CHAPTER 2
MEDIEVAL PLAGUE ICONOGRAPHY NORTH OF THE ALPS
Pamela Berger
In the twenty-first century, the fear of plague has once again become an issue of global dimension. The iconographic symbol of the current plague is the bird, traditionally symbolic in Western art of God bringing humankind to safety, as in the story of Noah, or the Holy Spirit. The Middle Ages evolved a variety of explanations for the causes of the plague and created symbols to denote those causes. An iconography for the results of the plague also developed, including imagery of the sick and the dying.1 This essay will explore some of the pictorial and textual assumptions about the causes of the plague and the symbolic language developed to represent it. It will also call attention to a few unpublished late medieval manuscripts that depict themes relating to the ramifications of the Black Death of 1348–49.
In 1894, Alexander Yersin identified the pathogen that caused the plague, and shortly thereafter, scientists showed that fleas escaping from dead rats were the source of the disease. It is often assumed that since the etiology of plague was not known until the late nineteenth century, people did not connect it with rats.2 Well before the outbreak of the Black Death, however, there was some understanding that rats were connected to the disease. The evidence is found in medieval manuscripts recounting and illustrating an episode in the Bible that has been termed the Plague of the [24]Philistines, also called the Plague of Ashdod (1 Samuel 5–6). The Philistines had captured the ark of the covenant and placed it in the temple of their god Dagon. The next day, they discovered that the statue of Dagon had fallen on its face before the ark. The Lord caused a plague to fall upon five Philistine cities in retribution for their having taken the ark. Rats figure prominently in a number of medieval manuscripts that depict this Plague of the Philistines. Textual as well as visual sources can demonstrate how the connection betweens rats and plague originated and how the connection was transmitted.
One of the illustrations that show rats causing this plague is in a French picture Bible (known as the Morgan Bible) completed at the court of Louis IX sometime between 1244 and 1254 (fig. 2.1).3 In the upper left quadrant are five pedimented structures meant to represent the five Philistine cities ravaged by the plague. Bodies are strewn at the base of the walls and portals, and rats swarm over them. The corpses include the unbearded young as well as the old and a peasant wearing a cap as well as city dwellers. The rats bite them all over, especially on the necks and armpits, places where the buboes of bubonic plague are found, though other parts of the body are attacked as well. Blood drips from the bites. Beside the representations of the five cities stand six men: five stand for the leaders of the Philistines and one is the priest or diviner counseling them on how to rid themselves of the plague. One of the textual sources available to the master directing the illustration of this Bible was the Vulgate, translated from Hebrew to Latin by Jerome sometime between 382 and 405 ce.4 Jerome’s Vulgate makes no mention of rats in this part of the story (1 Sam. 5),5 but says only that God struck the Philistines “in the secret parts of the buttocks” (percussit in secretiori parte natium), a phrase that has generally been taken to mean that God struck them with emerods, or hemorrhoids.6 The oldest surviving version of this episode, however, is in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible dating from the third century bce. The Septuagint does connect rats with the plague that struck the Philistines. In 1 Samuel 5:6, the text reads, “The hand of the Lord was heavy upon Ashdod, and he brought evil upon them, and it burst out upon them into the ships and rats sprang up in the midst of their country, and there was a great tumult of death in the city.”7 Further along, the text recounts [26]that the Philistines sent the ark away to another city, Gath, where also “the hand of the Lord came upon the city, and there was very great confusion. And he struck the men of the city both small and great, and struck them in their buttocks. And the Gittites made for themselves images of tumors.” Ultimately, the ark was present in five Philistine cities and in each one “there was very great confusion in all the city, w8hen the ark of the God of Israel entered there, and those who lived and died not were struck with tumors; and the cry of the city went up to heaven” (1 Sam. 5:12).
It has long been recognized by medical authorities that the disease described in this portion of the Septuagint is most likely the bubonic plague.9 The epidemic spread along with the transporting of the ark, so in epidemiological terms, one might hypothesize that either those who brought the ark or the animals involved in the transport served to communicate the plague; it attacked the “hidden parts,” that is, the groin, as do the plague buboes; the lesions caused by the epidemic could be described as having a definite shape; the disease was very deadly and caused social upheaval; the Hebrew word used to describe it, apholim, is included in a list of skin diseases in Deuteronomy 28:27; and mice are associated with the outbreak.10
[25] Fig. 2.1. Anonymous, The Plague of the Philistines, ca. 1250. Manuscript illumination, Ms. 638, fol. 21v. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Photo reproduced by permission from The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY.
The link in the Septuagint between mice and the plague of the Philistines is taken up by Josephus (37 ce–ca. 100 ce) in his Antiquities of the Jews (6.1). Josephus’s text adds a description of how the Philistines suffered from diarrhea and vomiting, symptoms consonant with the early stages of bubonic plague:11“At length God sent a very destructive disease upon the city and country of Ashdod [Philistines], for they died of the dysentery or flux, a sore distemper . . . They brought up their entrails, and vomited up what they had eaten, and what was entirely corrupted by the disease. And as to the fruits of their country, a great multitude of mice arose out of the earth and hurt them, and spared neither the plants nor the fruits.”12
[27]The Septuagint and Josephus accounts that connect mice with the plague of the Philistines do not appear in the earliest extant Hebrew version of the Bible that has come down to us, the Masoretic Text, dating from about the tenth century. But the idea that rats were linked with the deaths that raged in the city apparently made sense to the writers of the Talmud, which was set down between 200 and 500 ce. Lewis Ginzberg has summarized the various Talmudic sources, which reveal that, as a punishment for the Philistines, mice were crawling “forth out of the earth, and jerking the entrails out of the bodies of the Philistines while they eased nature. If the Philistines sought to protect themselves by using brass vessels, the vessels burst at the touch of the mice, and, as before, the Philistines were at their mercy.”13 These Talmudic sources no doubt influenced Rashi, the great eleventh and twelfth century biblical commentator who lived in Troyes, France. Though the Masoretic Hebrew text available to Rashi does not mention rats as connected to the disease, Rashi incorporated into his commentary the earlier Talmudic explanations. Evidently, linking rats to the plague made more sense to him than the garbled “plague of hemorrhoids” transmitted by the Masoretic. Rashi elaborates on the Hebrew word for “hemorrhoids” used in the Masoretic Text.14 He writes in his commentary that God smote the Philistines with a “plague of the rectum. Mice would enter their recta, disembowel them, and crawl out.” Thus, the link between mice and the plague was well established in the Latin and Hebrew textual traditions of the Middle Ages.
