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The Diseased Landscape: Medieval and Early Modern Plaguescapes

ABSTRACT Medieval and early modern medical theory incorporated Greco-Roman and Islamicate traditions that associated particular landscapes with the generation of disease. Explanations of recurrent plague outbreaks between the mid-fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries thus relied, in part, on the concept of diseased landscapes. This paper offers a general historiographical overview of theories on the relationship between landscapes and diseases. It also provides a critical re-evaluation of how contemporaries adapted these theories to explain recurrent plague outbreaks. Focusing on English plague treatises, in particular, the paper demonstrates that while the overall landscape-disease relationship remained largely intact, broader issues such as nationalism and colonialism shifted the discourse such that plagued landscapes were ‘re-located’ from the English kingdom to definitively foreign places such as the Ottoman Empire.