Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe

Part I. Theory

1. Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance’: Old and New Trends in Renaissance Discourse on Contagion
Isabelle Pantin

2. The Animism of Ambient Air at the End of the Middle Ages
Claude Gagnon

3. Windows on Contagion
Donald Beecher

4. Contagions of Love: Textual Transmission
Nancy Frelick

5. The Devil’s Curses: The Demonic Origin of Disease in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Marianne Closson

Part II. Practice

6. Apples and Moustaches: Montaigne’s Grin in the Face of Infection
Hélène Cazes

7. Contagion, Honour and Urban Life in Early Modern Germany
Mitchell Lewis Hammond

8. Corruptible Bodies and Contaminating Technologies: Jesuit Devotional Print and the 1656 Plague in Naples
Rose Marie San Juan

9. Quarantine and Caress
Frédéric Charbonneau

10. The Preaching Disease: Contagious Ecstasy in Eighteenth-Century Sweden
Daniel Lindmark

Part III. Projections

11. A Contagion at the Source of Discourse on Sexualities: Syphilis during the French Renaissance
Guy Poirier

12. Contagious Laughter and the Burlesque: From the Literal to the Metaphorical
Dominique Bertrand

13. The Pathology of Reading: The Novel as an Agent of Contagion
Michel Fournier

14. Religious Contagion in Mid-Seventeenth Century England
Nicole Greenspan

15. Contagion by Conceit: Menstruosity and the Rhetoric of Smallpox into the Age of Inoculation
David E. Shuttleton

16. An Afterword on Contagion
Donald Beecher

Keywords: History, European History, History of Philosophy, History of Science, Modern History, World History, Global and Transnational History