In Walking Corpses , Timothy S. Miller and John W. Nesbitt contextualize reactions to leprosy in medieval Western Europe by tracing its history in Late Antique Byzantium, which had been confronting leprosy and its effects for centuries.
Integrating developments in both the Latin West and the Greek East, Walking Corpses challenges a number of misperceptions about attitudes toward the disease, including that theologians branded leprosy as punishment for sin (rather, it was seen as a mark of God’s favor); that Christian teaching encouraged bans on the afflicted from society (in actuality, it was Germanic customary law); or that leprosariums were prisons (instead, they were centers of care, many of them self-governing). Informed by extensive archival research and recent bioarchaeology, Walking Corpses also includes new translations of three Greek texts regarding leprosy, while a new preface to the paperback edition updates the historiography on medieval perceptions and treatments of leprosy.
Circa l’autore
Timothy S. Miller is Professor Emeritus of History at Salisbury University. He is the author of The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire and The Orphans of Byzantium. John W. Nesbitt has retired as Research Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. He is coauthor of The Miracles of St. Artemios and editor of Byzantine Authors. Miller and Nesbitt are coeditors of Peace and War in the Byzantium.
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