Introduction

Twentieth-century scholarship on premodern writing often distinguished ‘medical’ from ‘spiritual’ approaches to healing. When a premodern physician emphasised the spiritual state of a patient, explored connections between sin and disease or suggested prayer and penitential acts as treatment for illness, many scholars relegated such writings to the ignominious realm of ‘pseudo-science’. Even today, the study of medicine is often associated with material interventions, chiefly dietary recommendations and prescriptive therapeutics. Abraham Yagel’s Moshi‘ah Ḥosim (henceforth MH), a Hebrew plague treatise published in Venice in 1587, challenges this misleading binary. Yagel, a Jewish banker and medical doctor, wrote this work in the wake of sixteenth-century Italy’s most devastating plague outbreak as confidence in the medical establishment ebbed markedly. In MH, traditional advice common in Galenic medicine sits comfortably aside a detailed descrip-tion of how to use biblical incense to treat plague. Naturalistic explanations and religious practices are so closely related in Yagel’s text – and in his cosmology – as to be nearly symbiotic. This chapter joins a new wave of scholarship that seeks to revise and recast narratives stressing the ‘pseudo-scientific’ properties of premodern healing.

Sixteenth-century medical science from the world of northern Italian universities – itself predicated on a blend of long-standing medieval practice and a humanist emphasis on empiricism – was one feature of this Jewish physician’s healing practice. Another was a rich blend of kabbalistic doctrines, appeals to non-physical worlds and psalm recitations. One function of Yagel’s MH, as we shall see, is to medicalise a spiritual text and treat liturgy as prophylaxis against the plague. Although Yagel and his works are known to historians of premodern Jewry, he and his plague treatise are virtually unknown to scholars of the Second Pandemic. This chapter endeavours to bring Yagel’s work into dialogue with current scholarship on plague. In so doing, it builds on work that strives to recast the enduring and misleading scholarly dichotomy between premodern science and religion.

Background to Yagel’s treatise

Abraham ben Hananiah Yagel was born in 1553 in Monselice, part of the Venetian terraferma. His life did not follow the sort of trajectory common to other medical doctors of his time and place, however: he was itinerant; left no record of matriculating at, or graduating from, a university medical faculty; and none of his major works was published during his lifetime.