Could free-standing ideas be contagious?
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Could free-standing ideas be contagious? Justin K. Sterns: Infectious ideas: Contagion in premodern Islamic and Christian thought in the Western Mediterranean. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011, 304pp, $60.00 HB Avner Ben-Zaken
Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
In comparing a wide range of sources relating to contagion, Justin Sterns employs comparative history of ideas, aiming at debunking the traditional scholarship that viewed Islamic religious communities as denying causality and passively attributing the spread of epidemics to the will of God. Searching for ‘‘influences’’ of ideas upon each other, he argues instead that Muslim scholars since late antiquity and in comparison with Christian scholars engaged in creative and rational attempts to understand contagion as a metaphor commensurate with an intrinsic natural agency. Although Sterns focuses on the near aftermath of the Black Death in Iberia, his efforts to counterpoise historical epochs and religious traditions impressively swing from one body of texts to another—from hadith that were written in the Middle East of late antiquity, to Christian writings in late antiquity and fifteenth-century Iberia; from medical treatises that stemmed out of medical practices along several generations and diverse loci, to theological and legal texts, most of which were written in far off Andalusia; from Christian debates regarding the phenomenon of visual contagion, to Muslim treatments of contagion in north Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries—leaving the reader with the recognition of the nuanced usages of the metaphor of contagion, but with scarce understanding of the contextual grounds that gave rise for such diverse perceptions. In Chapter One, Sterns takes up the place of contagion in the collections of the hadith and the commentaries on these collections. These sources, he stressed, although written in late antiquity in the Eastern Islamic world, far from late medieval Andalusia, are still pertinent to the study of contagion in medieval western parts of the Muslim world, since they carried considerable authority there and, second to the Qur’an, formed the heart of what many Muslims considered knowledge to be. Sterns states that he chose ‘‘to give a composite overview of traditions as they could have been perceived by the later commentators themselves’’ A. Ben-Zaken (&) Ono Academic College, 104 Zahal St, 55000 Kiryat Ono, Israel e-mail: [email protected]
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(15). Chapter Two turns to an overview of the metaphoric uses of contagion in Christian Iberian writings from the seventh-century Isidore of Seville up to the fifteenth-century Valencian preacher Vincent Ferrer, showing that the concept of contagion was not only accepted but also applied on the description of the heresy of Arianism and later on the segregation of religious communities of Muslims and Jews. In Chapter Three, Sterns touches upon the heart of his work on late medieval Andalusia, examining the relations of Muslim medical tradition to
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