ABSTRACT
This article will discuss two strategies of rejection, both accusations of causing injury, but neither normally linked with the other. They are two varieties of insidious damage, accusations of witchcraft on the one hand, and on the other, diagnoses of hidden infectious disease. Infection and causing occult harm are both hidden from observation; a carrier can transmit disease to others without showing any signs of infection; a witch looks like anyone else. From their hiddenness both forms of harm afford the same kind of opportunity for accusations and exclusions. To historians the anthropologist’s analysis of witchcraft appears in antique fancy dress, as if the subject is cast to be played in skins or the clothes worn by their own seventeenth-century dramatis personae. However, combining witchcraft with infectious disease as two strategies in the same process of exclusion and rejection may shed light on some shady corners of medical history. The argument that follows will summarize some of the anthropological analyses of witchcraft accusations in order to apply the same approach to the supposed epidemic of leprosy in northern Europe in the twelfth century.
