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䡲 䡲 䡲 Preface Disease, and especially epidemic disease, has played an influential or even central role in human history. Not too long ago, when the focus of historians was largely political, and disease made at best an anecdotal appearance in standard historical narratives, such a statement would have needed justification. But in the past half century, historians and scholars have argued convincingly that disease has been a factor in nearly every aspect of the human experience.1 Few would now dispute that epidemic disease influenced (and continues to influence) political, social, and economic developments; a classic example is the role played by smallpox in the Spanish conquest of the New World. How has humankind responded to this influence? What were the cultural and intellectual responses to epidemics? How have societies made sense of these terrible and traumatic natural disasters that they could neither fully control nor understand? This book examines one aspect of the human experience of epidemics, the transmission of disease—commonly known as contagion—in the context of Christian and Muslim societies in Iberia and North Africa. Much of the attention is focused on the example of the Black Death of the fourteenth century, but in order to fully contextualize the variety and richness of the meanings given to the concept of contagion, the book considers examples from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Epidemic disease disrupts societies and threatens the established social and ethical order. As is true of both the plague and leprosy, the two diseases that figure most prominently in this work, epidemics commonly arouse fear, disgust, helplessness, and incomprehension. How and why epidemics occur have always been closely associated if not interwoven questions, and any discussion of contagion in medieval Iberia involves an at least implicit discussion of how Christians and Muslims responded to these epidemics themselves. Yet the focus here is on the many significances of contagion itself, and specifically on how Christian and Muslim scholars presented understandings of contagion that drew productively and creatively on medical knowledge, empirical observation, religious sources, and previous scholarship. This is a comparative study, in that the worlds of Christian and Muslim scholarship here examined were largely distinct, though they both drew on Greek sources and Abrahamic scriptures. Simultaneously, it strives to avoid the comparativist tendency to reduce a given religion, culture, or x Preface society’s response to a narrow set of characteristics that can be easily juxtaposed with those of another. Instead, the study aims to identify the different parameters within which these two groups of scholars debated the notion of contagion and to clarify why each found it to be of such interest. Christian Scholarship in Iberia The Iberian peninsula was at least tentatively united under Roman rule by the end of the third century BCE, following Rome’s defeat of Carthage in the Second Punic Wars, and it was through Rome that Christianity came to Iberia in the first century CE.2 Although Christians of the time were persecuted for their faith, shortly before 313 CE, when the emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, declaring a policy of religious toleration, the first public council of the Church in Spain boasted nineteen bishops. In the beginning of the fifth century, as the Roman Empire’s control over Iberia weakened, Visigothic tribes crossed the Pyrenees, bringing with them Arianism, a Christian heresy that they continued to profess for another century and a half.3 The Visigoths were not able to consolidate their hold over Iberia until the end of the sixth century, at roughly the same time that they abandoned their adherence to Arianism and officially adopted Catholicism, removing a barrier between them and their Hispano-Roman subjects. The following century witnessed a rapid growth of Christianity in the peninsula. While it is impossible to know what percentage of Iberia’s population was Christian by the time of the Muslim invasion in 711, archaeological evidence strongly suggests that by then the majority of Iberians had adopted Christianity. This Christian population was tended to by an affluent and powerful church, which had become one of the largest landowners in Iberia, second only to the Visigothic royalty. The authors considered in chapters 2 and 4 of this book largely belonged to the ecclesiastical classes of this church. Beginning with the bishop Isidore of Seville (d. 636), they were concerned with policing the purity of the faith of their flock and with maintaining their own social importance. These anxieties were...

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