How to End an Epidemic: The Politics of Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Cádiz

Abstract This article analyzes the poems gathered and published by Ignacio de Saavedra, public prosecutor of the city of Cádiz, that participated in the festivity of plague’s remission in 1681. It argues the poetic and iconographic project of the volume aims to influence the perceptions of the political management of epidemics in the eyes of local survivors. In so doing, plague poetry reinstated the social and political order temporarily upended by plague and gave the city a sense of pride and identity.