ABSTRACT
Between 1473 and 1519 plagues threatened German-speaking lands roughly once a decade, striking various cities around 1473, 1483–85, 1494–96, and 1504–07. 1 German physicians, clerics, and printers responded to contemporary fears by embracing the new print technology to popularize their medical and spiritual guidance. For physicians, this first flourish of printed plague treatises began with Heinrich Steinhöwel’s vernacular work of 1473, the first printed plague monograph in all of Europe. This chapter explores a variety of plague texts produced before and after this introduction of print in order to understand how plague advice changed, considering especially the trends of popularization and vernacularization. Another purpose of this chapter is to provide a detailed portrait of the wide array of natural and spiritual medicine that late medieval authors recommended for plague, especially before the changes of the Reformation era. While physicians’ plague treatises written in the German vernacular form the core set of sources, this chapter also considers printed religious devotional literature and single-leaf broadsides, as well as a small number of manuscript sources written in German or Latin since 1348.