These texts may help illuminate certain other details in the Morgan manuscript. For instance, in the next episode of the story, illustrated in the upper right (1 Sam. 6), the Philistine priest has told the rulers not to return the ark empty, but rather to provide an offering of five golden tumors and five golden rats.15 The ark and the golden offerings are to be set up on a wagon drawn by nursing cows without their calves. If the cows drawing the ark go toward the Hebrews rather than toward their calves, the Philistines will know that the hand of God had brought on the affliction. The ark of the covenant is shown as a Gothic reliquary with crosses as finials. The cart [28]is being drawn away from the calves, which are depicted under an arch beneath the Philistines. Beside the ark are the offerings, but instead of golden rats there are gray living rats, and they are crawling in and out of metal vessels. It is curious that metal vessels are mentioned only in the Talmudic tradition, where the brass vessels into which the Philistines are relieving themselves miraculously burst at the touch of the mice, presumably a miracle to further the suffering. The notion that the mice, the offering of the Philistines, would be alive is contrary to all texts and is pictured nowhere else. It has been suggested that the mice are shown as living because of a misreading of aureos (gold), which may have been mistakenly read as vivos (living).16 At any rate, here the containers are interpreted as carrying away the live rats whose bites are depicted as causing the plague. In the bottom two images, the Israelites put the ark and the gold vessels containing the living rats on a great stone and, to the right, they make a burnt offering of the cart and the nursing cows.
Surrounding the Morgan illustration is a summary Latin text added in Bologna around 1300. The commentator thought the golden vessels were part of the offering, but he clearly connected the mice with the plague when he described the picture as showing the “pestis magna,” the great plague that smote the city because of the “murium inaestimabilis multitudo,” the innumerable multitude of mice. When they were “unable to sustain such a pestilence any longer, the Philistines removed the ark of God from that place, having added golden vessels to soothe the anger of the God of Israel.”17 The Farsi and Judeo-Arabic texts, which also surround the picture, were added in the seventeenth century. They are briefer and do not mention rodents.
The Septuagint-Josephus-Talmudic tradition was followed by one of the most important medieval churchmen, Peter Comestor, who, during the second part of the twelfth century, composed an elaborate commentary on the Bible in Latin, the Historia Scholastica. In addition to the Septuagint, Comestor specifically cites Josephus in his account of the Plague of the Philistines.18 Comestor writes that mice sprang up in the fields and that they gnawed away at the entrails of the Philistines. This detail is important for an understanding of another manuscript that illustrates the Plague of the Philistines, a thirteenth-century Bible moralisée (the Moralized Bible), where rats are shown biting people and causing the plague (figs. 2.2 and 2.3). The Bible moralisée was written in French in Paris between 1215 and 1230. In addition to Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, it is based on a loose paraphrase [29]of the Vulgate as well as the Josephus text. It greatly expands the plague iconography, for it illustrates the story and then moralizes it from the point of view of contemporary events. For instance, the wicked Philistines in this narrative are interpreted as being the Saracens (the medieval term for Muslims), against whom the French were fighting the Crusades. In addition, the moralized texts and images present a version of the story from a Christological perspective. These proclivities become clear right at the top of the page in the first four images (fig. 2.2). The text on the left reads, “Here the Saracens (Li Sarrazin) come and take the ark that they had conquered and put it in their mosque (mahomerie/mahommer) beside one of their gods named Dagon.”19 In the roundel on the right “their god Dagon [has] fallen to the ground, the head and hands and feet broken off.” The Saracens who have put the ark next to Dagon are likened to devils, who put the holy church next to Beelzebub. When Dagon falls to the ground, it is said to be like the holy church taking away the power of the devil.
The story of the plague itself commences in the third roundel down on the left. The French text on the side indicates that since the Saracens have taken the ark against God’s will, God is angered and “raz de terre,” rats, enter into them and “los mangerent les entrailles,” eat their entrails. This is a loose French translation of the Comestor Latin text “corrodebant extales eorum.” The image shows large rats that seem to be springing up from the ground and leaping into the groins of the Saracens. Unlike the Morgan illustration, which has the rats biting at the necks and armpits, here, influenced by the Comestor, the rats specifically target the pubic area. This interpretation of the tradition allowed for the revealing contemporary analogy depicted in the accompanying roundels. The Saracens who suffered from the rats leaping up to bite their sexual parts are likened to the “wicked prelates and the wicked bishops who hold rents . . . through simony, and God is angered with them and they are struck by sodomy which eats them and their loins and their entrails.”20 The roundel illustrating this moralized interpretation shows the bishops and clerics drawing close young boys, hugging them, and caressing their cheeks. Two of the boys appear to be tonsured, which means that they are young clerics. One bishop tilts up a boy’s face in an endearing gesture. The bishop in the center pushes away the personification of church, Ecclesia, who bows her head in dismay. The reason this particular kind of moralization could be used here is that Comestor writes that the mice sprung up and that they struck the “secret parts of their buttocks”; however, he goes on to add, like Josephus, that they were suffering from “crudeli passione dysenteriae” (the cruel suffering of dysentery). Since the Comestor language paraphrased here translates the [31]Josephus account of the Philistines’ suffering with the words “ex crudeli passione,” it allowed for an allegorizing of suffering, passion, in Latin, not just in the sense of physical suffering, but also in the medieval French sense of passion or “violent love.” In the moralized tale, God strikes the prelates with the suffering (passion), which makes them engage in sodomy with young boys. The “passion,” sodomy, “eats them and their loins and their entrails,” just as the rats ate the entrails of the Philistines.
[30] Fig 2.2. Anonymous, The Ark in the Temple of Dagon and the Suffering of the Philistines, 1215-30. Manuscript illumination, Bible moralisée, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, fol. 36r. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Photo reproduced by permission from ÖNB/Bildarchiv+ImageID.
The next part of the biblical story is in the third roundel from the top on the right. The Philistines/Saracens repent and make offerings of rats of gold and of five pieces of gold “and the rats fall from them and they are cured of this plague.” The rats of gold are being placed in a box, and above it on another platter are what the accompanying text calls five “pieces d’or” (pieces of gold). The Comestor Latin version that influenced this paraphrase recounts that in the container next to the ark were “quinque annulos aureos et quinque mures auros.”21 No doubt the Comestor text specifying “five golden rings” influenced this depiction of circular gold forms with black holes in the middle, though how they were understood to relate to the initial suffering remains unclear, unless one evokes the notion of hemorrhoids. At the feet of the Saracens, the rats are falling away.
The final text and image at the bottom right complete the allegory. The Saracens’ repentance and offering signify (senefie) the ecclesiastics who repent and make offerings of the five senses (de V. sens); Jesus removes them from sodomy and they push the boys away. In a clever allegorization of the biblical account, the author of the moralized story used the five offerings from the five Philistine cities to stand for the five senses. As the Philistines had to give up gold for the creation of the offerings, the bishops had to give up the sensual pleasures of the five senses stemming from the sodomy. In the visual rendition of the bishops’ repentance, the boys, like the rats, are shown falling down. It is apparent that, as in other sections of the Bible Moralisée, the text and images here have been interpreted to reflect concerns of the day.
The theologians who dictated the iconographic program for this Bible directed the artist or artists to draw images that were consonant with the theologians’ point of view and their interpretation of God’s plan. God’s will was to punish the Saracens with rats that would eat their entrails. In an analogous manner, God punishes the prelates with a desire that “eats them.” In a curious twist, the Philistines/Saracens are sometimes depicted as wearing a tight-fitting or slightly pointed cap, an attire common for Jews in this manuscript. So the Philistines, who are called Saracens, are sometimes depicted as Jews.
