Bartolomeo da Ferrara,Tractatus predicandus in ciuitate pestilenciata. Conversation with the Authors

The volume offers the critical edition of the most extensive treatment de plague so far found in the preaching, conceived by the author as an incitement to the moral correction of sins, understood as the true cause of the plague. The extensive introduction to the critical edition, edited by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, places Bartolomeo's writing in relation to the historical situation of the plague-stricken cities of Padua, Ferrara and Bologna, and relates it to local and contemporary medical treatises (Tommaso Duranti). The comparison with the sermons de plague of 15th-century preachers - Bernardino da Siena, Giovanni da Capestrano, Antonio Bettini, Bernardino de Busti - allows us to identify the specific character of the treatise, scriptural and theological, of ‘spiritual medicine’ offered to the ‘plague-stricken’ city (Chiara Crisciani).