Revulsion and fear have been the most common responses to leprosy since biblical times, yet there is slight medical basis for the recurring stigmatisation of a disease with such a very low level of infection. Leprosy, it seems, has had extraordinary potential for becoming more than itself. The reasons for this, the myths that accrued around the disease, and particularly the manner in which these were refashioned in the modern colonial period, is the subject of this book.

Carlo Ginzburg has described the panic in early fourteenth-century France around an alleged conspiracy of lepers to kill the healthy by poisoning the fountains and wells. As alarm spread, the rumoured conspiracy grew to include the Jews (there was an ancient tradition that among the ancestors of the Jews was a group of lepers driven out of Egypt), and then, somewhat improbably, the Muslim king of Granada. Ginzburg argues that lepers and Jews were pariah groups because of their ambiguous borderline status. Lepers were unclean, but loving them was, as Francis of Assisi had shown, a sign of sanctity. Jews were the deicide race but also those to whom God had chosen to reveal himself. Muslims were the threat from without, the menacing world beyond Christendom, conspiring with those groups within whose marginality made them susceptible to promises of wealth and power, as well as potential targets of social purification. Ginzburg also sketches a wider social context for this outbreak of victimisation.