[32]The use of this combined Philistine/Saracen/Jew iconography continues on the verso, where again the Lord’s enemies are being struck with plague (fig. 2.3). In the visual tradition that the Morgan manuscript followed, the ark was given back to the people of Beth Shemesh without indicating that many of the Israelites themselves were struck with disease. The Septuagint, Vulgate, Hebrew, and Comestor texts tell the same story and attribute the plague to the Israelites’ folly of having looked into the ark (1 Sam. 6:1, Septuagint): “And the sons of Jeconiah were not pleased with the men of Beth Shemesh because they looked into the ark of the Lord; and the Lord struck fifty thousand and seventy men among them. And the people mourned, because the Lord had inflicted on the people a very great plague.” Perhaps the illustrators of the Bible moralisée could not make sense of the Lord’s striking those who presumably were his own people, so they invented their own imagery and text. In the right-hand roundel at the top, the Israelites of Beth Shemesh (1 Sam. 6:13) have been turned into the “wicked Saracens” who want to “take and guard [the ark], and God is angered with them and strikes them all.”22 The image shows God striking the Saracens by throwing down pointed arrows on their faces and hands. Arrows later become a common symbol for the agent that inflicts people with plague. The Israelites of Beth Shemesh, who welcome the ark in the text and visual tradition, have now become the Saracens/Philistines. In a double inversion, these “Saracens” are depicted as Jews commonly are, with beards, pointed hats, large grotesque noses and mouths, and grimacing expressions. The roundel below on the lower left depicts Ecclesia carried by the chariot. The cows are replaced by the bishops who are tethered to the chariot. The calves that, in the image above, were left crying after their mothers as the cows fulfilled God’s will are now replaced by tonsured youths, who had been analagous to the rats that caused the “pain” in the groin. The accompanying text tells that the churchmen “push away the boys” just as the cows ignored their calves. After being sexually used, the boys are cast aside: these “children and their parents go crying after” the prelates, but they have no recourse; the prelates “do not care nor give them anything.” The grim boys gesture in dismay as the bishops turn their backs on them. These bishops, ignoring the cries of the boys and their parents, are designated as good prelates, for they have taken on the burden of pulling the holy church.
The moralizing roundel on the lower right equates the Saracens/Jews from the image above it, who wanted to take and guard the holy ark, with the wicked people, who “argue about guarding the holy Church, and God is angered with them and pushes them all into hell,” the jaws of which are spread open at the bottom of the roundel. Thus, the texts and images here [34]were selectively revised for a mid-thirteenth-century French perspective wherein Jews and Muslims are seen as enemies of Christians. Muslims threatened the Christian sites in the Holy Land, and contemporary Jews were the descendants of the murderers of Jesus. They both had to be depicted as victims of God’s wrath as he sent down the plague. As these evil peoples march into hell, they serve as warnings to the contemporary wicked who might argue about guarding the holy church.
[33] Fig. 2.3. Anonymous, The Return of the Ark, 1215-1230. Manuscript illustration, Bible moralisée, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, fol. 36v. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Photo reproduced by permission from ÖNB/Bildarchiv+ImageID.
The Psalter of Saint Louis is another manuscript from the mid-thirteenth century that points to a connection between the plague and rats. At the front of this Psalter is a group of seventy-eight full-page illustrations of scenes from the Old Testament, and one of them depicts the Plague of the Philistines (fig. 2.4). On the left, the five Philistine leaders are asking their priest, who wears a pointed hat, how to rid themselves of the rats that swarm below. The medieval French text on the back of the image is written by a contemporary scribe23 and relates that “this page shows how the sons of Israel take counsel and sit on sheepskins and a plentitude of mice are among them. And how the people die in the fields.”24 Obviously, the scribe has been told to call the Philistines in the story the Israelites, not a surprising “misunderstanding” given the climate of the times. The image also depicts the Philistine priest as wearing the pointed hat typical of the Jew. As the text indicates, the Israelites/Philistines are seated on piaus de moutons (skins of sheep), presumably to ease the pain in their buttocks; the bench beneath them is covered in a white cloth that has on it the curly hairs of sheep. This detail comes from the Comestor text, which records that the Philistines “fecerunt sibi sedes pelliceas,” words not present in the medieval version of the Vulgate.25 Though the presence of the sheepskin argues for the idea that hemorrhoids are the problem, a “plentitude of mice” is clearly visible, and in the text they are mentioned next to the phrase, “the people die.” So, in the Psalter of Saint Louis the cause of the plague that besets the Philistines/Israelites and forces them to return the ark of the covenant appears to be the mice. God’s people are the Christians, who are shown on the right looking up to see the ark return. They are all wearing simple peasant caps; not a one has the pointed cap worn by the Philistine/Israelite priest and by many Jews elsewhere in this Psalter.
The images in the Morgan Bible, the Bible moralisée, and the Psalter of Saint Louis depicting the Plague of the Philistines are in accord with the [36]iconography favored during the reign of Louis IX. He saw the Old Testament figures not as ancestors of the contemporary Jews, but as his own ancestors and those of his French subjects. The Muslims and Jews were the enemy, and these illustrations were chosen to depict how God’s wrath punished them. Louis organized and participated in two crusades, and perhaps the choice to depict the events recounted in 1 Samuel should be seen in that context.26 The Philistines/Saracens/Jews had stolen a holy relic of the believers, and God’s power helped the Israelites/French to retrieve it, through the agency of the rat-induced plague. Certainly, Louis likewise hoped for divine intervention as he mobilized for and fought against the Muslims, whom he saw as having control of the holy relics in Jerusalem.
Another strand of the tradition connecting mice with plague can be picked up in Spain, and it ultimately had an influence north of the Alps. In Pamplona, in the late [38]twelfth-century royal chancery of King Sancho VII, called el Fuerte, in Pamplona one Petrus Facundus was responsible for directing the production of two picture Bibles, both executed in a similar style.27 The image of the Plague of the Philistines is one of over eight hundred biblical episodes depicted in each of these Bibles. One of the Pamplona Bibles now in Augsburg contains a plague narrative illustration showing three seated men holding their hands to their heads in a gesture of woe (fig. 2.5). The two figures on the left shield their genitals with their free hands, and the figure on the right points to the cause of their grief, the rat. The Latin above is partially from Vulgate 1 Samuel 5:6: “Adgravata est autem manus domini super Azotos et demolitus est eos” (The hand of the Lord was heavy upon the Azotos [Philistines]). The next part of the inscription goes on to say that “there was a springing up in the cities and fields of rats that were born in the middle of their region and there was a confusion of death.”28 This part of the text is not in the Vulgate but is in the Septuagint (1 Sam. 5:6 ). Thus, the text in the Augsburg Pamplona Bible incorporates both the Latin Vulgate and a Latin translation of the Greek Septuagint, and the image follows the text. The creatures are named by the word mures on the lower left side of the picture; the Philistines are also named: “Isti sunt azoti.” Though the two figures on the left do hold their hands over their genitals, the brief text in this picture does not include a mention of God striking the Philistines “in their secret parts.”
