Our Activities
Presentation of the book “History in times of pandemic”
La Historia en tiempos de pandemia is an initiative of the Órdenes Españolas Foundation and the Villacisneros Foundation, which has been published by La Esfera de los Libros. In it, a dozen prestigious Spanish historians reflect on and analyze, with sharpness and precision, the health crises that have plagued humanity, to find out how the societies of the past dealt with those terrible episodes, how they can help us to understand everything that has happened in recent times, and what possible consequences the epidemic of COVID-19 will have on our way of life.
The work was presented in Madrid on October 26, 2021 at the Abante Auditorium, in a well-attended event, which was presented by H.R.H. Don Pedro de Borbón Dos Sicilias, Duke of Calabria, and Don Íñigo Gómez-Pineda, presidents of the Órdenes Españolas Foundation and the Villacisneros Foundation, respectively. During the event, a round table discussion was held with three of the co-authors, the academicians of the Royal Academy of History Vicente Pérez and Francisco Javier Puerto, and Alfredo Alvar, research professor at the CSIC, moderated by the journalist and writer Ramón Pérez-Maura, who stressed that “this is a book with a great journalistic spirit, especially for how it takes advantage of the knowledge of those who know the most to help us understand events of the past and their importance today”.
In La Historia en tiempos de pandemia Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, José Luis Beltrán Moya, Fernando García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, Luis A. García Moreno, Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, Hugo O’Donnell y Duque de Estrada, Magdalena de Pazzis Pi Corrales, Vicente Pérez Moreda, Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, Luis Ribot García, Gabriel Tortella Casares and Enriqueta Vila Vilar answer four general questions and two issues specific to their specialty.
“The characters who sign the texts are relevant, they combine very solid knowledge and almost all of them are teaching professionals, the best assets to illustrate what pandemics have been in the course of time, how they punished men at each moment and what were the consequences derived from them. […] This is the origin of the texts that are now presented and that fulfill the sentence that knowledge helps us to live”.
From the prologue of Órdenes Españolas Foundation
“History is an excellent mirror in which to look at ourselves. There is no one better to act as cicerones of this journey through history than those who have dedicated their lives to studying it. Historians must be the ones who, regardless of all political fickleness, show us what our past was like and what lessons we can draw from it”.
From the prologue of the Villacisneros Foundation.
