Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean

How did pre-modern scholars conceive of contagion and the transmissibility of disease in general? Infectious Ideas answers this question by looking carefully at both Muslim and Christian scholarship in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia and North Africa. Recent scholarship has focused extensively on how the laboratory revolution of the nineteenth century changed the understanding of disease in Western Europe. I argue that many previous discussions of both pre-modern conceptions of contagion and disease have been distorted by anachronistic pre-conceptions rooted in the nineteenth century science of bacteriology. In order to truly understand the nature of contagion and contagious diseases in the scholarship of Muslims and Christians in Medieval Iberia, we need to explore the discourses that defined and debated the nature of contagion.

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