Piety And Plague

Plague was one of the enduring facts of everyday life on the European continent, from earliest antiquity through the first decades of the eighteenth century. It represents one of the most important influences on the development of Europe’s society and culture. In order to understand the changing circumstances of the political, economic, ecclesiastical, artistic, and social history of that continent, it is important to understand epidemic disease and society’s response to it. To date, the largest portion of scholarship about plague has focused on its political, economic, demographic, and medical aspects. This interdisciplinary volume offers greater coverage of the religious and the psychological dimensions of plague and of European society’s response to it through many centuries and over a wide geographical terrain, including Byzantium. This research draws extensively upon a wealth of primary sources, both printed and painted, and includes ample bibliographical reference to the most important secondary sources, providing much new insight into how generations of Europeans responded to this dread disease.

"This book traces the late medieval rise of Santa Maria di Loreto, a wealthy and powerful Marian shrine in central Italy. Devotees venerated the shrine as an emotional response to multiple plagues, leading to the site's cooptation by the papacy in the fifteenth century"--

Bubonic Plague was an ongoing epidemic that sickened and killed many in Europe and beyond beginning in the mid-fourteenth century and continuing in the days of Martin Luther's sixteenth-century Germany. The pneumonic form of the disease was particularly dangerous because it entered the lungs and was spread by coughing. When this happened the fatality rate was nearly 100%. Martin Luther's treatise on whether one may flee when plague strikes was prompted by a request from the clergy of Breslau, who wondered whether a Christian could flee home and labors on account of the plague. Luther's pragmatic response focused on a Christian's responsibility to care for the sick and to use the means God gives to limit the plague's destruction. He lauded those who can face the plague without fear of death, but he emphasized that those with "weak faith" can flee in good conscience as long as they are not needed to care for someone or to maintain a public service. Luther used the occasion for the treatise to talk about the need for hospitals and public cemeteries outside the city center. Anna Marie Johnson introduces Luther's treatise and provides insightful annotations to help the reader understand Luther's text and his sixteenth century context. The parallels to the recent Covid pandemic and other epidemic diseases are striking. Though science and medicine have advanced greatly today, questions of ethical responsibilities are still with us, and Christians continue to wonder what faithful responses to pandemic should be.

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"A dramatic and highly interesting story--one that brings to life the complexities of plague and of piety."--Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University

In 1705-1706, during the War of the Spanish Succession and two years after a devastating earthquake, an ’epidemic’ of mysterious sudden deaths terrorized Rome. In early modern society, a sudden death was perceived as a mala mors because it threatened the victim’s salvation by hindering repentance and last confession. Special masses were celebrated to implore God’s clemency and Pope Clement XI ordered his personal physician, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, to perform a series of dissections in the university anatomical theatre in order to discover the 'true causes' of the deadly events. It was the first investigation of this kind ever to take place for a condition which was not contagious. The book that Lancisi published on this topic, De subitaneis mortibus (’On Sudden Deaths’, 1707), is one of the earliest modern scientific investigations of death; it was not only an accomplished example of mechanical philosophy as applied to the life sciences in eighteenth-century Europe, but also heralded a new pathological anatomy (traditionally associated with Giambattista Morgagni). Moreover, Lancisi’s tract and the whole affair of the sudden deaths in Rome marked a significant break in the traditional attitude towards dying, introducing a more active approach that would later develop into the practice of resuscitation medicine. Sudden Death explores how a new scientific interpretation of death and a new attitude towards dying first came into being, breaking free from the Hippocratic tradition, which regarded death as the obvious limit of physician’s capacity, and leading the way to a belief in the 'conquest of death' by medicine which remains in force to this day.

News in Early Modern Europe presents new research on the nature, production, and dissemination of a variety of forms of news writing from across Europe during the early modern period.

Since the late fourteenth century, European artists created an extensive body of images, in paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and other media, about the horrors of disease and death, as well as hope and salvation. This interdisciplinary study on disease in metaphysical context is the first general overview of plague art written from an art-historical standpoint. The book selects masterpieces created by Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Poussin, and includes minor works dating from the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. It highlights the most important innovative artistic works that originated during the Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. This study of the changing iconographic patterns and their iconological interpretations opens a window to the past.