Disease and the Environment in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

The virtue of an interdisciplinary and multi-authored collection such as this one is that it can gather the necessary range of expertise to look into the complexities of disease and environment from different perspectives – allowing for both a scientifically- and culturally-minded readership to find interest in the discussion of epidemic and other disease. The volume brings environmental history into dialogue with the histories of medicine, science, and environmental thought, reflecting one of the best new trends in current scholarship on the relationship between humanity and non-human Nature. This edited volume will be the first to provide students and scholars with a comprehensive look at both how the environment is implicated in pre-modern disease regimes and how contemporary populations made efforts to mitigate the challenges that these disease regimes generated. It is also the first volume to take a long view by examining the environment–disease relationship across the traditional medieval–early modern divide to show both change and continuity.