Illness, Metaphor, and Bells
Campanology under COVID-19
in Historical Reflections/Réflexions HistoriquesSearch for other papers by Remi Chiu in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
All currencies in US Dollar
Abstract
Throughout 2020 and 2021, bells have rung in a variety of COVID-related rituals in the West, ranging from large-scale religious and civic rites, to ad hoc neighborhood and hospital initiatives, to anti-racist memorials that simultaneously spoke to the health crisis at hand. Taking stock of how these COVID bell-ringing rituals were formalized, their structures and actions, and the historical precedents from which they drew their meanings, this article investigates what the sounds of bells and the rituals of bell-ringing communicated about COVID, how they shaped our personal and collective experiences of the crisis, and what functions they were expected to serve during this liminal period. It reveals how, owing to the historical polysemy of bells on the one hand and the social uncertainties of living with COVID on the other, those rituals generated vivid symbolisms and mobilized powerful emotions that sometimes brought about unintended consequences.
Contributor Notes
Remi Chiu is Associate Professor of Musicology at Loyola University Maryland, a specialist in Renaissance music and the historical intersections between music and medicine. He is the author of Plague and Music in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and the editor of a companion volume of Renaissance plague polyphony entitled Songs in Times of Plague (A-R Editions, 2020). In addition to epidemic disease, he also studies the use of music in medical and scientific entertainments at the end of the nineteenth century. Email: rchiu@loyola.edu