Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe (review)

This collection of essays from a group of Canadian and European scholars of literature, history, art history, and philosophy explores how Europeans perceived contagion in the early modern period. Although writers such as Fracastoro, Paracelsus, and Marsilio Ficino all made important contributions to the development of contagion theory, the period had not yet been the focus of a full-length book on this subject until this volume. The book's contributors succeed in demonstrating how ideas about contagion subtly, and often overtly, permeated the cultural and social worlds of early modern Europe, influencing how people responded to religious diversity, personal relationships, and new literary genres. Contagion was more than just a metaphor: it was "more often than not embodied" (p. xi). Although occasionally the authors push their argument about the centrality of contagion to early modern thought too far, they do on the whole succeed in demonstrating their point.

Part 1 explains early modern theories, with useful contributions by Isabelle Pantin and Claude Gagnon on late medieval influences on Fracastoro's and Paracelsus's notions of contagion. Using lovesickness as an example of contagion from a distance, Donald Beecher explores one of the volume's central themes: early modern Europeans' perceptions of the fluid boundaries between mind and body, between images or ideas and the physical world. A beautiful woman's image, which could create symptoms of disease in those who beheld her, was transmitted through eyesight and therefore contagious. Print thereby represented a real threat to health, since ideas and images could be reproduced and transmitted to a wider audience. Writings about love, and novels themselves, were denounced for their ability to produce cases of lovesickness or other diseases, especially in vulnerable young women (Nancy Frelick, chap. 4, and Michel Fournier, chap. 13)—but print also provided a means to cure or prevent illness by, for example, enabling people to carry a healing saint's image next to the body to protect against plague (Rose Marie San Juan, chap. 8). More controversial is Marianne Closson's inclusion of diseases caused by demons as a form of contagion: this is an intriguing idea that merits attention (contemporaries described devils traveling from body to body), but she insufficiently explores the limits of contagion theory in explaining phenomena as complex as early modern witchcraft beliefs.

Part 2, "Practice," includes fascinating essays by Hélène Cazes and Mitchell Lewis Hammond. Cazes explains how the fear of infection affected interpersonal relationships and behavior on an intimate, daily level. For example, Montaigne kept a moustache to retain pleasant aromas—the smell of "luscious" "melting kisses"—and thereby evade the threat of contagious disease (p. 88). Hammond carefully explores the social impact of contagion, concluding that while the wealthy inhabitants of German cities avoided contact with the sick because these were regarded as socially impure, the poor often sought a contagious-disease diagnosis to obtain access to charitable resources reserved for the sick.

Collectively, the chapters in Part 3 ("Projections") illustrate how ideas of contagion influenced the cultural and social worlds of early modern Europe. Particularly effective is Nicole Greenspan's analysis of how English Protestants regarded Catholics as a source of religious contagion, with contemporary medical debates about contagion and disease shaping the parameters of debate about English policy toward Catholics (toleration being favored by exponents of the Galenic model, and expulsion by exponents of the Paracelsian).

The book's primary limitation is the lack of an analytic introduction to define and delimit key terms—such as the differences between contagion, contamination, and pollution, which are key anthropological concepts. Nonetheless, the book is an important contribution to early modern history of medicine for two reasons: for explaining how early modern Europeans combined mental and physical processes in their understanding of contagion, and for showing the importance of the concept of contagion to early modern European culture.