Giovanni of Capestrano on the Plague and the Doctors

Abstract

In her authoritative collection of contemporary sources on the Black Death, Rosemary Horrox subdivided the part dedicated to ‘explanations and responses’ in three sections: ‘The religious response’, ‘Scientific explanation’, and ‘Human agency’.2 Even if there are overlaps between these categories, they offer explicit or implicit explanations of pestilence and suggest adequate responses to it in different terms. Documents in the first are centered on God’s anger and punishment for human sins, those in the second on natural mechanisms not immediately dependent on God’s will, while those in the third on alleged conspiracies and secret machinations of the Jews (and, in one case, the urban poor). If we look at the relationship between content and genre in this rich and balanced selection of texts from different geographical areas and social milieus, we find an interesting discrepancy. It is not a mistake in the editor’s careful work but, most probably, a characteristic of the available source material itself or, perhaps, even of late medieval expectations and intentions behind that. The discrepancy is this: while scientific explanations had their own genre, the plague tract, that was largely born with the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century,3 there was virtually no genre or sub-genre