12 • The Great Plaguetian ritual. In today’s Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Venice, commemorative
monuments, votive altars, and even new churches stand as testimonies to the
tragedy.
Artists recast saints who had lived long before the time of pestilence as
heroic figures battling the unwanted invader. A favorite subject was the sec-
ond-century Christian martyr Saint Sebastian. He had been executed after
miraculously surviving the persecuting Romans’ shower of arrows, which
symbolized the pagan god Apollo’s wrath. In early modern paintings, the ar-
rows in this saint’s flesh appeared as plague-poisoned weapons of a wrathful
God’s Destroying Angel, sent to punish humans for sinful acts. For Catho-
lics, Saint Sebastian’s survival offered hope that God would mercifully stay
the angel’s hand. In Protestant England and Holland, the menacing figure of
the Destroying Angel, stripped of the association with intercessory saints,
was deeply embedded in popular tracts and common speech. For Catholics
and Protestants alike, the anguish of plague was chiseled in stone and
painted on canvases by major and minor artists, including the great classicist
Nicolas Poussin. Today, biomedical plague specialists and art historians turn
to these visual representations as windows onto this world of unfathomable
physical and emotional suffering.^27
Material responses joined religious ones. Each community decided what
public activities to allow (religious gatherings being favored, fairs prohibited),
where to place the infected, how to bury the dead, and how to relieve the suf-
fering. In some places religious hospitals for the poor were commandeered.
Old leper houses, called lazarettos(after Lazarus, a beggar covered with sores
in a parable by Jesus),^28 were also available thanks to the mysterious decline of
leprosy—the most dreaded disease of pre–Black Death times. Gradually, ma-
jor cities and some towns built lazarettos or pesthouse hospitals exclusively
for plague patients, which in practice meant the sick poor. Wealthy house-
holds never sent a family member to one of these forbidding holding places,
though some house servants passed through a pesthouse door.
Public and private agendas often conflicted, as magistrates placed restric-
tions on daily habits while residents improvised to survive. At Salisbury in
1627 and Colchester in 1631 , angry women burned down the local pesthouse.
Their motives were mixed, but much of their anger stemmed from the con-
ditions in the pesthouses. Plague hospitals were widely perceived as places
where poor people were sent to die and where their bodies were tossed in an
adjacent plague pit.^29 In Florence, one of the most tightly controlled cities
during epidemics, hundreds of women and men took to the streets in 1630 to
demand that the large plague hospital be closed and all its patients returned