Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe

298 Pages·2005·2.182 MB·English

by  Claire L. Carlin (eds.)

Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe
Also by Claire L. Carlin
PIERRE CORNEILLE REVISITED
THEATRUM MUNDI
WOMEN READING CORNEILLE
Imagining Contagion in
Early Modern Europe
Edited by
Claire L. Carlin
University of Victoria
Canada
Editorial matter, selection, introduction © Claire L. Carlin 2005
All remaining chapters © Palgrave Macmillan 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-3926-5
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First published 2005 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-51974-3 ISBN 978-0-230-52261-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230522619
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Imagining contagion in early modern Europe / edited by Claire L. Carlin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Communicable diseases–Europe–History. 2. Epidemics–Europe–History.
I. Carlin, Claire L.
RA643.7.E85I53 2005
614.4′94′09031–dc22 2005045403
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on the Contributors viii
Preface xi
Part I Theory 1
1 Fracastoro’s De Contagioneand Medieval Reflection on ‘Action
at a Distance’: Old and New Trends in Renaissance Discourse
on the Plague 3
Isabelle Pantin
2 The Animism of Ambient Air at the End of the Middle Ages 16
Claude Gagnon
3 Windows on Contagion 32
Donald Beecher
4 Contagions of Love: Textual Transmission 47
Nancy Frelick
5 The Devil’s Curses: The Demonic Origin of Disease
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 63
Marianne Closson
Part II Practice 77
6 Apples and Moustaches: Montaigne’s Grin in the
Face of Infection 79
Hélène Cazes
7 Contagion, Honour and Urban Life in Early Modern Germany 94
Mitchell Lewis Hammond
8 Corruptible Bodies and Contaminating Technologies:
Jesuit Devotional Print and the 1656 Plague in Naples 107
Rose Marie San Juan
9 Quarantine and Caress 124
Frédéric Charbonneau
v
vi Contributor
10 The Preaching Disease: Contagious Ecstasy in
Eighteenth-Century Sweden 139
Daniel Lindmark
Part III Projections 155
11 A Contagion at the Source of Discourse on Sexualities:
Syphilis during the French Renaissance 157
Guy Poirier
12 Contagious Laughter and the Burlesque: From the Literal
to the Metaphorical 177
Dominique Bertrand
13 The Pathology of Reading: The Novel as an Agent of Contagion 195
Michel Fournier
14 Religious Contagion in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England 212
Nicole Greenspan
15 Contagion by Conceit: Menstruosity and the Rhetoric of
Smallpox into the Age of Inoculation 228
David E. Shuttleton
An Afterword on Contagion 243
Donald Beecher
General Bibliography 261
Index 271
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without early, enthusiastic
support from the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the
University of Victoria, its founding Director, Harold Coward, the current
Director, Conrad Brunk, and staff members Moira Hill, Leslie Kenny and
Susan Karim. Major funding was provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Hannah Development
Grant from Associated Medical Services.1Several other offices and depart-
ments at the University of Victoria contributed the additional funding
that was essential to our success: the Office of the President, David
Turpin, the Office of the Vice-President Academic, Jamie Cassels, the
Office of the Vice-President for Research, Martin Taylor, the Office of the
Dean of Humanities, Andrew Rippin, the Office of the Dean of Human
and Social Development, Anita Molzahn, along with the Departments of
French and English, the Medieval Art Research Group and the European
Studies Program. I am also very grateful to Bruce D. Wonder, who made a
substantial contribution to the September 2003 meeting of the project
team in Victoria.
Among the contributors to the volume, Hélène Cazes deserves special
thanks for her help with the bibliography, as well as the initial conception
of the project. Donald Beecher also did exceptional service, having written
the Afterword as well as one of the chapters. Indeed, Don’s work led to my
own interest in the topic of contagion.
Present at the team meeting but not able to contribute to the volume
were Philippe Desan, Guy Spielmann and Colette Winn. Their participation
was invaluable in the evolution of the project.
The enormous task of doing a first English version of the six chapters
submitted in French fell to graduate research assistant Rachel Warrington.
Her efforts are greatly appreciated, as is the editorial assistance provided by
Daniel Bunyard at Palgrave Macmillan.
Note
1 Associated Medical Services Inc. (AMS) was established in 1936 by Dr Jason
Hannah as a pioneer, prepaid, not-for-profit health care organization in Ontario,
Canada. With the advent of Medicare, AMS became a charitable organization sup-
porting innovations in academic medicine and health services, specifically the
history of medicine and health care, as well as innovations in health professional
