LEPROSY

LEPROSY

1. Rawcliffe - definitions subject to a range of shifting social, cultural and moral imperatives

   • Attitudes to SEGREGATION influenced by the Church's interpretation of Scripture
     • Links to HERESY
       • Heretic was spiritually diseased, as was the leper - striking impact in France (contagion of Catharism)
         • Not so much the case in England
           • Nirenberg - local context and the need for specific cases to be emphasised rather than a homogenous outlook towards lepers across w. Europe
         • Hostility and suspicion of the vagrant leper developed later in England than France
   • Influenced by English common law; urban and manorial custom
   • From C11th increasingly specialist vocabulary
     • More rigorous and systematic approach to the identification of suspects
     • Popular dissemination of scientific theories about public health and the environment during the latter Middle Ages
     • Cases of physicians reluctant to label every skin disease leprosy, and seek greater categorisation of skin afflictions, and the ambiguity of the disease and its effects
     • Misdiagnosis continued
       • In towns and villages where fear of pestilence and mistrust of the rootless poor escalated during periods of crisis -  supports COHN
     • Fear of transmisson personified disorder, dismemberment and economic collapse
       • Rawcliffe - English stigmatisation of the lepers as promiscuous and threatening developed later
         • Response to growing fears of vagrancy and social unrest from the early C14th onwards - largely URBAN phenomenon
   • REVISION of the marginalisation of lepers
     • Colonial administrators and evangelicals adapted the past to support their campaigns for mandatory segregation and missionising - creating a larger issue to heal it
       • Powerful image of Ostracism, Forcible Detention and Fear of Contagion
         • Seized the imagination of poets and writers both sides of the Channel - permeating the pages of scholarly and popular studies of Leprosy
         • Presenting the leper as a marginal figure, shunned throughout the ages
     • NOT extreme as it has been written for generations

2. Disease an Act of God

   • To punish, reform or reward the sufferer
     • Reward = remitting the pains of purgatory through the patient acceptance of earthly torments
   • Heredity, extreme anxiety, bad air and celestial forces lay beyond personal control; escaped moral censure
   • OT- Nebuchadnezzar and Herod
     • Herod - personification of pride and wrath
       • Familiar to medieval audiences both from the stage and the pulpit
     • N's madness destroyed rational faculties - beyond salvation
   • POSITIVE ASPECT
     • English devotional conviction that illness 'pacientlye and gladly' endured would purify the soul and facilitate its journey through purgatory
     • Lepers living out purgatory on earth - God's favoured

3. SIN

   • Sexual promiscuity and indulgence causing leprosy
     • THE MANIFESTATION OF SIN
     • Lepers as lecherous, and filled with sexual lust - Richards
     • C12th version of 'The Romance of Tristan' by French poet Beroul
       • Lepers lusting after adulterous Queen Yseult
         • "Give us Yseult, so that we can share her in common. No lady ever endured such an end. Sire, we burn with so much lust!"
         • Rawcliffe - Paralleling burning lust and wretched appearance of lepers with heroine's sexual licence and luxury
           • Her soul is as leprous as the bodies of her potential abductors
       • Beroul reflects mounting sense of clerical unease
         • Leading clergy in Paris see the bands of lepers and misfits, living outside the norms of society, as a THREAT - social order and power
   • Close connection between spiritual and physical health
     • Caroline Walker Bynum
       • "something profoundly alien to modern sensibilities about the role of the body in medieval piety"
       • Body and the soul interwoven in theology and medieval medicine - Aristotelian
   • WERE OSTRACISED
     • St Julians, St Albans - distinctive garb
       • Sober habit of black and russet, with long sleeves, ankle-length overcoat and hooded cape, would have made them immediately visible long before their deformed features
       • Black - colour of sin and darkness, spiritual symbolism of their dress - to be abhorred
     • 1212 Council of Paris
       • Ruled inmates of leprosaria should assume a habit and follow a rule - visible sign of their 'othering'
     • Reinforcing gender hierarchy
       • Leprosy and sex had the effect of reinforcing the generally held view of the inferiority and potential immorality of women - RICHARDS
       • Women potential source of infection
         • Intercourse with a menstruating woman caused leprosy
   • Judas and AVARICE
     • His death had infected Judea and hence all Jews, and AVARICE was most evident in its manifestation of leprosy - Nirenberg
     • Judas reputed to have revaled Jesus' location for a bag of money, and when he hung himself, his excrement polluted Judea

