07 Dec




















Desiderantes, issued by Pope Innocent VIII, in 1484. This utterance from the seat of St. Peter infallibly committed the Church to the idea that witches are a great cause of disease, storms, and various ills which afflict humanity; and the Scripture on which the action recommended against witches in this papal bull, as well as in so many sermons and treatises for centuries afterward, was based, was the famous text, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." This idea persisted long, and the evolution of it is among the most fearful things in human history.(332) (332) On the plagues generally, see Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages, passim; but especially Haeser, as above, III. Band, pp. 1-202; also Sprengel, Baas, Isensee, et al. For brief statement showing the enormous loss of life in these plagues, see Littre, Medecine et Medecins, Paris, 1875, pp. 3 et seq. For a summary of the effects of the Black Plague throughout England, see Green's Short History of the English People, chap. v. For the mortality in the Paris hospitals, see Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Graces en France, Paris 1866. For striking descriptions of plague-stricken cities, see the well-known passages in Thucydides, Boccaccio, De Foe, and, above all, Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. For examples of averting the plagues by processions, see Leopold Delisle, Etudes sur la Condition de la Classe Agricole, etc., en Normandie au Moyen Age, p. 630; also Fort, chap. xxiii. For the anger of St. Sebastian as a cause of the plague at Rome, and its cessation when a monument had been erected to him, see Paulus Diaconus, cited in Gregorovius, vol. ii. p. 165. For the sacrifice of an ox in the Colosseum to the ancient gods as a means of averting the plague of 1522, at Rome, see Gregorovius, vol. viii, p. 390. As to massacres of the Jews in order to avert the wrath of God in pestilence, see L'Ecole et la

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