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

• Author: Miller, Ruth A.
• Position: Book review

Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean. By JUSTIN K. STEARNS. Baltimore: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011. Pp. xx + 279. $60.

Justin Stearns starts his Infectious Ideas in an unexpected place. He states that his arguments about contagion in the premodern Islamic and Christian Western Mediterranean should not be extrapolated into broader theories about Muslim and Christian thought or about transmissible disease writ large. This plea that the book be read as the geographically, chronologically, and thematically focused work that it is is refreshing. It is also effective. Refreshing, because it allows Stearns to engage in a detailed comparative analysis that is free of the gross generalizations that more methodologically ambitious scholars of medicine, health, and illness sometimes make. Effective, because of course the book does make a number of broad, and potentially generalizing, historiographical and theoretical contributions. Stearns's careful avoidance of the conceptual traps into which comparative historians occasionally fall, however, makes these contributions unusually nuanced and thought provoking.

Stearns's subject in the book is the medical, theological, legal, and philosophical writing of Western Mediterranean Muslim and Christian scholars on the subject of contagion. More specifically, he examines texts that refer to the plague or leprosy, and that appeared in the Maghrib during and after the Black Death. Although Stearns thus necessarily focuses on Maliki and Catholic scholars writing between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, he also engages in a number of useful comparative exercises, drawing on sources ranging from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries, and discussing attitudes to contagion throughout the Sunni Muslim Mediterranean and West Asia, as well as throughout Christian Europe. Providing careful translations of new manuscript material, thoughtful alternative readings of existing literature, and challenges to existing historical convention, Stearns demonstrates that the ways in which Muslim and Christian interpretations of contagion resembled and differed from one another are not what previous scholars have maintained them to be.

Most pointedly Stearns convincingly argues that previous assertions that Muslims (as a general, de-contextualized category) denied the possibility of contagion and thereby fatalistically accepted the spread of epidemic disease are flawed. A major theme of the book, indeed, is that context is everything. Furthermore, it is that the efforts of Muslims as well as Christians to understand the transmission of disease were rational in their various contexts--the result of analyzing empirical evidence and observing local conditions as much as interpreting religious source material. He shows, for instance, that whereas most Muslim scholars in the Western Mediterranean did reject the notion that the plague was contagious, the transmissible character of leprosy was the subject of ongoing debate (p. 14).

Stearns divides Infectious Ideas into a preface and introductory chapter, six central chapters that intersperse Muslim and Christian approaches to contagion, and a conclusion. In addition, he provides a "Chronological List of Relevant Muslim and Christian Scholars Who Wrote on Contagion in the Premodern Period," in order to aid...