Piety and Plague

From antiquity until the early eighteenth century, plague was a recurring fact of European life, and every outbreak forced people to ask what it meant and what they could do about it. Much of the scholarship has followed the politics, economics, demography and medicine of epidemic disease. This interdisciplinary volume turns instead to faith and the mind: how Europeans prayed, feared, interpreted and endured, across many centuries and a wide geography that reaches east to Byzantium.

The research draws closely on primary sources, both printed and painted, so devotional images sit alongside texts as evidence of how communities answered catastrophe. Generous references point onward to the key secondary literature. Part of the Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies series, it suits historians of religion, medicine and art, and anyone curious how belief shaped the response to disaster.