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“The Devil constantly roams the earth seeking someone to devour.” 

565J Bernardino de’ Busti. (1440-1513)

(with additions by Illuminatus Novariensis and Samuel Cassinensis)

Venice: Georgius Arrivabenis, 1498. (In two parts, dated: I) 31 May 1498; II) 16 Aug. 1498)  Price $17,750

Quarto:18 x 16 cm: Sign: Vol. I: π8 3-48 56 a-z8 ỵ8 ƺ8 ⱹ8 Ɂ8 ƾ8 aa-ff6, gg4-290f Vol. II: ✠8 ✠✠10; A-Eee8 [-Eee8, a blank] =425 of 426 f.

Bound in nineteenth-century quarter sheep over marbled boards.
The title is soiled with damage and discoloration to head margin, with loss to one word verso (three letters supplied in manuscript).

The Plague:

Jussi Hanska, calls Sermon XL (Pars prima) [f. 256r-261v] in Bernadino de’ Busti’s collection of Easter sermons a “how to survive a plague” manual, which imparts a great deal of practical information and pragmatic advice to his Pavia congregation at a time when Italy was under virtually constant and unending threat of plague and other epidemic scourges.
Divided into four parts: 1. introduction, followed by a section on the signs. that an epidemic is on the way (in qua ponunt signa ex quibus possumus cognoscere pestilentiam debere venire in brevi), which is astrological in nature, and suggests how to read other catastrophes, such as earthquakes and plagues of insects (notably, a plague of locusts tormented the Italian peninsula in 1478, following a heat wave). 3. (huius sermonis de causis quare Deus mittit pestilentiam) treats the reasons God sends plagues, with discusses “putrid air” and pestilential places. 4. (huius sermonis de remedis co[n]tra pestilentiam), is a summary of the remedies against plague, which opens with the practical concept of cito, longe, tarde, or “leave quickly, fly far, and return slowly,” a precept in place since the original medieval European plague outbreak of 1348.(The Black Death) Most plague sermons written from 1348 to the end of the 15th century tended to follow the dictates of church dogma: that plagues (and other catastrophes) are the result of an excess of sin. These sermons usually conclude with advice on how to elevate one’s lifestyle now so that future plagues can be avoided. Very few such sermons bore actual information about the nature and causes of plague. Bernardino de’ Busti’s sermon, which though bookended with stern admonitions to the sinful, is essentially a vade mecum on understanding and surviving a plague. Written sometime between 1475 (when Bernardino entered the order of the Observant Friars Minor of the Lombard vicariate in Pavia), and 1498, (when this collection was published), Sermon XL, the Sabbato post quartam dominicam in quadragesima de pestilentie signis causis et remediis, was probably delivered when a plague was imminent, or at least raging nearby. The tone of the sermon suggests that plague was on everyone’s mind, and so could have been delivered in 1479, when the plague was rampant in England, or possibly in 1481 or 1483, when serious outbreaks occurred in Northern Italy and Germany. (It is worth nothing that in 1486 sudor anglicus, or the English sweating sickness, had arrived in Germany, and in 1494, syphilis was in harsh evidence, and even though Bernardino is specifically sermonizing here about what we now call bubonic plague, the threat of new and emerging lethal epidemics was ever-present.)
See The Sacred and the secular in medieval healing http://gecsero.web.elte.hu/doctors_and_preachers.pdf

Witchcraft

Sermon XVI is devoted to the exposition on witches.