How would this version of the Plague of the Philistines or a text dependent on it have been available to the royal chancery in Pamplona? In twelfth-century Spain, scholars of Hebrew, Arabic, and Christian learning had access to each other’s texts, and one of those texts may have been an early Mediterranean illustrated manuscript.29 Kurt Weitzmann hypothesized that such a manuscript may have had over three hundred illustrations and probably included the books of Samuel. He cites two examples of the story of the Philistines and the ark of the covenant to illustrate his hypothesis. One is in the Dura-Europus Synagogue and the other is found in an eleventh-century Byzantine manuscript, Vatican Greek 333. Weitzmann believed that both of these illustrations of the Philistine story are based on the same rich archetype, a Jewish illustrated Bible that influenced the Christian illustrative tradition.30 That the Dura fresco does not depict rats should not be surprising, since rodents could hardly be expected to find a place on the walls of a synagogue. The Vatican manuscript, however, presents a more complex problem (fig. 2.6). The image is very small (3.3 x 7.5 centimeters) and a good deal of the paint has come off. What can be discerned on the left are the Philistines in front of an arcuated structure, and at least two of them are making gestures of woe, as in the Augsburg copy of the Pamplona Bible. The temple of Dagon is to the extreme right, and the ark of the covenant, adorned with cherubim, is in the center. Since this manuscript is so worn, it is difficult to see if rats are present.31 However, the question arises as to whether or not the small creatures at the base of the column and at the feet of the Philistines could be rats. Or are what look like rodents merely places where the paint has come off? Unfortunately, the state of the manuscript does not permit a definitive answer. What is now known, however, is that the illustrated Pamplona Bible present in Augsburg did depend on the Septuagint/Josephus tradition, which included the mention of rats.
The other Bible completed in the Pamplona chancery in the late 1100s made its way to France after the death of Sancho VII in 1234 (fig. 2.7). The Bible, now in Amiens, displays six men, presumably the five Philistine rulers and the priest. Each has a hand up to his face in a gesture of woe. The text above is almost the same as in Augsburg’s Pamplona Bible and designates rats as the cause of the Philistine anguish. However, unlike the Augsburg manuscript, in the Amiens manuscript there is an addition. Written vertically on the edge of the right border is “percussit in secretiori parte,” the last part of the Vulgate phrase in 1 Samuel 5: 6. One or two of the men have their hands covering their genitals, but less pronouncedly than in the Augsburg image. Though the Septuagint rat phrase is written above, no rats appear in the image; as in Augsburg, the rodents are depicted as part of the offerings on the top of the ark in the image below. [39]Thus, in these two Bibles from the royal chancery in Pamplona the pictorial model included parts of both traditions: a “plague” that related to the “secret parts,” and a plague caused by rats.
The Amiens Pamplona Bible was probably handed down to Sancho’s heir, Thibaut IV, count of Champagne and king of Navarre.32 It then passed to the Valois rulers of France, where, around 1315, the images were used as a model for a luxury Picture Bible and Illustrated Lives of Saints now in the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library (fig. 2.8). The iconography of the five Philistine rulers and the one priest in this image is like the Amiens illustration, but the style is totally different. The lines delineating these early fourteenth-century figures are fluid, as in contemporary Parisian miniatures, and the artists made use of a diapered background and strong colors. To the right of the image is a text in French, which is strongly influenced by a French translation/adaptation of Comestor’s Historia Scholastica made by Guyart des Moulins between 1291 and 1295.33 Like the Comestor and Guyart narratives of the Plague of the Philistines, the Spencer Picture Bible’s text tells of the “torment of a cruel suffering and a disease that is called dysentery” (tourmenta d’une cruel passion & maladie qud dit dissintere) that attacked the entrails of the Philistines. Although, like the Amiens manuscript, the image does not depict mice, the text says that “little mice were born in the fields throughout the country and they caused great mischief and great confusion and peril of death.”34 The text of the Spencer [42]Picture Bible and the Guyart des Moulins text both give an account that resembles the Josephus and Comestor, including the mice eating the entrails and causing great death in the city.35 Over one hundred copies of this medieval French account by Guyart des Moulins are known to have been made.36 More than 80 percent of the extant copies of the Guyart text were produced in Paris between 1310 and 1420, and it was widely read, especially by those in the aristocracy. Thus, right up to and throughout the time of the Black Death, the popularity of these French vernacular Bibles strongly suggests that not only the clergy but also the lay readers north of the Alps had some understanding, or at least a suspicion, of the fact that rats are connected to plague.
The New Testament text that is a source of the plague imagery is the book of Revelation. Three major illustrated cycles of this text exist from the ninth century up until the later Middle Ages.37 One is an old Carolingian cycle and another is a commentary by Beatus of Liébana (written between 776 and 784). The illustrated Beatus manuscripts were drawn from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries.38 The third is the so-called Anglo-Norman group, which was formed around 1240 in England and northern France. This cycle was widely copied right up into the fourteenth century. There are nearly one hundred extant manuscripts from the Anglo-Norman group, some prepared for monastic communities and some for courtly patrons.39
The section of Revelation dealing with a plague that is relevant for our study is in chapters 15 and 16. John says (15:1) “Et vidi aliud signum in caelo magnum et mirabile angelos septem habentes plagas septem novissimas quoniam in illis consummata est ira Dei” (“And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous, seven angels having the seven last plagues; for in them is filled up the wrath of God”). The Latin and medieval French texts both relate that in John’s vision seven angels pour out seven plagues from their vials: plagues that turned the seas, rivers, and springs to blood; a plague that scorched mankind; a plague of darkness that brought pain; a plague of drought; a plague that brought unclean frogs; and one that brought an earthquake and hail. The one plague that might be related to a disease revealing itself on the skin and that could have been interpreted as linked to the pestilence of the Black Death is the first plague (Rev. 16:1–2), the one that is manifest through sore and grievous wounds. John recounts: [43] “And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth . . . . And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.”40 This plague is related to the plague in Exodus 9:8 when God tells Moses to toss a handful of soot from a furnace into the air and it becomes a fine dust, creating festering boils on men and animals throughout the land.41
The illustrations to this text and commentary in the Beatus cycle usually show the seven angels holding bowls, with dots inside them. Then, as the first bowl is emptied, flowing lines fall from the bowl to earth.42 The copies in the Beatus tradition, however, were almost exclusively limited to Spain, and they were compiled before the mid-twelfth century. More pertinent to this study of late medieval plague iconography is the Anglo-Norman cycle. This cycle was completed on both sides of the English Channel in the thirteenth century and was copied almost without change for hundreds of years.43 The illustrations in that cycle, as shown in an example from the Cloisters Apocalypse, depict the angel, having flown down from the temple in the sky, emptying his vial upon the earth, the contents of which would cause the sores and grievous wounds (fig. 2.9).44 The contents of the vial are depicted as a grayish matter, and that matter is the agent causing the plague of the sores on the skin.45 Thus, no doubt many who viewed these images in the numerous illustrated Apocalypses connected the cruel and malignant wounds caused by the plague with a noxious air embodying God’s wrath.
