Histories of Medieval Plague in Renaissance Italy.

The article focuses on how sixteenth-century Italian physicians and scholars reinterpreted the history of plague, particularly challenging the fourteenth-century view that the Black Death (1347–1353) was unprecedented. Influenced by Renaissance humanism, expanded historical sources from antiquity, the Byzantine Empire, and the Middle Ages, and an inductivist epistemology, these medical humanists such as Girolamo Mercuriale and Girolamo Cardano catalogued and categorized plagues, emphasizing continuities among epidemics across time rather than exceptionalism. They integrated historical accounts into medical theory and practice, viewing plague as a recurrent phenomenon rather than a unique catastrophe, thereby broadening the scope of historiography beyond political narratives to include cultural and natural history. This Renaissance perspective contrasts with later nineteenth-century historians like Justus Hecker, who revived the notion of the Black Death as a singular turning point, a view that modern scholarship has begun to reassess.