Histories of Medieval Plague in Renaissance Italy

During the sixteenth century, Italian scholars revised their conception of the field of history so that its purposes went beyond providing political and morally edifying narratives. These scholars contended that history must also account for culture and nature in an encyclopedic fashion. In the same years, numerous newly available texts from antiquity, the Byzantine empire, and the Middle Ages provided insight into the character of earlier outbreaks of plague. Italian physicians, embracing new visions of the field of history, the culture of humanism, and an inductivist epistemology, used these texts to argue that there were continuities among ancient, medieval, and Renaissance epidemics. They catalogued plague and formed historical categories based on severity and perceived origins, leading to the rejection of the conclusions of fourteenth-century western Europeans who viewed the plague of 1347-1353 as unprecedented. These erudite physicians saw medieval plague to be one example of the extreme epidemics that have regularly occurred throughout history.