Monete e peste: strumenti di cura e veicolo di contagio

Alongside the increasingly consistent discovery in the course of archaeological excavations of low-medieval burials related to the spread of the plague in which more or less substantial accumulations of coins were found, written and archaeological sources broaden the significance of the coin/plague relationship. They testify to the positive and negative roles that could be attributed to coins, in the first case as an artefact endowed with therapeutic powers, in the second as an object which could spread contagion. The first part of the paper analyses some ‘numismatic recipes’ against the plague, transmitted in the works of Gentile da Foligno, Giovanni di Rupescissa and Iacobo Soldi (14th and 15th centuries), which suggest the use of gold coins (ducats and florins) as ingredients for the preparation of the aurum potabile. The second part focuses on the so-called English Boundary/Plague Stones, which, at the time of the London Plague (1665-1666), were said to have functioned as territorial boundaries in towns and villages afflicted by the disease and as receptacles for coins, which had to be sterilised by immersion in water or vinegar before their use.