Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe

ISBN-13: 9781403939265 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 289 str.

Dr Claire L. Carlin

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Introduction; C.L.Carlin 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

O autorze

DONALD BEECHER Professor of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada DOMINIQUE BERTRAND Professor of French Literature, Université Clermont II, France HÉLÈNE CAZES Lecturer in Renaissance French Literature, University of Victoria, Canada FRÉDÉRIC CHARBONNEAU William Dawson Scholar and Professor of Eighteenth-Century French Literature, McGill University, Canada MARIANNE CLOSSON Lecturer in Renaissance Literature, Université d'Artois, France MICHEL FOURNIER Assistant Professor, Department of French, University of Ottawa, Canada NANCY M. FRELICK Associate Professor of French, University of British Columbia, Canada CLAUDE GAGNON Researcher, and founded of Horizons Philosophiques NICOLE GREENSPAN Researcher MITCHELL LEWIS HAMMOND Assistant Professor of History, University of Victoria, Canada DANIEL LINDMARK Professor of History and History Didactics, Umeå University, Sweden ISABELLE PANTIN Professor of Renaissance Literature, Université of Paris X-Nanterre, France GUY POIRIER Lecturer in French Renaissance Literature, Department of French Studies, University of Waterloo, Canada ROSE MARIE SAN JUAN Lecturer, Department of History of Art, University College London, UK DAVID SHUTTLETON Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK