St. Roch

Roch — also called Rocco or Roque — is the plague saint of western Christendom, and his cult, which spread with epidemic speed across Europe in the fifteenth century, is one of the most remarkable phenomena in late medieval popular religion. The historical figure is difficult to recover, because the earliest biography postdates his death by perhaps a century and the details vary considerably between traditions.

The most commonly accepted account makes him a native of Montpellier, born around 1295 or 1350 — the dates conflict — of a merchant family. Orphaned young, he gave away his inheritance, took the pilgrim's habit, and walked to Italy, arriving there during one of the great plague visitations of the fourteenth century. At Acquapendente, at Cesena, at Rome, at Piacenza, he tended the plague-stricken with a devotion that eventually cost him the disease himself. He withdrew to the forest outside Piacenza to die, but did not die: a dog belonging to a local nobleman found him daily and brought him bread, and a spring appeared for his water. He recovered and eventually attempted to return to Montpellier, where he was arrested as a spy — apparently unrecognisable after his years of illness and exposure — and died in prison after five years, still unidentified.

The competing biographical traditions resist adjudication and no exact chronology can be established. What is more certain is the cult's explosion across Europe from the 1410s onward, triggered by the miracle attributed to his relics at Venice in 1485 when plague ceased after the translation of his body. From that moment his image — the pilgrim who shows the plague-bubo on his thigh, attended by the dog — became one of the most universally recognizable in Christian iconography. He was invoked wherever plague threatened, and the confraternities founded in his name became some of the most active charitable institutions of the late medieval period.