The historical existence of Saint Roch, which had been doubted in the past, is now securely and universally accepted. Scholars agree also on the length of his life (29 or 30 years). However, as Antonio Niero explains, the exact dates are still open to argument: the learned French Canon, Augustin Fliche, believes it necessary to move his birth to 1350 and his death to 1378/1379. Now many scholars are focussed on the period including 1345-1350 and 1376-1379. This has been called the “second chronology”, as defined recently by Paolo Ascagni, to distinguish it from the traditional one.
The same Ascagni credits the stay at Acquapendente in 1367 and ascertains Roch’s presence in Rome between the end of that year and the beginning of 1368, following Fliche and Antonio Maurino. In his hypothetical return to France, it is thought that death overtook him at Voghera near Lake Maggiore. And it is at Voghera that the oldest and most secure sources related to his cult are found. In the list of local festivals entered in the “Civil and Criminal Statutes” of the city, completed up until 1389 and approved by Giangaleazzo Visconti on the 25 February 1391, we also find the festival of Saint Roch, which began, according to Pitangue, in 1382.
Francesco Pitangue dismisses Montpellier as the birth place of the cult, because during the plagues of 1348, 1384 and 1410, the French city’s University of Law invoked its traditional protectors against the plague, Saint Fabian and Saint Sebastian, but not Saint Roch. According to Ascagni, the first signs of a Rochian cult in Montpellier did not occur before 1415-1420.