The virtue of an interdisciplinary and multi-authored collection such as this one is that it can gather the necessary range of expertise to look into the complexities of disease and environment from different perspectives - allowing for both a scientifically- and culturally-minded readership to find interest in the discussion of epidemic and other disease. The volume brings environmental history into dialogue with the histories of medicine, science, and environmental thought, reflecting one of the best new trends in current scholarship on the relationship between humanity and non-human Nature. This edited volume will be the first to provide students and scholars with a comprehensive look at both how the environment is implicated in pre-modern disease regimes and how contemporary populations made efforts to mitigate the challenges that these disease regimes generated. It is also the first volume to take a long view by examining the environment-disease relationship across the traditional medieval-early modern divide to show both change and continuity.

This collection highlights and nuances some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease, across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions. Across and beyond the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish healing traditions shared inherited medical paradigms containing similar healthy living precepts and attitudes toward body, illness and mortality. Yet, as the chapters collected here demonstrate, customs of diagnosing, explaining and coping with disease and death often diverged with respect to knowledge and practice. Offering a variety of disciplinary approaches to a broad selection of material emerging from England to the Persian Gulf, the volume reaches across conventional disciplinary and historiographical boundaries. Plague diagnoses in pre-Black Death Arabic medical texts, rare, illustrated phlebotomy instructions for plague patients, and a Jewish plague tract utilising the Torah as medicine reflect critical re-examinations of primary sources long thought to have nothing new to offer. Novel re-interpretations of Giovanni Villani's "New Chronicle", canonisation inquests and saints' lives offer fresh considerations of medieval constructions of epidemics, disabilities, and the interplay between secular and spiritual healing. Cross-disciplinary perspectives recast late medieval post-mortem diagnoses in Milan as a juridical - rather than strictly medical - practice, highlight the aural performativity of the Franciscan deathbed liturgy, explore the long evolution of lapidary treatments for paediatric and obstetric diseases and thrust us into the Ottoman polychromatic sensory world of disease and death. Finally, considerations of the contributions of modern science alongside historical primary sources generates important new ways to understand death and disease in the past. Overall, the contributions juxtapose and interlace similarities and differences in their local and historical contexts, while highlighting and nuancing some of the recent critical advances in scholarship on death and disease - two historiographical subfields long approached separately.

The virtue of an interdisciplinary and multi-authored collection such as this one is that it can gather the necessary range of expertise to look into the complexities of disease and environment from different perspectives - allowing for both a scientifically- and culturally-minded readership to find interest in the discussion of epidemic and other disease. The volume brings environmental history into dialogue with the histories of medicine, science, and environmental thought, reflecting one of the best new trends in current scholarship on the relationship between humanity and non-human Nature. This edited volume will be the first to provide students and scholars with a comprehensive look at both how the environment is implicated in pre-modern disease regimes and how contemporary populations made efforts to mitigate the challenges that these disease regimes generated. It is also the first volume to take a long view by examining the environment-disease relationship across the traditional medieval-early modern divide to show both change and continuity.

For centuries, recurrent plague outbreaks took a grim toll on populations across Europe and Asia. While medical interventions and treatments did not change significantly from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century, understandings of where and how plague originated did. Through an innovative reading of medical advice literature produced in England and France, Patterns of Plague explores these changing perceptions across four centuries. When plague appeared in the Mediterranean region in 1348, physicians believed the epidemic's timing and spread could be explained logically and the disease could be successfully treated. This confidence resulted in the widespread and long-term circulation of plague tracts, which described the causes and signs of the disease, offered advice for preventing infection, and recommended therapies in a largely consistent style. What, where, and especially who was blamed for plague outbreaks changed considerably, however, as political, religious, economic, intellectual, medical, and even publication circumstances evolved. Patterns of Plague sheds light on what was consistent about plague thinking and what was idiosyncratic to particular places and times, revealing the many factors that influence how people understand and respond to epidemic disease.

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For centuries, recurrent plague outbreaks took a grim toll on populations across Europe and Asia. While medical interventions and treatments did not change significantly from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century, understandings of where and how plague originated did. Through an innovative reading of medical advice literature produced in England and France, Patterns of Plague explores these changing perceptions across four centuries. When plague appeared in the Mediterranean region in 1348, physicians believed the epidemic's timing and spread could be explained logically and the disease could be successfully treated. This confidence resulted in the widespread and long-term circulation of plague tracts, which described the causes and signs of the disease, offered advice for preventing infection, and recommended therapies in a largely consistent style. What, where, and especially who was blamed for plague outbreaks changed considerably, however, as political, religious, economic, intellectual, medical, and even publication circumstances evolved. Patterns of Plague sheds light on what was consistent about plague thinking and what was idiosyncratic to particular places and times, revealing the many factors that influence how people understand and respond to epidemic disease.