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. This chapter explores a variety of plague texts produced before and after this introduction of print in order to understand how plague advice changed, and considers the trends of popularization and vernacularization. Spiritual advice was arguably the dynamic element of German plague treatises in the decades before the Reformation, even as physicians retained the genre's traditional focus on natural medicine. The chapter provides a 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. Vernacular texts were sometimes very different from their academic cousins in both their medical and spiritual content, since their imagined audiences were different. The chapter considers printed religious devotional literature and single-leaf broadsides, and a small number of manuscript sources written in German or Latin since 1348.
