Latin-into-Hebrew Treatises on the Black Death

When the first epidemics of the Black Death struck Europe, a specific genre of medical literature on the plague developed. Among the medical manuals circulating at the time, a certain number were also written in Hebrew. Some of them were original works composed by Jewish physicians; other texts were translations of Arabic and Latin works into Hebrew. The phenomenon of Latin-into-Hebrew translations has long been disregarded, as it was considered marginal compared to the Arabic-into-Hebrew movement; this paper sheds light on this lesser-known aspect of the intercultural exchanges involving Hebrew, by focusing on plague treatises. The corpus of medical literature on the plague that was translated from Latin into Hebrew includes works by Gentile da Foligno, Francesco Zanelli of Bologna, John of Burgundy, Petrus de Tossignano, Antonio Guaineri of Pavia, and Valescus de Taranta. The aim of the paper is to offer a general overview of these texts, as until now only incomplete or erroneous information is available.