Michel Foucault - Madness and Civilization - Stultifera Navis lyrics

At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion. From the High Middle Ages to the end of the Crusades, leprosariums had multiplied their cities of the damned over the entire face of Europe. According to Mathieu Paris, there were as many as 19,000 of them throughout Christendom. In any case, around 1226, when Louis VIII established the lazar-house law for France, more than 2,000 appeared on the official registers. There were 43 in the diocese of Paris alone: these included Bourg-le-Reine, Corbeil, Saint-Valere, and the sinister Champ-Pourri (Rotten Field); included also was Charenton. The two largest were in the immediate vicinity of Paris: Saint-Germain and Saint-Lazare: we shall hear their names again in the history of another sickness. This is because from the fifteenth century on, all were emptied; in the next century Saint-Germain became a reformatory for young criminals; and before the time of Saint Vincent there was only one leper left at Saint-Lazare, "Sieur Langlois, practitioner in the civil court." The lazar house of Nancy, which was among the largest in Europe, had only four inmates during the regency of Marie de Medicis. According to Catel's Memoires, there were 29 hospitals in Toulouse at the end of the medieval period: seven were leprosariums; but at the beginning of the seventeenth century we find only three mentioned: Saint-Cyprien, Arnaud-Bernard, and Saint-Michel. It was a pleasure to celebrate the disappearance of leprosy: in 1635 the inhabitants of Reims formed a solemn procession to thank God for having delivered their city from this scourge. For a century already, royal authority had undertaken the control and reorganization of the immense fortune represented by the endowments of the lazar houses; in a decree of December 19, 1543, Francois I had a census and inventory taken "to remedy the great disorder that exists at present in the lazar houses"; in his turn, Henri IV in an edict of 1606 prescribed a revision of their accounts and allotted "the sums obtained from this investigation to the sustenance of poor noblemen and crippled soldiers." The same request for regulation is recorded on October 24, 1612, but the excess revenues were now to be used for feeding the poor. In fact, the question of the leprosariums was not settled in France before the end of the seventeenth century; and the problem's economic importance provoked more than one conflict. Were there not still, in the year 1677, 44 lazar houses in the province of Dauphine alone? On February 20, 1672, Louis XIV a**igned to the Orders of Saint-Lazare and Mont-Carmel the effects of all the military and hospital orders; they were entrusted with the administration of the lazar houses of the kingdom. Some twenty years later, the edict of 1672 was revoked, and by a series of staggered measures from March 1693 to July 1695 the goods of the lazar houses were thenceforth a**igned to other hospitals and welfare establishments. The few lepers scattered in the 1,200 still-existing houses were collected at Saint-Mesmin near Orleans. These decrees were first applied in Paris, where the Parlement transferred the revenue in question to the establishments of the Hopital General; this example was imitated by the provincial authorities; Toulouse transferred the effects of its lazar houses to the Hopital des Incurables (1696); those of Voley were a**igned to the Hopital de Sainte-Foy. Only Saint-Mesmin and the wards of Ganets, near Bordeaux, remained as a reminder. England and Scotland alone had opened 220 lazar houses for a million and a half inhabitants in the twelfth century. But as early as the fourteenth century they began to empty out; by the time Edward III ordered an inquiry into the hospital of Ripon - in 1342 - there were no more lepers; he a**igned the institution's effects to the poor. At the end of the twelfth century, Archbishop Puisel had founded a hospital in which by 1434 only two beds were reserved for lepers, should any be found. In 1348, the great leprosarium of Saint Albans contained only three patients; the hospital of Romenal in Kent was abandoned twenty-four years later, for lack of lepers. At Chatham, the lazar house of Saint Bartholomew, established in 1078, had been one of the most important in England; under Elizabeth, it cared for only two patients; it was finally closed in 1627. The same regression of leprosy occurred in Germany, perhaps a little more slowly; and the same conversion of the lazar houses, hastened by the Reformation, which left municipal administrations in charge of welfare and hospital establishments; this was the case in Leipzig, in Munich, in Hamburg. In 1542, the effects of the lazar houses of Schleswig-Holstein were transferred to the hospitals. In Stuttgart a magistrate's report of 1589 indicates that for fifty years already there had been no lepers in the house provided for them. At Lipplingen, the lazar house was soon peopled with incurables and madmen. A strange disappearance, which was doubtless not the long-sought effect of obscure medical practices, but the spontaneous result of segregation and also the consequence, after the Crusades, of the break with the Eastern sources of infection. Leprosy withdrew, leaving derelict these low places and these rites which were intended, not to suppress it, but to keep it at a sacred distance, to fix it in an inverse exaltation. What doubtless remained longer than leprosy, and would persist when the lazar houses had been empty for years, were the values and images attached to the figure of the leper as well as the meaning of his exclusion, the social importance of that insistent and fearful figure which was not driven off without first being inscribed within a sacred circle. If the leper was removed from the world, and from the community of the Church visible, his existence was yet a constant manifestation of God, since it was a sign both of His anger and of His grace: "My friend", says the ritual of the Church of Vienne, "it pleaseth Our Lord that thou shouldst be infected with this malady, and thou hast great grace at the hands of Our Lord that he desireth to punish thee for thy iniquities in this world." And at the very moment when the priest and his a**istants drag him out of the church with backward step, the leper is a**ured that he still bears witness for God: "And howsoever thou mayest be apart from the Church and the company of the Sound, yet art thou not apart from the grace of God." Brueghel's lepers attend at a distance, but forever, that climb to Calvary on which the entire people accompanies Christ. Hieratic witnesses of evil, they accomplish their salvation in and by their very exclusion: in a strange reversibility that is the opposite of good works and prayer, they are saved by the hand that is not stretched out. The sinner who abandons the leper at his door opens his way to heaven. "For which have patience in thy malady; for Our Lord hateth thee not because of it, keepeth thee not from his company; but if thou hast patience thou wilt be saved, as was the leper who died before the gate of the rich man and was carried straight to paradise." Abandonment is his salvation; his exclusion offers him another form of communion. Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost. from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and "deranged minds" would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well. With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain - essentially that major form of a rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration. Something new appears in the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance; soon it will occupy a privileged place there: the Ship of Fools, a strange "drunken boat" that glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish can*ls. The Narrenschiff, of course, is a literary composition, probably borrowed from the old Argonaut cycle, one of the great mythic themes recently revived and rejuvenated, acquiring an institutional aspect in the Burgundy Estates. Fashion favored the composition of these Ships, whose crew of imaginary heroes, ethical models, or social types embarked on a great symbolic voyage which would bring them, if not fortune, then at least the figure of their destiny or their truth.