Rudolf von Ems

Plagued by doubt and viral misinformation: the need for evidence-based use of historical disease images

“…This second image comes from an early 15th-century reproduction 17 of Rudolf von Ems's mid-13th-century Swiss Weltchronik, a German-language world chronicle used as political propaganda by the Hohenstaufen dynasty. 18,19 Around 1411, Dietrich von Lichtensteig produced a new, illustrated version of the text (popularly called the Toggenburg Bible) for Count Frederick VII of Toggenburg. 20 In this version, von Ems's 13th-century text about the ten plagues of Egypt surrounds the image that now erroneously carries a Black Death caption.…”