Medieval Lepers

In Brief

Nowadays, everyone knows only armadillos stand a decent chance of giving you leprosy and makes sure to hit them with their cars, but eight hundred years ago, the imaginative nuts in Western Europe many of us call our ancestors had entirely different ideas. Millions of people accused their neigbors of being lepers and the disease took on a life of its own. Is there levity in leprosy? Hell yes!

Party On

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In what is sure to be only the first of many such stories, we turn our attention this week to the exciting world of persecution in the Middle Ages. Sounds like a hoot, eh? Oh ye of little faith. Attentive readers know full well these medieval guys were just plain nuts, and always good for a laugh. Let's start with why we care, and for that we'll turn to the wonderfully droll professor, Dr. R. I. Moore, whose book The Formation of a Persecuting Society is full of the gargantuan sentences and dry wit we come to expect from the best English writers. He asserts:

The period 950-1250 [A.D.] witnessed a fundamental and irreversible change in Europe. A persecuting society formed that may be seen as the origin and forerunner of the atrocities of the religious wars, the executions of the Reformation, even the Holocaust of the twentieth century.

Sounds important. In fact, for such a weighty and sad subject, we must count ourselves fortunate to be privy to moments of such levity as to make the study almost bearable. And besides, we haven't had a straight-up icky story for a while[1], so we'll start with the lepers.

We've all seen Braveheart. We know lepers were gross and no one associated with them. But really, why bother? It's not like they're going to take up arms and fight you.[2] The answer is that it was easy to accuse your neighbor of it, discredit him, force him into exile in a leprosarium and steal his goodies. After all, how do you prove you don't have an early stage of leprosy? One can imagine the responses: "Hell no, that's just a really juicy zit!" The whole thing smacks of the witch hunts of latter-day Europe or McCarthyism in 1950's America. As is often true of many persecuted minorities, increasingly poisonous stereotypes of lepers came hand-in-hand with a sort of perverse fascination with them. The problem was that Christianity had long been intrigued by the 'leper'. While a variety of diseases were lumped under this category, one must only read about poor Job to understand the currency this idea held in Christian thought. As Moore so eloquently puts it, "the leper had been granted the special grace of entering upon payment for his sins in this life, and could therefore look forward to earlier redemption in the next." Hence, leprosy was even prayed for by some.[3] It gets better:

Like hermits and monks lepers were often called pauperes Christi, and the strict rules governing the conduct of leper houses were in part a reflection of the idea that lepers constituted a quasi-religious order. It was this ambivalence about their condition, as well as its physically revolting character, that lent extra merit to the practice of washing the sores and kissing the lesions of lepers which during this period became a general, almost a fashionable, religious exercise. One of its early enthusiasts was Henry I's wife Matilda, whose devotion on one occasion prompted a courtier to ask what the king's feelings would be if he knew where last her lips had been.

Yipes! We here at History House ask only that you remember this fashion next time you think a fad is getting out of hand. The Spice Girls don't seem so bad now, do they?

What else do we know about minorities? They corrupt our vital bodily fluids! Come on, we've all seen Dr. Strangelove. Well, this imagery of the sexual power of the unwanted is nothing new. A contemporary account laments that lepers, 'have bad habits of life... many of them burn with desire with coitus.' Yeah, right. Anyway, Moore relates the story of a certain Arnaud de Verniolles from the small French town of Montaillou in the 1300's. Not surprisingly given the location, a prostitute is involved. We'll go straight to Arnaud's original testimony, appearing in the enormously entertaining and educational Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Note the way in which the imageries of lepers and prostitutes, both persecuted groups, have become interchangeable: prostitutes are sinful, so you might catch leprosy from them.

At the time when they were burning the lepers, I was living in Toulouse; one day I 'did it' with a prostitute. And after I had perpetrated this sin my face began to swell. I was terrified and thought I had caught leprosy; I thereupon swore that in future I would never sleep with a woman again; in order to keep this oath, I began to abuse little boys.

Ladurie notes that Arnaud "experienced considerable success" as a pederast, an activity that "served to fill his leisure time, especially in the holidays." Funny times, these Middle Ages....

For those gentle readers whose sensibilities have been mauled by this story, rest assured we here at History House derive no pleasure in chronicling the pain of these lepers, but rather the colorful and idiotic things their irrational persecution drove the common folk to do. Moore, citing arguments by Susan Sonntag in her book Illness as Metaphor, notes that "diseases which have not succumbed to scientific understanding tend not only to generate metaphors of general decay but to be regarded as arising from many causes... and as being symbolic, or even punitive of viciousness or weakness on the part of their victims." Sonntag has prepared a second book relating this observation to the AIDS epidemic. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. How about those homosexual stereotypes of lasciviousness now? Funny times, in this Twentieth Century....

Footnotes

1. William the Conqueror and Lousy with Lice
2. On second thought, perhaps 'take up arms' was a poor choice of phrase in this context.
3. Perhaps the flagellants in our feature on the miserable Fourteenth Century should have taken that route

Bibliography

1. R.I. Moore. The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Blackwell, 1991.
2. Emmanuel Ley Roy Ladurie. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. Knopf, 1979.

 
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