Oana Sorescu-Iudean, Luminiţa Dumănescu
A Series of Standardized Datasets of the “Protocol of Plague Deaths” from Hermannstadt, 1738-1739
Oana Sorescu-Iudean, Luminiţa Dumănescu
Article Information
Pages: 5-20
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24193/RJPS.2025.1.01
Oana Sorescu-Iudean*, Luminița Dumănescu**
* Babeş-Bolyai University, Centre for Population Studies, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, oana.sorescu-iudean@ubbcluj.ro
** Babeş-Bolyai University, Centre for Population Studies, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, luminita.dumanescu@ubbcluj.ro
Abstract. As opposed to Western Europe, in East-Central/Southeastern Europe the plague still raged throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The 1738-1739 plague, which hit the Southeastern provinces of the Habsburg Empire, was instrumental in designing and implementing successful quarantine measures to prevent the ulterior spread of this disease from Ottoman territories during wartime. Nevertheless, very little quantitative substantial work on the impact of plague in these areas has been carried out, owing to inaccessibility of archival sources, limited information concerning population numbers, and the dearth of fundamental data-driven research aiming at creating datasets suitable for wide-scale, comparative research. The current paper seeks to remedy this gap by describing the creation and contribution of a dataset stemming from a historical plague register, kept by the urban authorities of the city of Hermannstadt/Sibiu, between 1738 and 1739. This source chronicled all deaths due to plague which occurred in the city, providing detailed social-economic information at individual, household, and neighborhood level. Standardized datasets were created to enable analysis of plague events recorded per household, as well as individual deaths, and were deposited on the public repository Zenodo.
Keywords: plague, eighteenth century, urban history, historical epidemics, demographic impact of epidemics
Primary sources – archival material
Sibiu County Branch of the Romanian National Archives, Fund Colecția de acte fasciculare (1290-1968), Subsection H- Sănătate (1530-1891), Record no. 54, Pest Protocol ab Anno 1738 den 21sten Juny
Secondary literature
Alfani, G., Bonetti, M., Fochesatto, M. (2023). “Pandemics and socio-economic status. Evidence from the plague of 1630 in northern Italy”. Population Studies: A Journal of Demography 78(1): 21-42.
Bailey, M. (2021). After the Black Death. Economy, Society, and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cohn, S. & Alfani, G. (2007). “Households and the Plague in Early Modern Italy”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38(2): 177-205.
Grigoruță, S. (2017). Boli, epidemii şi asistenţă medicală în Moldova (1700-1831). Iaşi: Editura Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”.
Lenghel, A. (1930). Istoricul ciumei la Cluj la 1738/39 [The history of plague in Cluj, 1738–39] Cluj-Napoca: Tipografia “Corvin”.
Muurling, S., Riswick, T., Buzasi, K. (2023). “The Last Nationwide Smallpox Epidemic in the Netherlands: Infectious Disease and Social Inequalities in Amsterdam, 1870-1872”. Social Science History 47(2): 189-216.
Sorescu-Iudean, O. (2020). “Dividing Society, Dividing Estates: Probate and Will-Making in Hermannstadt, 1720–1800: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Perspective” (PhD dissertation). Regensburg: University of Regensburg)
Sorescu-Iudean, O. (2025). “Keeping the City Alive: Managing Public Health Crises in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century in Sibiu”. In Pakucs M., Derzsi J. (Eds). Towns between Empires: Good Governance and “Police” in Case Studies from Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia, 1500s–1800s, Budapest-Vienna-New York: Central European University Press, pp. 227-246.