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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.1 (2002) 124-125



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Book Review

Pest, Heilsangst und Frömmigkeit: Studien zur religiösen Bewältigung der Pest am Ausgang des Mittelalters


Thilo Esser. Pest, Heilsangst und Frömmigkeit: Studien zur religiösen Bewältigung der Pest am Ausgang des Mittelalters. Münsteraner Theologische Abhandlungen, no. 58. Altenberge, Germany: Oros Verlag, 1999. 467 pp. Ill. DM 80.00 (paperbound, 3-89375-174-2).

In this theological dissertation Thilo Esser addresses the relatively unresearched topic of German late medieval religious attitudes toward and strategies for coping with plague. The church viewed plague as a divine punishment for sinners, and therefore it was essential to pray to God for help. Prayerful activity could be either collective or individual, and these two aspects form major sections of Esser's book.

In his first chapter, Esser discusses the different forms of plague-masses. Some were votive masses to individual saints, such as Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch, in which the main content was invocation of the saints' merits. Others related historical plague miracles, emphasizing the purity of those who had effected miraculous cures. God's pity, the miracles of Christ, and the merits of pious Christians are all referred to in the texts of the masses.

A second type of collective piety was the formation of confraternities, founded in large numbers in the plague years. The focus of a confraternity could be an actual occurrence of plague, or a saint whose protection was sought. Esser has studied the groups' statutes, which detail, in addition to rules and organization, the foundation of many plague-masses.

Esser then examines individual piety as evidenced by prayerbooks. He has performed a useful service by transcribing the texts of various prayers from manuscript sources, and has found, interestingly, that Saints Ann and Ursula were among those invoked as plague-saints. In his fourth chapter Esser analyzes plague-related woodcut illustrations, providing interesting details of the symbolism and provenance of such images as the plague-arrows or God's sword. He also [End Page 124] analyzes the texts on these woodcuts, and their relation to the pictures; both, he finds, like the texts of the plague-masses, reveal a very concrete hope for help and a belief in an effective interchange between the praying person and God.

In his conclusion, Esser suggests that late medieval plague-inspired piety was largely an intensification of earlier forms. New, however, was the use of religious woodcuts, which could reach a wider social range than could prayerbooks, owned by the privileged few.

The book is a useful compendium of (mainly southern) German late medieval plague-piety. Esser has constructed his corps of sources mainly from printed catalogs, examining wherever possible the manuscripts listed therein. Because his interest is in the pattern of piety, he is concerned with neither numbers nor representativity. This leaves the social historian somewhat frustrated: with no information provided as to the number of manuscripts actually studied, or the frequency of occurrence of specific images or texts, it is difficult to evaluate the impact of Esser's neatly described plague-piety. It is even more regrettable that he has not gone much beyond the traditional enumeration of religious images. If he had ventured into the advanced history of art and Reformation studies, he would have discovered, for example, the work of B. Scribner and others who have investigated the difference between prescriptive texts and (popular) practice. Nevertheless, he has given us a useful guide to the sources of plague-piety (printed in the appendix, as are many woodcuts) and to late medieval plague-related imagery.

 



Martin Dinges
Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation
Stuttgart

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