In fact, the representation of the agent responsible for the skin plague as a grayish matter flowing from the sky does accord with the questions of several mid- to late-fourteenth-century chroniclers who tried to understand the causes of the waves of plague they had been experiencing during the past decade. One such chronicler was Jean Jacmé, a papal physician and chancellor of Montpellier. Writing in 1364, Jacmé refers to corrupt [44]vapors from above inflicting plague: “For the [thick-clouded vapors in the air] above corrupts the air, and so the spirits of men are corrupted.”46 Louis Heyligen, one of a group of musicians at the papal court of Avignon, also describes the plague as a “stinking breath of the wind.”47 Thus, these chroniclers viewed corrupt air or wind as related to plague.48 Perhaps their thought that corrupt wind brought the plague was partially influenced by the apocalyptic textual and illustrative tradition, for the text from Revelation was, from the late eleventh century, commonly read as [45]part of the Easter liturgy, and Apocalypse imagery populated wall paintings and stained glass for all to see.49
The numerous disasters that befall humankind as recounted in the book of Revelation are described with a language rich in weapons imagery, and that imagery of bow and arrows, swords, and lances is likewise used in other works of art as general symbols of plague-causing agents. For instance, the notion of arrows representing a plague can be seen in a curious wall painting dating from 1355, in Lavaudieu, Haute Loire, in the Auvergne region of France (fig. 2.10).50 The image is on the south wall of a small Romanesque church that at one time was a nunnery. Above the hooded blind female is the word mors. Larger than the other figures, she grips six arrows in each hand and appears to have wounded all those at her sides with similar arrows. The figures of men and women, old and young, churchmen and bourgeois, surround her. They all have closed eyes and grim faces, and appear to be succumbing to death. An inscription dates the painting to just after the region had been devastated by the Black Death. What is interesting about the mural is that though it is found in a nunnery, God’s wrath is not evoked. It is a cruel female personification of blind fate, who dominates the scene.
In a late medieval altar panel now in the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover (fig. 2.11), the symbol of the affliction is again arrows. Jesus appears above in a scalloped space that breaks into the starry background. He holds three arrows in his left hand and with his right, he appears to aim an arrow downward. Jesus has already cast other arrows; they are piercing the bodies of reclining figures that represent the plague victims. The arrowheads have most frequently struck in their groins, armpits, or necks, places where the buboes of the plague erupt. On the left, the Virgin holds out her tunic, in which she catches many of the arrows meant for the victims, a few of whom are babies.
Plague iconography includes not only the imagery that relates to causes of the plague, such as rats, foul air, and arrows, but also the symptoms and the dying. The symptoms of the plague recounted by the chroniclers are so similar that scholars believe that many of the chroniclers knew they were dealing with more or less the same disease. However, Guy of Chauliac, surgeon and physician of Pope Clement VI of Avignon, writes of two kinds of “mortalities,” one that involved spitting blood, and another that involved tumors in the armpits and groin.51 Such tumors are depicted in art, as seen in the boil on the armpit of the dying man in the Stiny Codex [47](fig. 2.12). This form is now known as the bubonic plague. Heyligen, the Avignon musician, also knew of the boils, but he had observed that in another form, the pestilence was even more deadly. Those who got an infection of the lungs, now known as the pneumonic plague, coughed up blood and could not breathe. The throat and windpipe fill up with phlegm and blood, resulting in death by suffocation. The figure in the Stiny Codex manifests symptoms of both the bubonic and pneumonic plagues, for the patient mainly seems to be suffering from suffocation. This horror has been graphically personified by a strangulating creature whose body retains its flesh, though its face appears as a grisly skeletal head with a gaping mouth. The devilish monster has his hands on the dying man’s throat, thereby preventing him from breathing.
The spear in the hands of a skeleton was also used to indicate the agonizing pain of death, as in an image illustrating the Pilgrimage of the Soul [49](fig. 2.13). Here, death has the form of a grinning skeletal head on an emaciated body. One of death’s spears is aimed at the heart of the man who has taken his last breath. From the thirteenth century, the breath, anima, was associated with the soul, which, at the moment of final expiration, is depicted in the form of a homunculus, or little man. The horned black devil has been smudged, perhaps by a reader who was attempting to blot out the horror.52 The man’s soul has made eye contact with the winged angel who stands at the head of the bed. Presumably, this angel will accompany the soul to heaven.
Chroniclers of the mid-fourteenth-century plague recount that, though some churchmen refused to attend to plague victims, others stayed and administered to the sick, as in a manuscript illustration from a Franciscan [51]missal in the Bodleian Library (fig. 2.14). Many of the clergy fled along with members of the families of the victims. People were afraid even to look at someone who was sick for fear of being infected; this may have been the result of medieval notions of why and how people see. During the thirteenth century, Aristotelians from Oxford and Paris theorized that objects sent forth rays that were “captured” by the eye. This Aristotelian theory, called “intromission,” was legitimized by the optical writings of Alhazen, who influenced western writers on optics such as John Pecham (fig. 2.15).53 Part of this notion was that the object (in this case the sick person) emitted a “species” or “likeness” into the air that would be carried right to the eye of the beholder.54 The rays from the object of sight fall on the spherical surface of the pupil and then penetrate through the three humors of the eye and along the optic nerve. It was reputed that these rays had the potential to transmit the disease. As the doctor from Montpellier, Jean Jacmé, understood it, the brain of the sick person makes a poisonous material that is extruded through the eye, where the toxic spirits build up and “seek a dwelling place into which it can enter . . . . And if any well person looks upon that visible spirit, he receives the attack of the pestilential disease.”55 Thus, as the panic spread, people grew afraid of the gaze of plague victims, for the very sight of the sick could be deemed dangerous.
Several of the immediate responses to the plague can be seen in the imagery of the fourteenth century north of the Alps. Gilles li Muisis’ mid- fourteenth-century chronicle, which was illustrated shortly after it was written, depicts people bringing coffins to the cemetery, and other bodies being placed in the ground wound only in a shroud (fig. 2.16). These deceased were lucky to have coffins or even a shroud; during the plague, many were simply buried in mass graves or, in Avignon, thrown into the Rhône. The faces in this image are glum, and the palette is mostly black or bloodred; however, in an unusual touch, little white flowers have sprung up from the clumps of dark grass.
