ABSTRACT
461Although leprosy affected only a very small proportion of the population of medieval Europe, the disease had a significant cultural impact, manifested in literature, sermons, works of art, architecture and more. This cultural production reflects the strong responses that leprosy elicited, from fear and revulsion to compassion, charity and piety. Focusing on France, this chapter explores the identity of leprosy and lepers in Western Europe between 1100 and 1500, paying particular attention to the issues of narrative and language. While personal narratives of leprosy are almost completely absent for this period, especially in the earlier centuries, the perspectives of sufferers and onlookers can sometimes be deduced from the language of charters, testaments, episcopal visitation records and other documents. 1 These ‘indirect’ narratives testify to the diversity of responses to the disease, and also reveal that lepers and leprosy were not always referred to explicitly in this period. The chapter begins by considering how contemporaries identified the disease (or its absence) through examination and diagnostic procedures, the records of which also shed light on how lepers themselves were perceived. It goes on to survey the language associated with lepers and leprosy, and how such language changed over time. The final two sections consider the collective identities of groups of lepers, within and outside leper hospitals, and the individual identities of the leprous. The analysis considers ‘lepers’ to be those who were identified thus in the Middle Ages, since the perception that they had the disease – whether or not their illness was what is today termed Hansen’s disease – influenced responses to them. Above all, it is clear that lepers had multiple social and religious identities, which were often shaped by their situation prior to contracting the disease. This suggests that leprosy did not fully transform an individual’s identity, and that not only the disease itself, but also many other factors, affected the experiences of leprosy sufferers and responses to them.
