Exclusion And Salvation:Leprosy In Medieval Western Europe

In Western Europe, leprosy prevailed in the High Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this kind of "popularity" does not mean that the number of the lepers is truly considerable. To some extent, it was just the imagination of medieval people, and was produced by certain social contexts and people’s mentalities. Facing this horrible disease, the attitudes of medieval society divided into two branches:while taking lepers as monsters both physically and spiritually and trying to escape, people also considered that they had been given special gifts by the Lord and thus, approached them. However, the simple paradox is not the ultimate answer of this question. In fact, these two conflict attitudes were blended together. During the Middle Ages, leprosy struck people’s hearts from both good and evil at the same time. Therefore, numerous archives presented both two attitudes simultaneously. This phenomenon was tightly bound with contemporary social backgrounds and people’s mindsets and emotions. In order to cope with this ubiquitous specter, medieval society invented a series of measures.By citing various kinds of documents, the first chapter presents that medieval society’s attitudes to leprosy are twofold. Beginning with introducing the nature of leprosy, then, the first part of this chapter sets forth some basic features of medieval leprosy and leprosaria. The second part elucidates these two paradoxical opinions in legends, statutes, sermons, and hagiographies, etc. However, these two attitudes are interdependent, both can be noticed in some sources at the same time. This is the task of the third part.The second chapter tries to explain the roots of this contradiction. After making the reasons of popularity clear, this chapter deals with the leprosy-related texts and contexts in The Bible firstly. Then, the second part looks for the reasons from medieval social contexts, including the status of Christianity, the influence of Germanic identities, the transformation of social-economic backgrounds, the institutionalization of charity, the example of Saints, and the Crusades. Though leprosy was linked with many other things in the Middle Ages, it is still a disease. So, the last part attempts to explore the concept of disease and medicine of the medieval Latin West. However, the concept itself is very different from ours today, it cannot be understand without the medieval background.The final chapter’s contents are the institutional management of leprosy in the Middle Ages. The first part contains that how lepers were judged at that time. The second part states that, after the suspected patients were finally diagnosed, they needed to be announced "dead for this world". The whole ritual was nearly the same as the funeral. The third part introduces briefly a "pseudo-international" organization named the Order of St. Lazarus which had close relations with leprosy. Finally, as the most important measure in coping with lepers, leprosaria are elucidated in detail finally.Discussing from phenomena to reasons to solutions, it is easily to notice that firstly, medieval Western Europe had a twofold attitude towards leprosy. The negative one was not purely created to criticize the Dark Middle Ages, and the positive one was also not imagined to defend. Secondly, the countermeasures were not the results of one single opinion, but the results of both two.