ABSTRACT
The De plaga que facta est in Hierusalem eo quod dominicum diem non custodiebant chronicles a series of afflictions that struck the inhabitants of Jerusalem – Christians, Jews and Muslims – and their attempts to propitiate God. The Jewish and Muslim rites of atonement resulted in further, even harsher calamities, while the Christians’ three-day fast earned a respite and a revelation to a “servant of God” that these afflictions were imposed because Sunday was not correctly observed. The patriarch of Jerusalem decreed, consequently, that Sunday was to be correctly observed, and a great prosperity descended upon the land. The text of De plaga was published twice, by P. Jaffé and by R. Priebsch, but each of these editions represented a version transmitted in a single manuscript rather than a critical edition. The first part of this study consists of such a critical edition (based on ten manuscripts), a necessary condition for tackling the problems of De plaga’s authorship, literary genre, goals and meanings. These issues are discussed in the second part of the present study.
