Spaces of Honor: Making German Civil Society, 1700–1914 By Heikki Lempa. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 243. Cloth $80.00. ISBN: 978-0472132638.

Abstract

creation of dedicated plague hospitals that became more common in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, relying on miasma theory, continued to be the norm through the late nineteenth century. In a discussion of a rabies outbreak in Augsburg, Wolff points out the difference between the social and medical responses to a disease with clearly traceable infection patterns, and those to plague, more mysterious and therefore likely to have religious causation attributed to it. Although Wolff points out that miasma theory, not stigma, was responsible for the quarantine of convalescent residents of plague hospitals, she still treats segregation of the leprous as a norm from which Nürnberg departed. Chapters 5 and 7, bracketing the conclusion, are more clearly linked to each other than to the rest of the book. Chapter 5 provides a brief history of microbiology “from idea to science” (225), via biographical sketches. It asks provocatively what it might mean for a selfconsciously future-oriented discipline to look more thoughtfully to its past and to define that past more expansively. However, it occludes the history of the diffusion of ideas in favor of individual researchers and their discoveries. Max von Pettenkofer’s ideas about hygiene are described as making him “a figure between eras” (247-248). This approach to periodization seems to me to limit and undermine some of the work Wolff does elsewhere in connecting ancient and medieval theories and ignoring divisions sometimes made between the medieval and the early modern. This section, in contrast, seems to focus on paradigm shifts despite not locating them in precise historical moments. Chapter 7 argues that broadly based social responses to plague and epidemic disease were more normative in premodern societies than in our own. Wolff avoids direct comparisons between past and present but seems to suggest that the modern quest for certainty in the face of pandemic disease may be less accommodating to the needs of individuals and societies than medieval acceptance of ambiguity was. As the foregoing aims to make clear, Wolff’s work is conceptually ambitious. And in its case studies using archival sources, it is extremely impressive. But it is weakened in places by its failure to engage with relevant scholarship. Despite the analysis of plague treatises in chapter 3, Ann Carmichael’s work (“Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348– 1500,” Medical History Supplement 27 (2008): 17-52) is not cited. In several places, Wolff treats medieval leprosy as an epidemic combated with policies of segregation. Such ideas are far more prevalent in the historiography than in medieval Europe itself, and much valuable work since the influential study of Carole Rawcliffe (Leprosy in Medieval England [2006]) has dismantled such narratives. Perhaps most strikingly, in a work centrally concerned with both plague and public health in medieval Europe, neither Guy Geltner nor Monica Green appears in the bibliography. In a field rich with scholarly conversations, this is a perplexing silence.