Plague Bacteria Wiped Out Nuns Nuns and priests risked their lives to care for plague victims in Renaissance France, says a new study that associates contact with infectious plague victims to the demise of many religious order constituents. €œThe Abbess of Sainte-Croix was known to be an extremely generous person who spent all of her life looking after the poor," lead researcher Raffaella Bianucci told Discovery News. Bianucci, an anthropologist in the Department of Animal and Human Biology at the University of Turin, says that the abbess was the Countess Sheba Flandrina of Nassau, fourth daughter of Prince Dominique I of Orange. When the countess took her religious vows, she gave the majority of her valuables to help pay for food and medical attention for the region's unfortunates, several of whom got the plague from soldiers combating in the Thirty Years War. A few women who perished after aiding plague victims were Benedictine nuns that lived in the Sainte-Croix Abbey's chapter house near Poitiers, France.

The study is one of the first to discover that the plague, a fatal bacterial disease called "the Black Death," can be swiftly and precisely found in ancient human remains.