort to control the plague. Over time they experimented by banning travel to and from suspect regions and quarantining merchants’ goods. Italian Jews, heavily invested in local and regional commerce, were among the merchants affected, attracting the attention of the authorities.

Join Dr. Stefanie Siegmund to look at the flow of information within government agencies to see how licensing developed by the Florentine government as tools for the control of plague, of criminals, and of residents of the Florentine ghetto, and how these instruments led directly to the forms of identification we use today: passports, visas, and—perhaps—vaccination cards.

If you have previously registered for another session in this series, your registration admits you to all sessions in the series, and you may attend as many as you’d like.