Table of Contents

Introduction; C.L.Carlin PART I: THEORY Fracastoro's De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on 'Action at a Distance': Old and New Trends in the Renaissance Discourse on the Plague; I.Pantin The Animism of Ambient Air at the End of the Middle Ages; C.Gagnon Windows on Contagion; D.Beecher Contagions of Love: Textual Transmission; N.M.Frelick The Devil's Curses: The Demonic Origin of Disease in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; M.Closson PART II: PRACTICE Apples and Moustaches: Montaigne's Grin in the Face of Infection; H.Cazes Contagion, Honour and Urban Life in Early Modern Germany; M.L.Hammond Corruptible Bodies and Contaminating Technologies: Jesuit Devotional Print and the 1656 Plague in Naples; R.M.San Juan Quarantine and Caress; F.Charbonneau The Preaching Disease: Contagious Ecstasy in 18th-Century Sweden; D.Lindmark PART III: PROJECTION A Contagion at the Source of Discourse on Sexualities: Syphilis during the French Resistance; G.Poirier Contagious Laughter and the Burlesque: From the Literal to the Metaphorical; D.Bertrand The Pathology of Reading: The Novel as an Agent of Contagion; M.Fournier Religious Contagion in Mid-Seventeenth Century England; N.Greenspan Contagion by Conceit: Menstruosity and the Rhetoric of Smallpox into the Age of Innoculation; D.Shuttleton An Afterword on Contagion; D.Beecher General Bibliography

About the Author

CLAIRE L. CARLIN is Associate Professor of French and Associate Dean of Humanities at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of Pierre Corneille Revisited (1998) and Women Reading Corneille (2000), and the editor, among other volumes, of Le Mariage Sous L'Ancien Regime. Her work on early modern marriage led to her interest in the history of medicine and the idea of contagion.