Though the most common reaction to plague was flight, there was also an attempt to ward off the disease through religious ritual. Some of those rituals, such as self-flagellation, veered off into the aberrant. At first, the flagellants were composed of local or regional brotherhoods that assembled for pious processions, but their gatherings evolved into a kind of public mortification undertaken as a form of penance. A manuscript illumination from the early fifteenth century preserves what is known from texts and other illustrations (fig. 2.17). The flagellants wear long robes with hoods that have holes for the eyes and a long extension flowing onto their chests. They carry knotted whips with which they strike themselves. Froissart, who [54]lived at the time of the Black Death, amplifies the understanding of these flagellants. He relates that they “scourged themselves with whips of hard knotted leather with little iron spikes . . . . Some made themselves bleed very badly between the shoulders and some foolish women had cloths ready to catch the blood and smear it on their eyes, saying that it was miraculous blood . . . .”56 Clement VI, the pope at Avignon, abhorred the practice of flagellation and called public penance unlawful. He went so far as to excommunicate those who engaged in it.57 But flagellation was widespread and though the church was nominally against it, there are images of churchmen participating. The hysteria did not subside until late 1349.
Though flagellants may have been religious in origin in that they were seeking the expurgation of their sins, they soon evolved into groups that flailed out against “the other.” In the fourteenth century, it was often the foreigner or the outcast who was designated as the chief cause of whatever contemporary malady was threatening. In Spain, Portuguese pilgrims were thought to be responsible for an outbreak of the plague, and in southern France it was the English who were at fault. Blame was also cast on lepers, Muslims,58 and especially Jews. When the flagellants called for their extermination, they attracted ever greater numbers of adherents.
Gilles Li Muisis is one of those chroniclers to give us an account of the fate of some Jews during the Black Death: “In 1349 Jews were seized and put in chains and into prison . . . . The reason for this was a strong suspicion that they planned to destroy the Christians by means of poison, and that they had secretly put poison into wells, springs and rivers so that Christians would drink it . . . . The word was that throughout Germany and in other countries they were burnt, or beheaded, or killed by some other means.”59 In an illustration of the burning of Jews from Li Muisis’ chronicle it looks as if the event is taking place just outside the city walls (fig. 2.18). One man, arms crossed, peers over the side of a pit. Another man, well dressed and with a purse at his waist, brings wood. Behind him, a fellow with a bulging belly looks on with a rather distressed expression. On the left, a cross section of people from the city are in attendance. A churchman, a couple of burghers, and a knight are in the front row near the elegantly dressed man who feeds the fire. Behind him is a crowd including helmeted soldiers carrying weapons. Both the text and the image reveal that the populace was ready to believe that the men and women burning in the pit could indeed have been responsible for poisoning the well and giving them the plague.
Besides the petitions of the flagellants and the slaughtering of those who were thought to be responsible for the plague, people took other [56]actions to save or cure themselves. They were told to avoid gambling and lechery, to light fires for purification, and to practice bloodletting,60 but most people put their faith in traditional Christian prayer (see fig. 2.14).61 The Franciscan missal from the Bodleian Library shows a monk administering last rites to a sick man lying in bed, a jeweled cross behind his pillow. To the right, the monk is praying before a covered chalice on an altar.
The experience of the waves of plague in the second half of the fourteenth century contributed to a shift in iconography north of the Alps. Some of the imagery emphasized what was comforting, such as the Virgin of Misericorde protecting faithful petitioners beneath her cloak. There was also the new emphasis on “plague saints” such as Sebastian, who could act as intercessor before God. In an illuminated Book of Hours from the late fourteenth century, the body of Saint Sebastian is depicted riddled with so many arrows that he looks like a porcupine, as the Golden Legend of Jacopus de Voragine describes him (fig. 2.19).62 There was also an increase in funerary and macabre iconography north of the Alps, especially in illuminated books of hours. A funerary scene accompanying the Office of the Dead depicts, in a bifocal cutaway view, both the Gothic monumental entrance and the inside of a church where people are keeping vigil the night before a burial (fig. 2.20). Inside, a coffin is draped with an elaborately embroidered cloth. Behind it, two ecclesiastical figures on the left are reading from or meditating on the words in the open volumes. Two professional mourners with faces hidden are part of the scene. A young blond man clasps his hands and bows his head at the far right. A crippled old man on crutches is hovering, rather than standing, at the entrance. Perhaps he is meant to represent the elderly patron of the book envisioning or imagining the ritual that will surround his own demise. Or is he the patron placing himself in a scene meant to represent the untimely death of an adult son or daughter? Either way, the scene depicts an aesthetization of death. The aroma of the candles would have overcome the smell of bodily decay, and gold embroidered cloths cover the coffin holding the decomposing body.
The gruesomeness of funerary iconography increased in the very late Middle Ages, with a growing emphasis on the more grisly symbols of death, such as the cadaver, which became part of David’s prayer in the books of hours. An example from the Boston Public Library (fig. 2.21) illustrates the moment when David tries to stop the angel of death from destroying Jerusalem by means of the plague (1 Chron. 21:8–17). David had taken a census, [58]a prideful act that was evil in the sight of God, for men do not belong to David, but to the Lord. So, through the prophet Gad, David’s seer, the Lord made known the three possible punishments that David and his people would suffer for his trespass. As the French verses below the image indicate, David could choose “guerre, famine, ou pestilence” (war, famine, or plague). The text goes on to say that he chose peste, and so the Lord sent a plague on Israel, and seventy thousand men died (1 Chron. 21:14). Here, the aged King David is on his knees without his crown. A cadaver and a dead or dying man are at his feet. He looks up at the avenging angel holding an arrow and the bloodred “sword of the Lord”; he is about to cast the plague on the Holy City. David prayed, however, and the city was spared from the plague. His grim choices and the number of dead are spelled out in the rhymed French text below.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the funerals process out to the graveyards and the more graphic aspects of death are depicted. In a fifteenth century Book of Hours, grave diggers are burying a body sewn into [61]its shroud in the spot where they have exhumed the bones of a former deceased (fig. 2.22). The bones will be thrown into the charnel house, which, in this miniature, is perhaps depicted just outside the graveyard walls. The thought of having their corpses eaten by worms was so abhorrent to some members of the aristocracy that they had their bodies boiled after death.63 Then the lean bones could be separated from the flesh and interred in an appropriate setting.
The imagery relating to death and the macabre does seem to increase in the second part of the fourteenth century. But though several major outbreaks of the plague occurred between 1348 and 1400, the chroniclers mention them only briefly in comparison to the descriptions of the Black Death of 1348. It seems that the midcentury plague had made a much more profound impact on them, or at least they recorded it more fully.64 Perhaps chroniclers had been so traumatized by the plague that they wanted to repress it; perhaps the symptoms of later outbreaks were less severe. Or perhaps the chroniclers had grown so used to the plague that they stopped giving it much attention. For as the twenty-first century so clearly demonstrates, people do become inured to even the grimmest accounts of famines, massacres, and diseases.
[62]ABBREVIATION
PL Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina. Edited by J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1844–64.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berger, Pamela. “Sculpted Body Parts from Ancient Healing Sanctuaries.” In The Plume and the Palette, edited by Pamela Berger, Jeffery Howe, and Susan A. Michalczyk, 1–15. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Boeckl, Christine M. Images of Plague and Pestilence. Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 43. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000.
