The devil in the sheaves: Ergotism in Southern Italy
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Alessandro Tarsia
Alessandro Tarsia (b. 1978) is an independent scholar 〈alextarsia@gmail.com 〉. His research interests include historical anthropology, philosophy, and classical archeology.
Abstract
Ergotism was a terrible plague in southern Italy in the second millenium, especially in the regions of Basilicata and Calabria, and yet, there is a serious lack of scholarship on the subject. In the absence of multidisciplinary studies, some scholars deny that ergotism even existed historically in these regions. The scarcity of original sources and the abundance of indirect evidence and clues call for an adductive, multidisciplinary method of investigation. This article is divided into three sections. The first part provides a medical-pharmacological explanation of the causes and effects of the disease; the second analyzes the agriculture and diet in southern Italy, highlighting the extremely favorable conditions for the pathology as well as describing local traditions. The last section explores the magical-religious implications of the cult of Saint Anthony Abbot, thaumaturge of plants, animals, and men, divinity par excellence of ergotism, whose votive offerings outnumbered those of all other saints in southern Italy for centuries. With the demise of the Order of Saint Anthony, other autochthonous saints began fulfilling the same functions, demonstrating that ergotism continued to be a serious problem into the eighteenth century.
About the author
Alessandro Tarsia (b. 1978) is an independent scholar 〈alextarsia@gmail.com〉. His research interests include historical anthropology, philosophy, and classical archeology.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Qu'est-ce qu'une fiction cubiste ? La “construction textuelle du point de vue” dans L'Herbe et La Route des Flandres
- Lostology: Transmedia storytelling and expansion/compression strategies
- Semiotics at the crossroads of art
- Semioethics and translation as communication in and across genres
- Shakespeare's first sonnet: Reading through repetitions
- Visual grammar in practice: Negotiating the arrangement of speech bubbles in storyboards
- Semiotics and Knowledge Management (KM): A theoretical and empirical approach
- The analysis of Licheń's Holy Icon as a case study in semiotic fortition
- Types of dialogue: Echo, deaf, and dialectical
- Borges and the construction of “reality”
- Advanced literacy and the place of literary semantics in secondary education: A tool of fictional analysis
- Peirce, Leibniz, and the threshold of pragmatism
- The devil in the sheaves: Ergotism in Southern Italy
- Biosemiotic scenarios
- Reflecting on human language through computer languages
