Infectious ideas : contagion in premodern Islamic and Christian thought in the Western Mediterranean
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Infectious ideas : contagion in premodern Islamic and Christian thought in the Western Mediterranean
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011
Available at 9 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
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  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [245]-266) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the transmission of disease in the premodern Mediterranean world. How did religious communities respond to and make sense of epidemic disease? To answer this, historian Justin K. Stearns looks at how Muslim and Christian communities conceived of contagion, focusing especially on the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the Black Death. What Stearns discovers calls into question recent scholarship on Muslim and Christian reactions to the plague and leprosy. Stearns shows that rather than universally reject the concept of contagion, as most scholars have affirmed, Muslim scholars engaged in creative and rational attempts to understand it. He explores how Christian scholars used the metaphor of contagion to define proper and safe interactions with heretics, Jews, and Muslims, and how contagion itself denoted phenomena as distinct as the evil eye and the effects of corrupted air. Stearns argues that at the heart of the work of both Muslims and Christians, although their approaches differed, was a desire to protect the physical and spiritual health of their respective communities.
Based on Stearns's analysis of Muslim and Christian legal, theological, historical, and medical texts in Arabic, Medieval Castilian, and Latin, Infectious Ideas is the first book to offer a comparative discussion of concepts of contagion in the premodern Mediterranean world.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chronological List of Relevant Muslim and Christian Scholars Who Wrote on Contagion in the Premodern Period
Introduction: Contagion and Causality in the Study of Premodern Muslim and Christian Societies
1. Contagion in the Commentaries on Prophetic Tradition
2. Contagion as Metaphor in Iberian Christian Scholarship
3. Contagion Contested: Greek Medical Thought, Prophetic Medicine, and the First Plague Treatises
4. Situating Scholastic Contagion between Miasmaand the Evil Eye
5. Contagion between Islamic Law and Theology
6. Contagion Revisited: Early Modern Maghribi Plague Treatises
Conclusion: Reframing Muslim and Christian Views on Contagion
Appendix A: Contagion in the Christian Exegetical Tradition
Appendix B: The Presence of Ash'arism in the Maghrib
Notes
Bibligraphy
Index
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