Bucher, François. The Pamplona Bibles: A Facsimile Compiled from Two Picture Bibles with Martyrologies by King Sancho el Fuerto of Navarra (1194–1234). 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970.
Camille, Michael. Gothic Art, Glorious Visions. New York: Prentice Hall and Harry Abrams, 1996.
———. Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
Campbell, Anna Montgomery. The Black Death and Men of Learning. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931.
Conrad, Lawrence I. “The Biblical Tradition for the Plague of the Philistines.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984): 281–87.
Courtille, Anne. “Vers une nouvelle datation des peintures de l’église Saint-André de Lavaudieu?” Almanach de Brioude 61 (1981): 68–85.
Dines, Jennifer M. The Septuagint. London: T&T Clark, 2004.
Driver, G. R. “The Plague of the Philistines (1 Samuel v, 6–vi, 16).” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland Z|x (1950): 50–52.
Eichler, Myron. “The Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6.” Dor le-dor 10 (1982): 157–65.
Friedman, John B. “‘He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence’: Iconography of the Plague in the Late Middle Ages.” In Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Francis X. Newman, 75–122. Binghamton: State University of New York, 1986.
Froissart, Jean. Chronicles. Translated and edited by Geoffrey Brereton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968.
Geyer, John B. “Mice and Rites in I Samuel V–VI.” Vetus Testamentum 31 (1981): 293–304.
Gilles Li Muisis. “Chronicle.” In Horrox, The Black Death, 45–54.
Ginzberg, Lewis. The Legends of the Jews. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909–30.
Guest, Gerald B., Commentator and translator. Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. London: Harvey Miller, 1995.
Harrington, Anne. Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Horrox, Rosemary, translator and editor. The Black Death. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
Jacopus de Voragine. The Golden Legend. Translated by William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Jean de Venette. Excerpt from the “Chronicle of Jean de Venette,” in Horrox, The Black Death, 54–57.
Klein, Peter K. “Introduction: The Apocalypse in Medieval Art.” In The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, edited by Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn, 159–99. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
[63]Komada, Akido. “Bible Historiale (‘Complete Version’).” In The Splendor of the Word, 100–108.
Lewis, Suzanne. Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Lindberg, David, C. “Alhazen’s Theory of Vision and Its Reception in the West.” Isis 58 (1967): 321–41.
———. “The Intromission-Extramission Controversy in Islamic Visual Theory: Alkindi versus Avicenna.” In David C. Lindberg, Studies in the History of Medieval Optics, 137–59. London: Variorum Reprints, 1983.
Maekawa, Kumiko. Narrative and Experience: Innovations in Thirteenth-Century Picture Books. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Marks, Geoffrey. The Medieval Plague. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.
Mormando, Franco. “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy: What the Primary Sources, Printed and Painted, Reveal.” In Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, edited by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas W. Worcester, 1–44. Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 2005. Distributed by University of Chicago Press.
Neustatter, Otto. “Mice in Plague Pictures.” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 4 (1941): 105–13.
Plummer, John, and Sydney C. Cockerell. Old Testament Miniatures: A Medieval Picture Book with 283 Paintings from the Creation to the Story of David. 1927. Reprint, New York: George Braziller, 1969.
Sandler, Lucy Freeman. “Picture Bible and Illustrated Lives of Saints.” In The Splendor of the Word, 97–100.
The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts at the New York Public Library. Edited by Jonathan J. G. Alexander, James H. Marrow, and Lucy Freeman Sandler. New York: New York Public Library, 2006.
Stahl, Harvey Joseph. The Iconographic Sources of the Old Testament Miniatures, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 638. PhD diss. New York University, 1974.
Thomas, Marcel. “Introduction et Commentaire.” In Le Psautier de Saint Louis, Reproductions des 78 Enluminures à Pleine Page du Manuscrit Latin 10525 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, 9–27. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1970.
Weiss, Daniel H. Die Kreuzritterbibel = The Morgan Crusader Bible = La Bible des Croisades. Lucern: Faksimile Verlag, 1999.
Weitzmann, Kurt. “Die Illustration des Septuagint.” Münchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst 3–4 (1952–53): 96–120.
———. “Zur Frage des Einflusses jüdischer Bilderquellen auf die Illustration des Alten Testamentes.” In Mullus: Festschrift Theodor Klauser, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, edited by Alfred Stuiber and Alfred Hermann, 410–15. Münster: Aschendorff, 1964.
Williams, John. The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Harvey Miller, 1994.
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1 Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence; and Friedman, “‘He Hath a Thousand Slayn.’”
2 Mormando, “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy”; and Neustatter, “Mice in Plague Pictures,” 105. The Poussin painting The Plague at Ashod, which includes rats, has long been known as the exception to the idea that artists as well as medical men were unaware of the connection between rats and the plague. For an in-depth analysis of Poussin’s plague painting, see the essay in this volume by Elisabeth Hipp.
3 Neustatter, “Mice in Plague Pictures,” 110 and fig. 2; Weiss, Die Kreuzritterbibel, 3:238; and Plummer and Cockerell, Old Testament Miniatures, 108.
4 There were earlier, Old Latin versions of the Bible, which Jerome’s text gradually replaced. Dines, Septuagint, 10. There were also later Latin versions, among them the Clementine Vulgate, authorized by Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605).
5 Later in the text rats are mentioned as offerings. See 1 Samuel 6:5, 11–12, 15, 17–18.
6 The Authorized (King James) Version uses the Middle English word “emerods” (1 Sam. 5:6).
7 I would like to thank Dia Philippides for her help with some parts of the translation of the Greek Septuagint. The English translation that includes the words “burst out upon them into the ships” is problematic. Elsewhere the word “ships” is translated “buttocks.” G. R. Driver (“The Plague of the Philistines,” 52) says that the Greek word that has been translated into the English as “ships” actually “means the male privies [buttocks], just as the Latin navis is occasionally used to denote the pudenda muliebria.” There was a confusion in the Latin because navis -is, f., means “ship”; nati sunt from nascor means “to spring up”; and natis -is, f., or nates -ium means “rump or buttocks.” The problem may stem from the original Hebrew. Scholars have long realized the 1 Samuel 5 texts represent an interweaving of several traditions, probably in the original Hebrew as well as in the Septuagint and Vulgate. They suggest that the text Jerome was looking at was garbled as well. See Conrad, “Biblical Tradition for the Plague of the Philistines,” 283; and Geyer, “Mice and Rites in I Samuel V–VI,” 293.
8 This sentence, “the Gittites made for themselves images of tumors,” has also been translated as “they made for themselves comfortable seats”; Driver, “Plague of the Philistines,” 51. See below for the texts of Comestor and the Psalter of Saint Louis.
9 Eichler, “Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6,” 162–64.
10 In Hebrew, the same word is used for mice and rats; Eichler, “Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6,” 162.
11 Eichler, “Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6,” 161.
12 Though Josephus wrote in Greek and Aramaic, his texts were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages.
13 Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 4:62–63; 6:223. Ginzberg also cites (ibid., 6:223) a tenth-century Jewish source, Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, a commentary on a midrash that also “speaks of the visitation of the mice, as well as of the plague causing death among men, women, and children.”
