ABSTRACT
The fear of death brought on by plague was sufficient to launch some religious movements and to deepen religious sensibilities in an age when religion was seen to have great power. Such religious intensification could be associated with more apocalyptic sensibilities or heretical ideologies. Religious worldviews and narratives of plague deeply affected how early moderns understood and responded to plague. Plague had a wide range of associated meaning and imagery, which helps to explain its multi-valent usage throughout the middle ages and into Modernity. Numerous plague treatises were written in the later Middle Ages and early modern period that explored religious aspects of plague in addition to scientific/medical and policy issues. Processions with saints’ relics and other holy objects were regularly organized against the plague, even in the earliest of plagues. From saints to contemporary mystics and holy people, religion provided hope and possible responses to the outbreak of plague, at times even to the preparation for an epidemic.
