Images of leprosy : disease, religion, and politics in European art

From biblical times to the onset of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, leprosy was considered the worst human affliction, both medically and socially. Only fifty years ago, leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, was an incurable infectious illness, and still remains a grave global concern. Recently, leprosy has generated attention in scholarly fields from medical science to the visual arts. This interdisciplinary art-historical survey on lepra and its visualization in sculpture, murals, stained glass, and other media provides new information on the history of art, medicine, religion, and European society. Christine M. Boeckl maintains that the various terrifying aspects of the disease dominated the visual narratives of historic and legendary figures stricken with leprosy. For rulers, beggars, saints, and sinners, the metaphor of leprosy becomes the background against which their captivating stories are projected. The history of plague and leprosy, the two most persistently stereotyped diseases, needs constant revision. Boeckl has contributed significantly to this revision, in 2000 by broadening our perspective on the imagery of plague, and now with this spirited study on the depictions of leprosy. Defying the danger of retrospective diagnosis, she matches premodern representations of leprosy to current knowledge about Hansen's disease. Assiduous research, incisive analysis, and ample illustrations support her theses, especially when she challenges conventional interpretations. Most importantly, by laying bare religious and political dynamics in iconography, this book opens new insights on the relationships between imagery and “reality” and between power and disease in history. —Luke Demaitre, author of Leprosy in Premodern Medicine This is, to my knowledge, the only general study of leprosy in art and in context, although there have been a number of specialized studies of individual cases and regions, all of which Boeckl seems to have consulted and cited. Supplementing her extensive research, she received excellent medical advice, and the resulting book is clearly organized and well documented. Images of Leprosy reviews modern research on Hansen’s disease, and traces the history and historiography of the disease in religious contexts and its identification with sin, discussing biblical and other literary sources, the leprosaria and saintly caregivers, and the Christological cycles and their exploitation for political and religious purposes. Two appendices present pertinent texts from the Bible and other literary sources. —Jane Hutchison, University of Wisconsin-Madison