n'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
Science, Paris, 1887, p. 178; also Hecker, and especially Hoeniger, Gang
und Verbreitung des Schwarzen Todes in Deutschalnd, Berlin, 1889. For
a long list of towns in which burnings of Jews took place for this
imaginary cause, see pp. 7-11. As to absolute want of sanitary
precautions, see Hecker, p. 292. As to condemnation by strong
religionists of medical means in the plague, see Fort, p. 130. For a
detailed account of the action of Popes Eugene IV, Innocent VIII, and
other popes, against witchcraft, ascribing to it storms and diseases,
and for the bull Summis Desiderantes, see the chapters on Meteorology
and Magic in this series. The text of the bull is given in the Malleus
Maleficarum, in Binsfield, and in Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels,
Leipzig, 1869, vol. i, pp. 222-225, and a good summary and analysis of
it in Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprocesse. For a concise and admirable
statement of the contents and effects of the bull, see Lea, History of
the Inquisition, vol. iii, pp. 40 et seq.; and for the best statement
known to me of the general subject, Prof. George L. Burr's paper on
The Literature of Witchcraft, read before the American Historical
Association at Washington, 1890.

In Germany its development was especially terrible. From the middle of
the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Catholic
and Protestant theologians and ecclesiastics vied with each other in
detecting witches guilty of producing sickness or bad weather; women
were sent to torture and death by thousands, and w