Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Lepers, Real and Imagined, in Medieval and Early Modern England

From Biblical times, leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, has been both a medical and a social condition. Today, the disease afflicts over a million people, many of them residents of leper colonies and subjected to isolation and neglect. Lepers have long been characterized as bearers of horrific contagion; historically, they were also linked to heresy and sexual deviancy. The European experience with Hansen’s disease is particularly complex.  disease are surprisingly diverse and often compassionate. In the late Middle Ages, as the disease disappeared and the leper houses were emptied, the complex portrait of the medieval leper gave way to a simpler, far less sympathetic portrayal.  

Sealy Gilles, a writer in residence in the Wertheim Study, is associate professor of English literature at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus. She teaches a wide range of classes in early literatures. Publications include work on Old English lyrics, a ninth-century geography, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.  Her current research centers on cultural responses to epidemic disease in the Middle Ages and the early modern period.