4. Identification between Christ and lepers

   • Queen Matilda & Hugh of Lincoln
     • Prompted a fashion for conspicuous acts of abasement before the most physically repugnant individuals.
   • Beaten and crucified Christ frequently said to have been 'quasi leprosus' (like a leper)
   • A life of pain and rejection could bring one closer to God
     • St. Anselm - 'the progress of the soul grows out of the failure of the flesh'
     • Bernard of Clairvaux - disease a divine gift; pregnant with opportunity
     • Biblical righteousness of Job
       • Medieval depictions teemed with the severity of his disease and the humility of his response to unbearable suffering. 'Cult of Job' flourished
     • Used by medical practitioners - Guy de Chauliac (d. 1368)
       • Affliction shows election rather than a curse.
       • Incautious words about sin might plunge the victim into despair, whereas a message of divine love would help him to 'stand in pees'.
     • Medieval hagiography; people BEGGING for infliction of leprosy
       • C11th Irish monk Finian Lobhar
         • Miraculously cured a blind, mute and leprous child by assuming the disease himself and suffering patiently under the lash of God.
       • Saintly treatment of lepers is a backhanded recognition of the popular sentiment of fear and revulsion RICHARDS

5. NOT OSTRACISED

   • Belief that lepers could not be expected to withdraw from society unless they had regular access to the sacraments
     • Louis VI of France's (d. 1137) instructions to the clergy of Compiegne
   • Rawcliffe - misinterpretation of the III Lateran Council
     • Providing SUPPORT for leper communities, whose members already obliged by Mosaic Law to live apart from the healthy
       • Leprosaria across England and Europe - catering for noble cases (Walsingham), or some with as few as two or three beds in rural areas
     • Church's apostolic mission to the sick, deploring the lack of chapels and clergy in wider society
     • Alexander III granted all leprosaria an exemption from the payment of tithes on agricultural produce
       • Papal endorsement of the relief towards lepers
   • No special uniform within the IV Lateran Council
     • Neither canon law nor local custom demanded lepers ought to wear anything distinctive in England

6. WILD and the TAME Rawcliffe

   • Common categorisation among ecclesiastical and urban authorities
   • Church's response to the 'wild' - refusing to modify their behaviour and thus moral panic
     • Assumption they would contaminate the rest of society
       • Inchoate dread of the unruly and the ungovernable poor - supporting MOORE
       • Disturbed state of France in early C14th
         • Speed which the rumours spread
         • Popular fears crystallised following famine and hardship
           • Fury turned on groups who were seen to be threatening the life and health of the country
             • RICHARDS - minority groups acting together (suspected poisoning of wells) the most feared element of medieval life
               • Jews and heretics implicated in the rumours
         • Rumours that lepers poisoning the wells; burnings and killings in 1320 and 1321
         • NIRENBERG - social conflict expressed in various discourses about kingship, bodies, Jews and the nature of evil
     • C12th Parisian clerk - "vagrant, drunken and debauched lepers, corrupting others in their bad example"
     • Bernard of Gui
       • "unhealthy in body and insane in mind"
       • 1322- permanently immured
         • were enclosed in places from which they could never come out, but wither away and languish in perpetuity, so that they would not do harm or multiply
         • 1322 - Jews expelled from France
     • By infecting the healthy, lepers sought to reduce all Christians to their sinful state
       • REMOVAL OF THE SIN REQUIRED - Nirenberg
   • Implicated with civic disorder and unrest - social concerns as much as religious
     • Mounting tensions awareness - combating the sexual license of the C12th and the 'rise of the individual'

7. RICHARDS - synonym for outcast

   • Purifying - Washing and cleansing procedures of the lepers as religious procedures have a hygienic value.

8. Moral Economy

   • Lepers and the monarch
   • Moral management of the body manifest in the physical corruption of that body - metaphors of illness and infection
   • Distinction between spiritual and physical leprosy easily obscured in popular moral tradition
     • Physical leprosy a punishment for spiritual sin