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The Pandemic Origins of Child Baptism

By Francesco Arduini

Pandemics can influence and radically alter habits and practices of entire populations. Billions of people have personally tested this phenomenon during the current Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis. History knows numerous signs of behavioral practice changes that can be attributed to pandemics, such as the bubonic plague that devastated medieval Europe in the mid-14th century, upsetting many sectors of civil life, or the pestilence that ravaged the Byzantine Empire during the reign of Justinian (mid-sixth century C.E.), even forcing the Goths and the Byzantines to suspend the war fought on the Apennine Peninsula. Like other catastrophes, pandemics can be […]

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Footnotes

1. Sarah K. Yeomans, Classical Corner: “Pandemics in Perspective,” BAR, Fall 2020.

2. Sarah K. Yeomans, Classical Corner: “The Antonine Plague and the Spread of Christianity,” BAR, March/April 2017.

Endnotes

1.
For more, see Francesco Arduini, Il battesimo dei bambini (Rome: Aracne Editrice, 2010).

2.
Elio Lo Cascio, “Fra equilibrio e crisi,” in Storia di Roma, vol. 2.2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), p. 710.

3.
Christer Bruun, “La mancanza di prove di un effetto catastrofico della ‘peste antonina’ (dal 166 d.C. in poi),” in E. Lo Cascio, ed., L’Impatto della “Peste Antonina” (Bari: Edipuglia, 2012), p. 133.