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Textual Infection: Syphilis in Grimmelshausen’s Courasche

Scholarship on seventeenth-century concerns about print has highlighted how writers drew on diseases like syphilis as metaphors to criticize the spread of dangerous ideas through print. This essay argues that, in certain texts, the epidemiological threat of the printed text goes beyond the metaphorical and becomes literal. By examining the way Grimmelshausen presents syphilis in his 1669 novel, Courasche, and outlining how ideas of infection in the work intersect with concerns about printing, circulating, and reading texts, this essay demonstrates how literary portrayals of syphilis can also claim to have real, material effects on their readers.