Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: From England to the Mediterranean ed. by Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati (review)

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• Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: From England to the Mediterranean ed. by Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati
• Kaitlin Sager (bio)

Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati, eds. Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: From England to the Mediterranean. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. 424 pp. Hardcover, $140.00.

Elma Brenner and François-Olivier Touati's edited volume, Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: From England to the Mediterranean, is an invaluable addition to the body of work on leprosy in the medieval period. Encompassing the overlapping disciplines of history of medicine, [End Page 225] cultural history, art history, as well as new findings in bioarchaeology, osteology, and paleopathology owing to innovations in ancient DNA (aDNA) research, this book successfully bridges the gap between the sciences and the humanities in disease studies. By focusing on identity as the central concept in their study, the contributors to this volume manage to dispel oft-repeated myths about medieval leprosy in Western Europe, especially the idea that its sufferers were subjected to complete isolation and institutional neglect and had to resort to mendicancy to survive. With a focus on both institutional and non-institutional constructions of identity around leprosy, the book not only addresses those who suffer from the infection, but also the communities with whom they interacted and to which they claimed membership. Leprosy and Identity is an essential read not only for scholars of the Middle Ages, but for anyone interested in the social history of disease. Its thoroughly researched chapters by scholars from a wide variety of disciplines help to make sense of an illness whose sufferers have been heavily stigmatized and historiographically misrepresented as social pariahs. This research reintegrates leprosy sufferers into complex social and institutional contexts, complicating and problematizing the simplified historical narrative of leprosy as a taboo disease which resulted in social isolation and rejection.

Contributors to the volume address leprosy in many different geographical and chronological contexts but remain in conversation with one another by focusing on institutional settings, material histories, and language to better understand the experiences and identities of communities affected by leprosy. The book is comprised of five parts, with one to three chapters in each section. Part 1, "Approaching Leprosy and Identity," contains broad surveys based on geographical, historical, and archaeological data, helping to ground the reader in the historical and religious myths around the origins and initial spread of the infection. In chapter 3, for example, Damien Jeanne applies René Girard's scapegoat theory and analyzes Latin terminologies in Thomas Becket's miracles to better understand the dichotomy between leper as scapegoat and leper as sanctified in Catholic thought. In Part 2, "Within the Leprosy Hospital: Between Segregation and Isolation," scholars make use of both of documentary evidence and archaeological findings from leprosaria, analyzing economic and social aspects of institutional life to determine how these groups functioned on a day-to-day basis. Elma Brenner's chapter, "Diet as a Marker of Identity in the Leprosy Hospitals in Medieval Northern France," provides a fascinating slice of daily life in the leprosarium through the exploration of food-sharing [End Page 226] rituals and how they connect to religious and social ideals of charity and hospitality. Part 3 then shifts to leprous communities outside of the institution. Lucy Barnhouse and Luke Demaitre's chapters use linguistic and visual analysis to demonstrate how people living with leprosy in the Middle Ages were perceived and described by those around them. This strategy of linguistic analysis is continued in Part 4, where Anna M. Peterson analyzes terminologies in Latin, Occitan, and Italian used to refer to leprosy to get a better sense of how these communities were regarded in these thriving medieval cities.

This volume ends with "Post-medieval Perspectives" by Kathleen Vongasthorn and Magnus Vollset, in which they argue that the resurgence of scholarly interest in medieval leprosy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries carried with it the ideological aim of justifying European colonization and promoting civilizing religious missions in the tropics. While this chapter is rich and fascinating to read, the historiographical complexity of medieval leprosy and its relationship to colonization warrants more than one...