Unlike the Dominican demonologists, de Busti treated witchcraft (for instance in

his 16th sermon) as a form of idolatry and superstition, and as such as a violation of the first commandment, a kind of improper worship. While being harmful magic it was not seen as a stereotypical diabolical conspiracy. However, Busti described a woman who practiced magic and renounced the catholic faith as ‘stria’, a species of female witches that had the credit of getting to the insides of men, and thus devouring them. Sermon 16 of Bernardino Busti’s Rosarium Sermonum,proves a rich source for the developing concept of witchcraft at the close of the fifteenth century. The sermon elaborates on ways in which it is possible to sin against the proscription of idolatry in the first commandment. Busti was particularly worried about three elements of idolatry common to depictions of witches: demonic involvement, ritualistic behaviors, and negation of the principles of Christianity. By describing maleficae et maladictae feminae who renounced the. Catholic faith, he contributed to ratification of the stereotype of the striga in the early modern period. See Conti: https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/35491852

Supersition

Benardino Busti and other Franciscan writers arranged the superstitious practices they wrote to oppose. One of these was outright idolatry. Others included forms of divination, observance of omens, interpretation of dreams, use of amulets, and more elite practices such as necromancy and the ars notoria. Also included among superstitious practices was maleficium, which could be translated as witchcraft.

Conti argues, however, that Busti and other Franciscan writers treated maleficium still mainly as simple harmful magic, not as a practice inevitably linked to news, more terrible stereotypes of diabolical, conspiratorial witchcraft emerging in the fifteenth century. They addressed those notions too, however, and it is to witchcraft address nocturnal travel to a witches’ sabbath, the ludus Dianae, or when

they describe witches’
supposed belief in their
own ability to transform
(or be transformed by
demons) into cats.
Grounded firmly in the
tradition of the canon
Episcopi, observant
Franciscans regarded both
as entirely illusory–
merely the deception of
demons worked on the
feeble minds of foolish
women, and sometimes men. They were by no means unaware of other developing theories of witchcraft, however. They incorporated the notion of witches’ traveling to the ludus Dianae on rods anointed with hideous unguents, whereas the canon Episcopi refers only to women riding on animals in the train of the supposed goddess Diana, a demon in disguise. Here they reflected a stereotype developing since the early fifteenth century in regions around the western Alps….they began in some ways to conflate the ludus Dianae tradition with the separate ludus bariloti, that envisioned malefactors magically entering locked houses, to feast, drink from wine barrels, and commit other indecent revelries. This ludus, Franciscan authorities were willing to posit, might reflect real, physical action, but they never allowed that to affect their judgment that travel with Diana was always completely illusory.

Socioeconomic Observations:

Many of Busi’s sermons discuss methods and theories for coping and exploring the causes of natural disasters by religious means.
Busti, see many ‘natural disasters’ as not so natural and rather ‘caused’ by man’s sinfulness, but this position is not a simple transaction of Bad behavior leas to the natural (God’s) wrath but instead it has a socioeconomic aspect. On Plagues Busti writes That the Poor are moved by necessity 

“To eat many corrupt, harmful things which are counter to and abominable to nature: generating putrid, venomous diseases. Thus, pestilences of the poor is caused by the rich who refuse to provide for them” [f. 256v].

Goff B1336; H 4163*;BMC V 387 (IA. 22572)BMC V, 387; Goff B-1336; GW 5807; ISTC ib01336000; H 4163; Walsh 2141; Proctor 4935; BSB-Ink B-1018.

• Hanska, Jussi, Strategies of Sanity and Survival: Religious Responses to Natural Disasters in the Middle Ages (Vol. II of Studia Fennica Historica), Helsinki, Finnish Literature Society, 2019, pp 111-113.
• Viets, Henry, and Ballard, James, “Notes on the Plague Tracts in the Boston Medical Library,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. VIII, No. 3, Baltimore: JHUP, 1940, pp. 370-80
• Bowers, Barbara S., and Keyser, Linda Migl, Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages Ch. 4, Gecser, Otto, “Doctors and Preachers against the Plague: Attitudes toward Disease in Late Medieval Plague Tracts and Plague Sermons.” New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 94-5.
• Conti, Fabrizio, Preachers and Confessors against “Superstitions,” The Rosarium Sermonum by Bernardino Busti and its Milanese Context. Budapest: 2011, pp. 45-6;