Faith, Reason And The Plague: A Tuscan Story Of The Seventeenth Century
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
When the plague swept through the Tuscan town of Monte Lupo in 1630, it ignited a fierce collision between the cold logic of public health officials and the fervent spiritual convictions of an embattled community — a conflict that reveals the fault lines of an entire civilization. Carlo M. Cipolla's Faith, Reason and the Plague chronicles this gripping episode in meticulous detail, reconstructing the dramatic standoff between a determined friar, Brother Giacinto da Fucecchio, and the Florentine health authorities who sought to impose quarantine measures on a population that saw divine will, not contagion, as the true author of their suffering. Cipolla, one of the twentieth century's most celebrated economic and social historians, brings his signature clarity and wit to this compact masterwork, illuminating how the tensions between religious authority and rational governance were not merely theological abstractions but matters of life and death. Drawing on rich archival sources, he presents seventeenth-century Tuscany as a microcosm of the broader European struggle to reconcile faith with empirical reason — a struggle that remains, in its essence, startlingly unresolved. Will reason ultimately triumph, or does this small Tuscan town hold a mirror up to a timeless human paradox?
Author: Carlo M. Cipolla
Format: Hardback
Published: 1979
Genre: European history
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
When the plague swept through the Tuscan town of Monte Lupo in 1630, it ignited a fierce collision between the cold logic of public health officials and the fervent spiritual convictions of an embattled community — a conflict that reveals the fault lines of an entire civilization. Carlo M. Cipolla's Faith, Reason and the Plague chronicles this gripping episode in meticulous detail, reconstructing the dramatic standoff between a determined friar, Brother Giacinto da Fucecchio, and the Florentine health authorities who sought to impose quarantine measures on a population that saw divine will, not contagion, as the true author of their suffering. Cipolla, one of the twentieth century's most celebrated economic and social historians, brings his signature clarity and wit to this compact masterwork, illuminating how the tensions between religious authority and rational governance were not merely theological abstractions but matters of life and death. Drawing on rich archival sources, he presents seventeenth-century Tuscany as a microcosm of the broader European struggle to reconcile faith with empirical reason — a struggle that remains, in its essence, startlingly unresolved. Will reason ultimately triumph, or does this small Tuscan town hold a mirror up to a timeless human paradox?