education and bioethics.
vii
Notes on the Contributors
Donald Beecheris Professor of English at Carleton University in Ottawa.
He has published on Renaissance medicine, as well as some twenty critical
editions of Renaissance plays, early English prose fiction and early music.
Currently, he is preparing a two-volume collection of sixteenth-century
Italian comedies in translation for the Da Ponte Library. His most recent
articles deal with cognitive approaches to Renaissance authors and sex
changes in early medical literature.
Dominique Bertrand, Professor of French Literature at the Université
Blaise Pascal Clermont-Ferrand, specializes in the representation of laughter
and burlesque poetics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is
the author of Dire le rire à l’Age classique (1995) and Poétiques du burlesque
(1998), and is preparing a critical edition of the Aventuresof Dassoucy.
Claire Carlin is Associate Professor of French and Associate Dean of
Humanities at the University of Victoria. She is the author of Pierre Corneille
Revisited (1998) and Women Reading Corneille (2000), and is the editor,
among other volumes, of Le mariage sous l’Ancien Régime. Her work on early
modern marriage led to her interest in the history of medicine and the idea
of contagion.
Hélène Cazes teaches French Renaissance literature at the University of
Victoria. A contributor to the volume Henri Estienne, Imprimeur et Ecrivain
(2003), her current research topic is ‘Children and Childhood in Renaissance
France’. She came to the history of medicine during her research on the
representation of infants and exploration of the textual transmission of
Galen’s theories by the humanists.
Frédéric Charbonneau, William Dawson Scholar and Professor of
Eighteenth-Century French Literature at McGill University, has been
working on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literary history in
three specific domains: memoirs, prose genres and the representation of the
body. He is the author of Les Silences de l’Histoire(2001; Raymond-Klibansky
Prize Finalist); and co-edited, with Real Ouellet, an anthology of Nouvelles
françaises du XVIIe siècle(2000).
Marianne Closson, Maître de conférences en littérature de la Renaissance
at the Université d’Artois, is the author of L’Imaginaire démoniaque en France
(1550–1650). Genèse de la littérature fantastique (2000). Her research focuses
viii
Notes on the Contributors ix
on demonology and demonic possession through the nineteenth century,
viewed from both anthropological and literary perspectives. She has also
published on baroque theatre.
Michel Fournieris an Assistant Professor in the Department of French of
the University of Ottawa. His publications centre on the anthropology of
fiction, history of reading and seventeenth-century French literature.
Nancy M. Frelick is Associate Professor of French at the University of
British Columbia. She is the author of Délie as Other: Toward a Poetics of
Desire in Scève’s ‘Délie’ (1994) as well as articles on a number of early
modern writers, including Scève, Rabelais, Montaigne, La Boétie, Gournay,
Flore and Marguerite de Navarre.
Claude Gagnonpublishes his work in Chrysopoeia, a periodical dedicated
to the history of alchemy, and regularly contributes to Aries(Journal for the
Study of Western Esotericism). His principal field of interest is the history of
Western theories of the soul from Aristotle to the present day. In 1979, he
foundedHorizons philosophiques, a journal devoted to popular philosophy,
published by the Collège Édouard-Montpetit in Montreal.
Nicole Greenspanis a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. She is
completing a dissertation on news culture and the politics of anti-popery in
mid-seventeenth-century Britain and has published articles on the Stuart
courts-in-exile in the 1650s. She teaches at Sheridan College in Ontario,
Canada.
Mitchell Lewis Hammond is an Assistant Professor of History at the
University of Victoria. His research interests in early modern Europe
include the activities of medical practitioners, poor relief and public health,
and changing perceptions of illness and the body. His current project is a
comparative study of medicine and society in the imperial cities of the
Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Daniel Lindmark is Professor of History and History Didactics in the
Department of Historical Studies and the Teacher Education Faculty, Umeå
University, Sweden. He has published in various fields of educational and
religious history, including emigration and Saami studies. His most recent
books areReading, Writing, and Schooling: Swedish Practices of Education and
Literacy, 1650–1880(2004), andEcclesia Plantanda: Swedishness in Colonial
America(2005).
Isabelle Pantin is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the Université of
Paris X-Nanterre, and associate researcher at the Observatoire de Paris
(CNRS, SYRTE) on the history of astronomy. Her publications include La