The Reception, Consumption and Broader Context of a French Vernacular Plague Tract Printed in 1495

Abstract

This article focuses on the physician Thomas Le Forestier’s French vernacular plague tract published in Rouen in 1495, to explore how medical advice on epidemic illness was consumed and disseminated in Normandy and further afield in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While plague was an urgent issue facing all people at this time, and the publication of this text in the vernacular ostensibly made its advice more accessible than material in Latin, the article finds that it was probably read above all by physicians or other medical practitioners, including those from a monastic or ecclesiastical context, rather than by a more diverse range of readers. These medical readers sometimes assembled personalised Sammelbände (volumes in which separately produced printed and/or manuscript works were bound together), gathering together a range of health-related texts that could be read alongside each other. Although the extant copies of Le Forestier’s tract do not appear to have travelled beyond France, continental plague printings in Latin were annotated by English readers, indicating the transnational dissemination of such material in the scholarly language shared across Europe. This article focuses on the physician Thomas Le Forestier’s French vernacular plague tract published in Rouen in 1495, to explore how medical advice on epidemic illness was consumed and disseminated in Normandy and further afield in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While plague was an urgent issue facing all people at this time, and the publication of this text in the vernacular ostensibly made its advice more accessible than material in Latin, the article finds that it was probably read above all by physicians or other medical practitioners, including those from a monastic or ecclesiastical context, rather than by a more diverse range of readers. These medical readers sometimes assembled personalised Sammelbände (volumes in which separately produced printed and/or manuscript works were bound together), gathering together a range of health-related texts that could be read alongside each other. Although the extant copies of Le Forestier’s tract do not appear to have travelled beyond France, continental plague printings in Latin were annotated by English readers, indicating the transnational dissemination of such material in the scholarly language shared across Europe.