ABSTRACT
While Sontag has shown that for cancer and AIDS many of these moral associations with illness are medically unfounded, they still exist. More importantly, these moral connections not only function on a metaphoric level, but also operate on a literal level that needs further examination, especially in the medieval period. For example, when a medieval doctor said that plague was caused by usury, he might not be making metaphorical connections to the state of the patient’s soul or of society’s morality, but might literally have meant that usury causes the plague. As Sontag has shown, epidemic diseases whose means of transmission is unknown are the diseases most susceptible to moral (what I term metaphoric) associations (Illness, 58-9). These moral associations are numerous and shifting. This book follows the moral associations connected to leprosy and bubonic plague by medical, theological, and literary communities from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. I demonstrate how these epidemic diseases raise concerns about an errant society.
