Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque (review)

This volume, the proceedings of a conference held at Holy Cross College in 2005, contains several valuable and well-researched essays. The collection as a whole, however, is disjointed and begins with false pretenses. The essays fail to find common ground even within the volume's title. Not all of the essays regard plague (or at least bubonic plague). William Eamon's essay "The Canker Friar" regards a charlatan who sells remedies for pox or mal francese and encounters troubles from the Venetian inquisition in the 1560s, and Franco Mormando's close analysis of Michael Sweerts's Plague in an Ancient City concerns a period in mid-seventeenth-century Rome when there were no plagues and refers to a possibly apocryphal disease of an unknown sort in 361–63 A.D. that God inflicted on the apostasy of Emperor Julian.

Much more problematic is the first term of the title, "piety." Most of these essays hardly mention the word and at best concern it only obliquely. Only one contribution confronts this theme head-on, Ronald Rittgers's "Protestants and Plague." Rittgers examines plagues in sixteenth-century Nürnberg to gauge what difference Reformation theology and piety made when burghers no longer had recourse responses to the intercession of plague saints. Through the analysis of the city's plague tracts written by clergymen, burgher letters, and a poem by the shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs, Rittgers argues convincingly that Nürnberg made a smooth transition from plagues with Catholic forms of consolation to the new Protestant piety and psychology that left the burgher "standing alone before God" (p. 151).

So what then fills this miscellaneous collection? First, art historical analysis—imagery, iconography, and the contextualization of individual paintings—predominates, composing five of the nine chapters. In terms of space, this predominance is more pronounced. Two essays examine single works of art alone—Elizabeth Hipp's on Poussin's The Plague at Ashod and Franco Mormando's on Sweerts's Plague in an Ancient City—filling 40 percent of the volume's pages. Others, such as Anthony Kaldellis's and Thomas Worcester's, examine sources—the first, the principal histories of the Justinianic plague, and the second, three plague treatises of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Etienne Binet.

Furthermore, the volume begins with the misleading claim that heretofore plague scholarship has focused on "the political, economic, demographic, and medical aspects" to the neglect of the "religious, cultural, and psychological" (p. xi). This assertion shows scant knowledge of the trends in the historiography, failing to register major debates and interpretations such as the works of Jean Delumeau, his students, and others on the history of fear and plague or notions of civic Christianity and plague that have so shaped Italian scholarship of the later Middle Ages of the last thirty years.

Finally, the volume shows little editorial control or intellectual interaction among the authors. The first of two examples is "Mice, Arrows, and Tumors," in which Pamela Berger argues that those in the Middle Ages saw a connection between rats and plague. Her evidence, however, comes exclusively from twelfth- and thirteenth-century representations of the Plague of Ashod (1 Samuel 5–6). She argues that these "reflect the concerns of day" (p. 31). But what concerns? What plagues? Curiously, once the Black Death arrives, the visual and narrative works she describes shift from rats to contagion spread by sight and air, represented by arrows. She never explains why rats would suddenly yield ground to these more abstract representations of contagion with the appearance of the bubonic plague. Moreover, the examples she cites of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century depictions of rats in plague gainsay any knowledge of bubonic plague, at least of the Yersinia pestis variety. Instead of rats represented as sick or dead, they are very much alive, aggressively attacking victims, biting their most secret parts. As Elisabeth...