Dangers inside and outside the community

Chapter 2 focuses on the long-term dimensions of how communities interpreted and understood epidemic disease in the Low Countries. I show that there was some gradual change over time—disease became seen as a product of external dangers outside the community rather than internal moral corruptions around the sixteenth century. Over time, different social groups are identified as connected with epidemic disease. In the sixteenth century, we see the first links being made between plague and poverty, but in the seventeenth century, we see a more coherent “outbreak narrative”, where women and physical outsiders are more explicitly condemned and restricted. Nevertheless, there were also strong continuities in understanding epidemic disease in the Low Countries. During the late Middle Ages, we find a complicated mix of providential, miasmatical, and contagionist ideas where they worked in tandem rather than in opposition. Religious interpretations of disease response and impact remained present in communities well into the late nineteenth century, even when germ theory was taking hold. Most fundamentally, epidemics were rarely instigators for massive changes or developments in public health institutions and infrastructure—adaptations were small and incremental and built upon practices already seen outside of epidemics.