Syphilis: Medicine, Metaphor, and Religious Conflict in Early Modern France by Deborah N. Losse

Abstract

scholarship that focuses primarily on political exiles and pariah groups, Jordan succeeds in his goal to “revise existing theories about the operation of England’s common law” (5) in order to illustrate that exile was a common tool of medieval jurisprudence, essential to “the treatment and control of criminals and people of bad repute”(26). The study focuses almost exclusively on poor and middle-class felons, and Jordan’s skillful integration of historical anecdote illuminates the harsh reality of the exile’s life following abjuration. This book is of importance to any scholar of medieval European history, of legal history, and of British and French culture during the High Middle Ages. Jordan structures his work chronologically, devoting one chapter to each stage of the journey to France. Engaging with a vast body of previous scholarship and primary sources, he provides minute details about many of England’s felons, including the nature of their crimes, the value of their confiscated property, the length of their journey to France, and their fate once they arrived. Painstaking research allows him to follow several exiles from the moment of abjuration until their death, with the effect of creating a highly cohesive historical narrative. While such detail might otherwise seem repetitive, Jordan’s engaging commentary on the felons’ behavior, as well as his perceptive inferences when gaps in the historical record present themselves, allow for the vivid reconstruction of this historical underworld. Contributing to the accessibility of this book are frequent explanations of terms and procedures for those unfamiliar with the medieval legal system. Furthermore, Jordan frequently connects individual cases to larger trends in Northern Europe, providing a study that is global in scope and therefore expands his audience to include scholars of medieval history beyond that of England and France. Jordan’s ability to chronicle almost every aspect of exile in France, from arrival to either repatriation—in the case of the lucky few who were pardoned—or to death, paints a vivid portrait of medieval life at the lowest levels of society. Furthermore, his frequent reference to similar legal practices in other Northern European kingdoms and municipalities significantly strengthens his argument that abjuration was an efficient and often-used legal procedure in England during the High Middle Ages. His epilogue, which credits the decline of legal exile to the onset of the Hundred Years War and to the declining use of sanctuary during the sixteenth century, situates the importance of his work to contemporary debates on capital punishment. This work constitutes an important and engaging addition to medieval scholarship on both France and England. Ithaca College (NY) Rachel A. Paparone Losse,Deborah N. Syphilis: Medicine, Metaphor, and Religious Conflict in Early Modern France. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8142-1272-1. Pp. 172. $52. In the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as explorers returned to Europe from the New World, they imported not only exotic plants and spoils from their travels, but 246 FRENCH REVIEW 89.3 Reviews 247 also a new disease, syphilis. Losse underscores in the introduction to her fascinating work that while syphilis spread throughout the Old World affecting the physical body of those who contracted it, as well as the institution of marriage, the family, and even “the survival of humanity”(2), the French Wars of Religion threatened French society on broad political, legal, social, and religious levels. As Losse notes, the confluence of these two phenomena informs the writings of a number of French sixteenth-century writers and spans literary genres. In this study, Losse examines satirical verse and prose narratives, colloquies, travel literature, siege literature, and memoirs to analyze the metaphorical linking of physical patients and the ills of the French body politic. From Rabelais’s frequent mention of venereal disease, his detailed record of its symptoms and impact in Gargantua and Pantagruel, to Erasmus’s observations of the spread of the disease through his European travels in his Colloquies, and the association by both the cosmographer and former Franciscan André Thevet and the chronicler and Calvinist pastor Jean de Léry (among others) of cannibalism and syphilis as metaphors for the spiritual ills and “sins” of French society, Losse traces the multiple and...