Abstract
For some European Christians, like Gabriele de Mussis (Document 23), the extraordinary mortality of the Black Death was proof of the righteous judgment of God visited upon a sinful humanity—the clergy, chief among them—which inevitably invited intimations of a coming apocalypse or reign of the Antichrist. But even Mussis, who does not doubt that God’s vengeance is just, seems so overwhelmed by the plague that he begins to despair of God’s mercy. As we have seen, others, like Petrarch (Document 15), could not understand why humankind deserved such awful punishment and began to question whether God even played a role in their lives. Overall, however, the predominant response seems to have been to seek solace and hope in the prayers and processions led by bishops and the clergy. Christians directed religious appeals to God and to saints especially known for their mercy or power against the plague, such as the Virgin Mary, St. Sebastian, St. Anthony, and St. Roch. Many also resorted to local saint cults, such as the Virgin Agatha of Catania in Sicily (Document 24), or the newly established shrine of St. Thomas Cantilupe in Hereford, England.1
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Notes
John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2000), 125, 272.
Richard Gyug, “The Effects and Extent of the Black Death of 1348: New Evidence for Clerical Mortality in Barcelona,” Mediaeval Studies, 45 (1983): 391.
R. N. Swanson, “Standard of Livings: Parochial Revenues in Pre-Reformation England,” in Religious Belief and Ecclesiastical Careers in Late Medieval England, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1991), 151–96.
Samuel K. Cohn Jr., The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); idem, “The Place of the Dead in Flanders and Tuscany: Towards a Comparative History of the Black Death,” in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. B. Gordon and P. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17–43.
Michael W. Dols, “The Comparative Communal Responses to the Black Death,” Viator, 5 (1974): 284–85; idem, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 296–97.
Matteo Villani, Cronica, ed. Giuseppe Porta, 2 vols. (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1995), 1:12.
Karl Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,” Archiv fçr Geschichte der Medizin, 11 (1919): 44–47.
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Aberth, J. (2005). Religious Mentalities. In: The Black Death. The Bedford Series in History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10349-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10349-9_6
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