Good People, Poor Sick: The Social Identities of Lepers in the Late Medieval Rhineland (original) (raw)

Abstract

As François-Olivier Touati has observed, views of the leper as Other within medieval societies has been closely bound up with the Other-ing of medieval society itself. It is the aim of this paper to contribute to the work of illuminating the diverse social realities of those viewed as lepers in medieval Europe. Leprosy, I argue, did not erase previous social identities, as has sometimes been claimed. Rather, medieval lepers derived their identity from where they lived, and the communities of which they were a part. In addition to examining leper hospitals, which conferred religious status on their residence, I look at informal communities of lepers, often located near crossroads. Such groups have not yet been the subject of analysis, due to a dearth of sources. An examination of the distinctive vocabulary applied to such communities has allowed me to draw some tentative conclusions about how they lived and were perceived. Drawing on multiple source types allows me to more clearly see where the rhetoric or priorities of a genre may distort our picture of how medieval lepers lived, and how they were perceived. The vocabulary used for lepers, both in and outside hospitals, reveals not only a variety of responses to lepers, but a variety of ways in which those designated as lepers could choose to live. In attempting to reconstruct the ways of life available to lepers in the late medieval Rhineland, my chief source base has consisted of charters preserved in the archives of Mainz and Darmstadt. I have also used the internal records of hospitals; the chartularies and account books of the leper hospitals of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer document how their residents, healthy and sick, participated in the socioeconomic networks of late medieval cities. A comparison of the hospital statutes of leprosaria and multipurpose hospitals in the cities of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer indicates that such regulations were primarily affected by hospitals’ legal status as religious institutions, rather than by attitudes towards lepers. Particularly in order to find references to informal communities of lepers, I have also drawn on the account books of monastic houses. Lastly, I have examined the fifteenth-century letters of diagnosis created by the physicians of Frankfurt responsible for the examination for leprosy, the Lepraschau. These letters, not hitherto the subject of close analysis, reveal both the individual and collective agency of lepers, as well as a range of social responses to them. These letters also demonstrate that medical diagnosis and what I call social diagnosis—the response of medieval communities to lepers or putative lepers—were not consistently correlated. The experiences of those seeking a medical verdict often show that their social relationships affected how, and why, they came before Frankfurt’s Lepraschau committee. The terms “leprosy” and “lepers” warrant special attention. As has been widely observed, it would be misleading to treat Hansen’s Disease and medieval leprosy as identical; I argue that it is also inappropriate to assume monolithic medieval attitudes towards conditions identified as “leprosy.” Medieval vocabulary for the disease and those deemed to be afflicted with it was varied and labile. In Latin, lepra and elephantiasis were both used; sometimes, it is only context that tells us infirmi were thought to be suffering from this disease. Misellus/a bled into European vernaculars as mesel, and variations thereon. In Middle High German, the leprous could be Aussätzige or Maledern, but were often simply referred to as die armen Siechen, the poor sick, or, still more ambiguously, die armen Kinder Gottes, the poor children of God. The latter term was frequently used for informal communities established at crossroads. While the membership of such communities may have been fluid, the assemblies themselves were acknowledged as at least semi-permanent. The residents of leper hospitals, in the central Rhineland, were collectively known as “guden leuden,” good people; it is under this name that they most often appear as recipients of gifts and managers of property. The disease of leprosy, so easily recognizable in the stylized form given to it by the authors of literary sources, often defied precise classification by those charged with medical diagnosis. The lives and identities of lepers, were, moreover, not exclusively shaped by this facet of their identity. How leprosy affected individuals was determined to a significant extent by the response of their communities, a process I have termed social diagnosis. The agency of lepers themselves is revealed in the fact that they might seek, instead, to live in smaller groups, without the privileges of religious status, but also without its restrictions. The lepers of the Rhineland appear not only in groups, but as individuals: seeking or disputing medical diagnosis, receiving gifts or receiving care, wandering about or doing their shopping: good people, poor sick, and active participants in late medieval communities.