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  • La Contagion: enjeux croisés des discours médicaux et littéraires (XVIe–XIXe siècle) by d’Ariane Bayle
  • Hugh Roberts
La Contagion: enjeux croisés des discours médicaux et littéraires (XVIe–XIXe siècle). Sous la direction d’Ariane Bayle. Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2013. 208 pp.

This collection of articles examines how the emotions elicited by works of art and by the medical terminology of contagion have intersected, from the sixteenth century with the emergence of the first modern theories of infection to the period immediately prior to the foundation of the field of microbiology in the nineteenth. The disciplinary range here is wide: although most of the contributors are literary specialists, many articles concern the history of medicine, and an epilogue, by Philippe Monneret, is a linguistic reflection on what a metaphor of contagion might amount to. An elegant postface by the editor neatly weaves together the different case studies and places them within the context of previous work on the topic. A helpful bibliography and index complete the volume. Given these scholarly tools and the high quality of the research, the collection will be an essential reference point for anyone interested in contagion and cognate questions. The contributions on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topics make a particularly coherent group and will be the focus here. The first essay, by Concetta Pennuto, examines the Renaissance medical theory of contagion as expounded by the Veronese doctor Fracastor, which holds that bodies infected by the same disease share certain bodily states, also seen in cases that do not lead to illness; hence yawning is infectious and seeing someone eating sour fruits is itself unpleasant. Sexual fantasies are agreeable but dangerous, since pregnant women can imprint the image of what they desire on their unborn child. The vagueness of such ideas meant that they were readily applied in various fields, including enquiries into the physiological and psychological effects of works of art. Dominique Brancher, in a very stimulating contribution, examines how Renaissance medical writers approach the eroticism of poetry and farce in often duplicitous ways, exciting the very desires they claim to suppress. Françoise Poulet’s chapter adopts a similar approach to the intersection between medicine and literature, focusing on portrayals of madness. Lise Wajeman explores the love of statues, especially in Renaissance Italy, where viewers are so enamoured of a given sculpture that they are, in effect, petrified — the result of mimetic infection of stone on body that speaks of the power of art. The idea of contagion was commonplace in seventeenth-century disputes about the morality of the theatre, as Clotilde Thouret shows; yet the metaphor used by critics of the theatre changed over time, from that of a plague to the Cartesian notion that plays imprint passions on their audiences. Sarah Nancy examines why, when a given art form is taken to be contagious in the early modern period, it is also gendered as feminine; this, she argues, is best explained with reference to the early modern distinction between reason and emotion, rather than by viewing it simply as misogyny, even if that distinction was itself already gendered. Given its scope and quality, this volume is likely to be of interest to scholars in various fields, but especially to those concerned with early modern intersections of medicine with art and literature. [End Page 243]

Hugh Roberts
University of Exeter
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