Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe

Front Matter....Pages i-xii
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance’: Old and New Trends in Renaissance Discourse on Contagion....Pages 3-15
The Animism of Ambient Air at the End of the Middle Ages....Pages 16-31
Windows on Contagion....Pages 32-46
Contagions of Love: Textual Transmission....Pages 47-62
The Devil’s Curses: The Demonic Origin of Disease in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries....Pages 63-76
Front Matter....Pages 77-77
Apples and Moustaches: Montaigne’s Grin in the Face of Infection....Pages 79-93
Contagion, Honour and Urban Life in Early Modern Germany....Pages 94-106
Corruptible Bodies and Contaminating Technologies: Jesuit Devotional Print and the 1656 Plague in Naples....Pages 107-123
Quarantine and Caress....Pages 124-138
The Preaching Disease: Contagious Ecstasy in Eighteenth-Century Sweden....Pages 139-153
Front Matter....Pages 155-155
A Contagion at the Source of Discourse on Sexualities: Syphilis during the French Renaissance....Pages 157-176
Contagious Laughter and the Burlesque: From the Literal to the Metaphorical....Pages 177-194
The Pathology of Reading: The Novel as an Agent of Contagion....Pages 195-211
Religious Contagion in Mid-Seventeenth Century England....Pages 212-227
Contagion by Conceit: Menstruosity and the Rhetoric of Smallpox into the Age of Inoculation....Pages 228-242
An Afterword on Contagion....Pages 243-260
Back Matter....Pages 261-289