«C’era, del resto, un certo numero di persone non ancora persuase che questa peste ci fosse». Credulità, incredulità, superstizioni e pratiche di governo nei Promessi sposi e nella Colonna infame

The essay develops in two distinct but connected sections: the first part reflects on two keywords such as consent and dissent, based on a comparison between the seventeenth-century story of the Milanese plague and the connected trial of the so-called infectors and the scenario that materialized in two years of the Covid 19 pandemic. The instrument of this comparison are on the one hand Manzoni’s writings, on the other the interventions of Giorgio Agamben, whose thought represented the most systematic and radical polemical response to the phenomenon of the political-health emergency. In the second part, the essay discusses the most recent acquisitions of Manzoni’s philology, especially at the hands of G. Raboni and the team of the Manzonionline project, and a hermeneutic critical path of the author, who instead favors the overall interpretation of Manzoni’s long parable as a reflection around the functioning mechanisms of society, of power, and of the masses in the presence of emergencies, whether they are sanitary such as the plague, or political such as revolutions.