ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical overview of leprosy, bubonic plague, and syphilis in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and a history of the scholarship surrounding each disease. Essentially, I examine the early moral associations of each disease and how those associations changed over time. For the purposes of this chapter, I am looking at how medical and theological communities participated and interacted in the construction of the reception of disease. As I demonstrated in the last chapter, medicine was increasingly moving towards secularization, but it was not entirely free from the effects of theology, especially in relation to interpretation. Consequently, both medical and theological communities interpreted these three diseases through a moral filter that saw disease as a divine punishment sent to correct man’s sins. This chapter explains the foundation through which the medical and theological communities interpreted disease. With this foundation in place, I am able to examine the cultural meaning of disease as implied by literary authors who participated in and transmitted these ideas to a larger social body.
