Syphilis
Medicine, Metaphor, and Religious Conflict in Early Modern France
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16580755 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Katherine Crawford (0000-0001-9386-2926, Vanderbilt University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 572-574 |
| Publication date | 2015-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | French History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0269-1191 • E-ISSN: 1477-4542 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/fh/crv068 |
| OpenAlex | W2269011055 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
For sixteenth-century Europeans, the New World and religious conflict were recurrent preoccupations—as was syphilis. Especially virulent in its early manifestations in Europe, syphilis seemed to come from the New World, where natives of Brazil experienced it as the ‘maladie de pians’. Blamed variously on lascivious women, on men having sex with lascivious women, or on cannibalism, syphilis, Deborah Losse argues, became a central metaphor for the effects of religious division. Catholic and Protestant condemned each other using syphilis as a metaphor, linking it to contestation over cannibalism as a New World practice and an element in Catholic ritual. Losse weaves together the fiction, philosophical treatises, ethnography, essays and religious polemic to depict a culture struggling with a disease early modern physicians could not contain and a deepening religious crisis the French monarchy could not control. Associated with the failure of sexual self-control, syphilis served as a metaphor for disorder that infected both the individual and the state.
Cannibalism · Ethnography · Ethnology · Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) · Metaphor · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Sociology · Syphilis · Theology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Religious studies · Virology
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2022 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |