Sie eens ‘t verzwakte volk’: De bestrijding van pest in Antwerpen tijdens de vijftiende en de zestiende eeuw

This article sets out, by using city ordinances from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, to explore how the Antwerp authorities developed a policy against epidemic disease through the piecemeal absorption of the growing concept of contagion. As a result, this policy converged with the attempts to fight stink and waste in the public domain. A growing awareness of the necessity for functional interventions yielded an increasingly pragmatic and preventive action in the public and, in the end, the private domain. The core of the measures involved consisted of the detection, branding, and isolation of contaminated people. Lacking the managerial capacity for a repressive policy, the local magistrates adopted moralizing strategies of social control in order to subject principally the poor and indigent to these measures. At the same time, they took measures to safeguard the economic interests of the city.