Despite the interdisciplinary promise of its title, this book looks at French sixteenth-century plague treatises from a linguistic point of view only. As outlined in the introduction, the author's main goal is to elucidate how and to what ends rhetorical figures were used in plague treatises. Her consideration of relevant context is limited to an analysis of how the genre of plague treatises evolved with regard to the general evolution of logic and dialectics in sixteenth-century France.

Montagne analyzes a body of forty-eight texts originally written in French and published between 1512 and 1607, with a spike in the 1540s and 1580s; she also includes a few French translations of texts that were originally published in Latin but that diverge sufficiently from their source texts to be considered adaptations, shaped by their translators to a significant degree. While a few treatises by surgeons, apothecaries, and barbers are included, the vast majority of texts under scrutiny were penned by medical doctors—a choice that both reflects the distribution of plague treatises among the groups of medical practitioners in the sixteenth century and allows Montagne to develop her main argument about the rhetorical evolution of plague treatises by looking at a sufficiently large body of rhetorically refined texts.

The study is divided into four parts. The first part lists abundant examples of the three main rhetorical figures used in French sixteenth-century plague treatises: metaphors, comparisons, and analogies involving four terms, the latter following the explanatory model of “A is to B what C is to D.” After showing that many figures are recurring, Montagne concludes this part by pointing out that the similes most commonly used are animated, and that the creatures to which the plague is likened share a belligerent nature. In the remaining three parts, the author returns to these same rhetorical figures, analyzing them (in part 2) with the guiding question, What do these figures tell us?; then (in part 3) by unfolding “the study of the rhetorical-dialectical context” of the treatises; and, finally (in part 4), by detailing the impact of the rhetorical figures on the reader.

Her minute attention to the use of rhetorical figures enables Montagne to demonstrate convincingly that in plague treatises “figures are not meant to be ornamental” (395). The medical practitioners used rhetorical figures in order to establish themselves as trustworthy sources experienced in dealing with the illness, either personally or as part of a collective. Her analysis shows that these treatises were often dialogic in nature, had a strongly marked authorial presence, and appealed to emotions by using rhetorical figures that enabled the reader to deal with the unknown by way of the known. Metaphors, comparisons, and analogies continued to be integral parts of the writing style of plague treatises, even when the notion of a rational method became increasingly important in general and medical dialectics, from 1540 on. Thus, the genuine strength of this study is its contribution to our understanding of plague rhetoric.

If we take the book title at face value, and consider the genre of the plague treatise as a symptomatic case for the relationship between Renaissance medicine and rhetoric, broadly speaking, then the author could have considerably strengthened her argument by comparing the role of figurative speech in plague treatises with the role of figurative speech in other medical treatises on illnesses whose causes were actually known. By dealing directly with the obvious objection that the often-avowed inability of the authors to sufficiently define the cause of the plague might well have led to an increased use of rhetorical figures in its description, Montagne could have made an even stronger case for the exemplarity of plague treatises in sixteenth-century medical discourse.