Leprosy in Medieval England

This is probably one of the most important publications for many years in the fields of medical, religious and social history. Rawcliffe's book completely overhauls our understanding of leprosy and contributes immensely to our knowledge of the English middle ages. Over the last ten years there have been concerted efforts to challenge preconceived ideas about past disease. Rawcliffe's book should therefore be set next to studies by Samuel K. Cohn on the Black Death (2002) and Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson and Roger French on the Great Pox (1997), as well as ongoing French research on leprosy (especially by F.O. Touati). Well aware of these precedents, Rawcliffe's monograph is a well-informed and richly-detailed study, inter-disciplinary in its attention to art, literature, law and hagiography as well as medical material. Rawcliffe is determined to demolish modern misconceptions of medieval leprosy, most of which, she argues, were created in the nineteenth century in relation to emergent germ theories, imperialism and social Darwinianism. Thus her first chapter tackles the nineteenth-century prism through which we view medieval leprosy, exploding two influential myths: the ideas that a leper had to undergo a quasi-funeral ceremony (the leper's ‘mass’), and that they were strictly enclosed within an institution. Rawcliffe successfully argues that modern ideas of leprosy as a state of living death and of lepers as social outcasts have more to do with the legacy of colonialism and the nineteenth-century literary imagination than they have to do with medieval experience of disease

Ancient history · Archaeology · Ceremony · Colonialism · Discipline · Early Modern Europe · Leprosy · Middle Ages · Mythology · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Medicine Studies · Leprosy Research and Treatment · Medicine

• Social isolation

  Open Access•Kevin Bingham•Annals of Leisure Research•2021

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