Volume 27, Number 11 · June 26, 1980
Rats or Cheese?
By J.H. Elliott
Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany
by Carlo M. Cipolla, translated by Muriel Kittel
Cornell University Press, 113 pp., $9.95
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by John Tedeschi, by Anne Tedeschi
Johns Hopkins University Press, 208 pp., $14.00
The plague of 1630—that plague so graphically depicted in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi—was carried into Italy by German soldiers in the Imperial army on their descent toward Mantua. From Milan it spread to Tuscany, which it reached in August, and it was soon ravaging Florence and the neighboring communes and villages. Some places, like Altopascio,[1] were lucky enough to escape. Others succumbed all too easily. Among these was the little walled village of Monte Lupo, some twenty miles to the west of Florence.
Review, 3102 words
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