"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.
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