Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, C. L Carlin (éd)

Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe
Ed. C. L. Carlin. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005. 304 pp.

URL de référence:
http://www.palgrave.com/products/Catalogue.aspx?is=1403939268

Description
The ideological underpinnings of early modern theories of contagion are dissected in this volume by an integrated team of literary scholars, cultural historians, historians of medicine and art historians. Even today, the spread of disease inspires moralizing discourse and the ostracism of groups thought responsible for contagion; the fear of illness and the desire to make sense of it are demonstrated in the current preoccupation with HIV, SARS, 'mad cow' disease, West Nile virus and avian flu, to cite but a few contemporary examples. Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe explores the nature of understanding when humanity is faced with threats to its well-being, if not to its very survival.

PART I: THEORY
Fracastoro's De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on 'Action at a Distance': Old and New Trends in the Renaissance Discourse on the Plague; I. Pantin

The Animism of Ambient Air at the End of the Middle Ages; C. Gagnon

Windows on Contagion; D. Beecher
Contagions of Love: Textual Transmission; N.M.Frelick

The Devil's Curses: The Demonic Origin of Disease in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; M. Closson

PART II: PRACTICE
Apples and Moustaches: Montaigne's Grin in the Face of Infection; H. Cazes

Contagion, Honour and Urban Life in Early Modern Germany; M.L. Hammond

Corruptible Bodies and Contaminating Technologies: Jesuit Devotional Print and the 1656 Plague in Naples; R. M. San Juan

Quarantine and Caress; F. Charbonneau

The Preaching Disease: Contagious Ecstasy in 18th-Century Sweden; D. Lindmark

PART III: PROJECTION
A Contagion at the Source of Discourse on Sexualities: Syphilis during the French Resistance; G. Poirier

Contagious Laughter and the Burlesque: From the Literal to the Metaphorical; D. Bertrand

The Pathology of Reading: The Novel as an Agent of Contagion; M. Fournier

Religious Contagion in Mid-Seventeenth Century England; N. Greenspan

Contagion by Conceit: Menstruosity and the Rhetoric of Smallpox into the Age of Innoculation; D. Shuttleton

An Afterword on Contagion; D. Beecher

General Bibliography