Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth Century Tuscany

"Faith, Reason, and the Plague is an extraordinary book about a couple of different visitations of the plague in a tiny Tuscan town during the seventeenth century, during a time when ideas about religion were changing. The response to the plague in Tuscany became a fulcrum for debate about whether the clergy should continue to command life beyond church doors. The emerging professional class of doctors and administrators explained concepts like contagion and infection that are obvious to us now, but which were really very new at the time. Cippolla uses court records and other kinds of primary evidence to explore what happened when the plague arrived as science started to challenge the way religion traditionally shaped people’s belief. He does it in about 80 pages of marvellous micro-history . In response to the visitation of disease , this new class of medical professionals and administrators was urging the population to self-quarantine to avoid the spread of infection, while local priests, who largely had control of the population, were saying, ‘This is an act of God; to ward off the plague we need to come together for a mass.’ “In the 19th century, reservations became breeding grounds for infectious diseases like tuberculosis” These forces were completely at odds with one another. One is suggesting, based on empirical evidence, that people need to separate themselves. The other one is saying that to stop the plague we must come together and praise God. Cippolla shows how these questions of faith and reason, as he puts it, created enormous conflicts."