Reply to: RE>St. Roch
Dear Graham,
This has turned out to be a rather long answer to your questions re Roch; feel free to skip to the end for the bibliography if you feel like it!
PLAGUE SAINTS: The saint most usually appealed to for protection against plague was the 4th century Roman martyr Sebastain, who was shot with arrows for refusing to apostatize, miraculously survived & then was subsequently beheaded. His earliest cult was a function of his status as a martyr & primarily limited to Rome; the first references to him as a protector against the plague seem to date from the late 8th century. The traditional biblical symbolism of the arrow as a metaphor for divinely-sent, sudden disease and death seems to be at work here, in conjunction (I think) with the concept of martyrdom as imitation of Christ, so that Sebastian comes to be venerated as a kind of alter-Christus, who offers himself as a vicarious sacrifice to the angry deity on behalf of his worshippers. Sebastian continues to be appealed to during the Middle Ages to ward off epidemic disease, but his cult really takes off with the return of bubonic plague to Western Europe from 1348 on for the next several centuries (untill well into the 17thc).
ROCH: Throughout the Renaissance, Sebastian remained the most popular and universally venerated plague saint; his cult was never supplanted or overshadowed by that of Roch. Roch is a strange case, a really shadowy and ahistorical figure (sometimes I think he was actually just invented!); his earliest life is an anonymous & undated vita (1st half of the 15thc?) which is composed almost entirely of hagiographic clichés and has little or no specific historical details, let alone dates. It ends by claiming that Roch was canonized but more recent research has proven this to be fictitious. The same seems to be true of the claim in a later 15thc vita (written in 1478) that Roch was appealed to during an outbreak of plague at the Council of Constance in 1416. How Roch's cult ever gets going at all still puzzles me: there's no body, no tomb, no pilgrimage site, and no interested order, city or even, as far as one can tell, family. My guess is perhaps it might have started as a localized cult in Piacenza (Emilia), where he is supposed to have cured plague victims & which has been suggested as the place of origin of the anonymous writer of the earliest vita. If anyone else on the list has any thoughts I would love to hear it. Roch's cult as a plague protector seems only to become more widely known during the second half of the 15thc and, as far as I can tell, seems to have been localized primarily in northern Italy. He starts appearing alongside Sebastian in altarpieces from the Veneto in the 1460s & around this time there are confraternities that start to be dedicated to him (eg in 1467 an existing confraternity in Padua rededicates itself to him). In fact, in several central Italian cities in the 1460s & 70s it seems to be confraternities dedicated to Roch which are the main sponsors of his cult in their town/region, organizing processions etc and commissioning images. The biggest impetus to the proliferation of his cult I think was the devastating series of plague epidemics which occured throughout Italy from 1477-79. A new life is written by the Venetian governor of Brescia in 1478, which went into several editions in the next decade; his name is inserted in the Venetian missal in 1481; and finally in 1485 his relics are triumphantly installed in Venice. From then on his cult has a physical focus and interested institutions to promote it, and he becomes the second universal plague saint after Sebastian. Of course, there is always the Virgin to appeal to if things get too bad, and even Christ himself, but that's another story...
The best studies on Roch I have found are:
Andre Vauchez, "Rocco", in *Bibliotheca Sanctorum*, vol. 9, Rome, 1968, 264-73.
Irene Vaslef, "The Role of St. Roch as a Plague Saint: A Late Medieval Hagiographic Tradition", Ph.D., Catholic University of America, 1984 (with English translations of both lives).
More problematic though still important to consult are the studies by A. Fliche, *L'art et les saints: Saint Roch*, Paris: Laurens, 1930; and "Le probleme de Saint Roch", *Analecta Bollandia*, 68, 1950, 343-61.
There is also a published German PhD on images of Roch, which is useful as a topographical survey of extant images: M.T. Schmitz-Eichoff, *St. Rochus: Ikonographische und medizin-historische Studien*, (Kolner medizin-historische Beitrage, 3), Cologne: F. Hansen, 1977.
I have published on the imagery of plague saints, including Roch:
L. Marshall, "Manipulating the sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy", *Renaissance Quarterly*, 47, 1994, 485-532; I also have a chapter on Roch in my dissertation, " 'Waiting on the Will of the Lord': The Imagery of the Plague", PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 1989.
I hope any of this is helpful/of interest, and I'd love to hear from any other list members who share my obsessions with wounded bodies and bleeding saints! Best wishes,
Louise Marshall
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Louise Marshall
Dept. of Fine Arts
University of Sydney
NSW 2006 Australia
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