The editors point out that while the plague, Bubonic and other such epidemics, have attracted scholarly analysis for the political, economic, demographic, and medical impact it has made, relatively few studies have investigated the connection between the plague and either theological reflection or popular piety (A. Lynn Martin's Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the 16th Century [Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1996] being an exception). This collection of nine essays—papers presented together at a New England Renaissance Conference—not only places at our disposal assessments of several ways in which the religious faith and pious instincts of Byzantine, western medieval, and early modern Christians—theologians and lay—reacted to outbreaks of the plague. This volume also creatively explores how historians of Christian thought and ecclesiastical life, art historians, and social historians can successfully blend their insights to produce more sharply focused pictures of the past than each might without the other disciplines' insights. Art history predominates in this collection, but its practitioners pay careful attention to theology and popular piety as well as the social dimensions of the plague's devastating impact.

The concluding essay, Professor Mormando's skillful examination of the “enigmatic painting,” Plague in an Ancient City, by Flemish painter Michael Sweerts (1618–1664), who resided in Rome around 1650, places Sweerts and his work in the political and ecclesiastical context of the mid-seventeenth century. The longest essay of the nine, some eighty pages, it traces in detail why other explanations of the significance of this depiction of the horror of mass disease must give way before its identification with the fourth-century plague that struck during the reign of Julius the Apostate. Mormando situates the painting in the context of the plague of 1649 and of the ecclesiastical-political maneuvering of Pope Innocent X, who in the wake of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) was attempting to combat Protestantism, with its new measure of security in the empire, and to discipline those Roman Catholic monarchs who had made the Protestant gains possible, particularly Louis XIV of France and Emperor Ferdinand III. The essay further explores the early modern discussion of the proper interpretation of the ecclesiastical history of Nicephorus (which ranged partisans of Cesare Baronio's Annales eccleisiastici against the Magdeburg Centuries of the Lutherans Matthias Flacius, Johannes Wigand, and Matthaeus Judex) and seventeenth-century interpretations of the ancient pagan religious spectrum, including the connection of Mithraism, along with other elements of popular religion in the Roman Empire of the early Christian era, in order to identify elements of the painting that could allude to heresy, in Julian's court and in Protestant Europe of 1650. Mormando shows that Sweerts's painting reinforces the message of contemporary Roman preachers, “the only true, effective remedy for plagues of any sort or dimension was repentance for their sin, emendation of their ways, true conversion, and a return to the ‘one true faith’” (303).

Although each essay stands alone as an integral study itself, they all contribute to the reader's appreciation of Mormando's climax to the volume. Anthony Kaldellis's assessment of “anxieties of piety” (1) in sixth-century Byzantium demonstrates that in Byzantine theology and popular piety, some interpreted the plague as God's punishment and call for repentance, while others seemed overwhelmed by the mystery of God's use of evil and tried to avoid speculation over the larger causes of this affliction.

Three essays treat medieval depictions of the plague. Focusing on Europe north of the Alps, Pamela Berger's “Mice, Arrows, and Tumors” scrutinizes the growing fascination with the macabre in portrayals of the plague, at a time when chroniclers found it easier to pass over outbreaks with little mention. Elina Gertsman also assesses the macabre in various fourteenth-century portrayals of the plague, but she also notes the ambiguity of attributing this artistic trend directly to the plague. Sheila Barker follows the development of depiction of Sebastian's martyrdom from the early church through the Renaissance, showing how the saint gradually came to be associated with the plague.

Ronald Rittgers offers the lone study of Protestants and plague in the collection, focusing on the outbreak in Nürnberg 1562–1563. He compares the reactions of preachers and city officials at that time to similar responses to outbreaks in the late Middle Ages and in 1525. Rittgers demonstrates that “the Evangelical burgher was not an anxiety-ridden protopuritan completely devoid of the spiritual consolation preached by Luther and others. Recent scholarship has presented a one-sided picture of Evangelical burgher mentalities” (151). From the sermons of the sixteenth-century Lutheran preachers, Rittgers concludes that the plague was indeed seen as punishment of sin and a call to repentance, but the preachers also assured their hearers that “God did not punish his faithful children—he only disciplined them” (151).

William Eamon presents a different kind of study, the case of the Inquisition's inconclusive investigation of a Dominican, Antonio Volpe, a popular itinerant healer in the 1560s, who ran afoul of a businessman and physician, Decio Bellobuono, who accused him of heresy. Volpe disappeared from the public record once the Inquisition closed his case, but this affair demonstrates the tensions between physicians and their “amateur” rivals and the ways in which ecclesiastical policies and structures played roles in the larger stage of the society.

Elisabeth Hipp's careful assessment of both artistic elements and the ecclesiastical and pious context of Nicolas Poussin's The Plague at Ashdod is a model of cross-disciplinary exposition and aids in setting the scene for Mormando's investigation, as does Thomas Worcester's finely focused reading of three devotional treatises by the seventeenth-century French Jesuit Etienne Binet, which used plague as spiritual medicine and medicine as spiritual metaphor.

In every culture, the places where physical health and healing meet religion and popular belief help illumine both of these key elements of human society and others as well. These nine essays, enriched by copious reproductions of works of art in several cases, are indeed illuminating and provide patterns for further interdisciplinary study.