14 In synagogue readings when this section is read aloud, the word t’chorim is substituted for the word in the Masoretic text, apholim, because, as Talmudic commentators explain, apholim relates to unspeakable things: Rashi’s Commentary, online at Chabad.org, Library, Judaica Press, Complete Tanach, The Bible (with Rashi) Nevi’im, Shmuel I, chap. 5: http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=15834&show rashi=true (April 2006). See also Eichler, “Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6,” 160.
15 The illustrator was probably not familiar with the practice, apparently recorded in this section of the book of Samuel, of creating models of the causes of illness. Healing sanctuaries from the Greek and Roman world are replete with models in terra cotta, stone, or wood of limbs and organs exhibiting tumors that caused disease and death. Those frequenting the sanctuaries hoped to cure the very afflictions on display; Berger, “Sculpted Body Parts,” 1.
16 Plummer and Cockerell, Old Testament Miniatures, 108.
17 Weiss, Die Kreuzritterbibel,1:312.
18 Peter Comestor, Liber I Regum, 8, in PL 198:1300–1301: “Quod Josephus dicit factum ex crudeli passione dysenteriae, ita ut putrefacta egerent intestina, et mures ebullientes de agris corrodebant extales eorum.”
19 Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, ed. and trans. Guest, 108–9.
20 Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, ed. and trans. Guest, 108.
21 The Septuagint specified that “five golden tumors” and “five golden rats” should go into the ark. The Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 6.1.2) has it that five golden images and five golden rats should be sent. In the Vulgate, they are designated as “similitudinem anorum” (models of anuses).
22 Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, ed. and trans. Guest, 109.
23 Thomas, “Introduction et Commentaires,” 19.
24 “En ceste page est conment li fill Israhel sont a consoill et sieent seur piaus de moutons et plentei de souris entr’eus. Et conment les gens muerent es chans et conment dues vaches traients la sainte arche et muaillent por leur veaus ensi revint la sainte arche au tabernacle.” Thomas, “Introduction et Commentaires” (author’s translation).
25 The sixteenth-century Clementine version of the Vulgate, however, does mention “fecerunt sibi sedes pelliceas” (1 Sam. 5:9). The Vulgata Clementina is available online at vulsearch.sourceforge.net/html/1Rg.html.
26 King Louis led the Seventh Crusade from mid-1248 to mid-1254. He left for the Eighth Crusade on 1 July in 1270, and died from an illness on 25 August of that same year, shortly after landing on the coast of Africa.
27 Bucher, Pamplona Bibles, 1:3–4, 9–10.
28 “Et ebullierunt ville et agri in medio regionis illius et nati sunt mures et facta est confusion mortis.” Pamplona Bible, Augsburg, University Library, fol. 95v.
29 Weitzmann, “Zur Frage,” 404–5; and Bucher, Pamplona Bibles, 1:82, 101.
30 Weitzmann, “Die Illustration des Septuagint,” 116–17; and Weitzmann, “Zur Frage,” 402–5.
31 Stahl,“Iconographic Sources of the Old Testament Miniatures,” 218–19.
32 Sandler, “Picture Bible and Illustrated Lives of Saints,” 97–98.
33 Guyart des Moulins, Bible historiale. New York Public Library, MS Spencer 4 ms., fol. 76r.
34 Guyart des Moulins, Bible historiale. New York Public Library, MS Spencer 22 ms., fol. 63r. I thank Dr. Laurie Shepard for her help with this text.
35 Guyart des Moulins writes: “Et grant plente des souris des champs mengoient leur entrail . . . et etait aussi grans mortalietes en la cite.” He also cites, as a possible cause of the epidemic, “the corruption of the air”; Bible historiale, New York Public Library, Spencer 4 ms., fol. 76r. The idea of corrupt air becomes an important explanation for the plague in later texts and illustrations.
36 Komada, “Bible Historiale,” 100–101.
37 Maekawa, Narrative and Experience, 108–11.
38 On the Beatus manuscripts see Williams, Illustrated Beatus.
39 Klein, “Introduction,” 188–89.
40 Revelation 16:1–2 (Vulgate): “Audivi vocem magnam de templo dicentem septem angelis ite et effundite septem fialas irae Dei in terram . . . . Et abiit primus et effudit fialam suam in terram et factum est vulnus saevum ac pessimum in homines qui habent caracterem bestiae et eos qui adoraverunt imaginem eius.”
41 Some malignant substance emanating from a bowl is the way the “soot” for the Exodus story is also frequently rendered. See, for example, the image from the Moralizing Bible, fol. 19v, third image down on right.
42 For the “Morgan Beatus,” see, for example, Williams, Illustrated Beatus, vol. 2, plates 74 and 77. For the “Vitrina 14–1 Beatus,” see ibid., plate 140.
43 For a study of this group, see Lewis, Reading Images.
44 The Cloisters Apocalypse was produced in France in the 1320s in or near Coutance. It derives from what has been termed the “Metz” Group; Klein, “Introduction,” 190.
45 The notion that corrupt air might have been a cause of the Plague of the Philistines was discussed by the Philistine rulers in Guyart des Moulins, Bible historiale, New York Public Library, Spencer 4 ms., fol. 76r.
46 Text in Horrox, Black Death, 173–74.
47 Text in Horrox, Black Death, 41–42.
48 This was an ancient notion, articulated by Hippocrates and elaborated upon by Galen and Avicenna. See Mormando, “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy,” 8.
49 Williams, Illustrated Beatus, 1:104; and Lewis, Reading Images, 214.
50 Courtille, “Vers une nouvelle datation des peintures,” 68–85. See Elina Gertsman’s essay in this volume for further discussion of this fresco.
51 Campbell, Black Death and Men of Learning, 2. See also Jean de Venette, in Horrox, Black Death, 55–57; and the Avignon Musician, also in Horrox, Black Death, 42–43.
52 Camille, Master of Death, 219–20.
53 Lindberg, “Intromission-Extramission Controversy,” 153–54.
54 Lindberg, “Alhazen’s Theory of Vision,” 327–28; and Camille, Gothic Art, Glorious Visions, 22.
55 Quoted in Campbell, Black Death and Men of Learning, 61–62.
56 Froissart, Chronicles, ed. Brereton, 111.
57 Froissart, Chronicles, 112.
58 Marks, Medieval Plague, 108.
59 Gilles Li Muisis, “Chronicle,” in Horrox, Black Death, 50.
60 Ziegler, Black Death, 50, 60.
61 Modern science has shown that on the one hand, certain people will be exposed to a mortal disease and not get sick, and others somehow heal partially through a belief that they can in fact be cured. For recent scientific opinion on the power of the placebo effect see Harrington, Placebo Effect.
62 Jacopus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 1:100. For the development of the cult of St. Sebastian as a plague saint, see Sheila Barker’s essay in this volume.
63 Camille, Master of Death, 177–78.
64 Horrox, Black Death, 13.