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In his Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault effectively blew the whistle on the Enlightenment. The ‘Age of Reason’, far from being the dawn of toleration, liberalism and liberty, was in fact the epoch which inaugurated the ‘great confinement’ of the poor, the insane, the delinquent and the deviant — of anyone who could be accused of ‘unreason’. ‘Unreason’ was sequestrated in the old leper hospitals, empty because of the waning of that terrible disease.
What Foucault never asked, Moore points out, is what the leper hospitals were doing there in the first place. Foucault seemed to assume that they innocently met some objective medical need. But surely this is too simple. Was there not some kind of great confinement before the Great Confinement? Did not the Middle Ages launch its own ‘witch-hunts’ — centuries before the witch-craze proper was mobilized from the late fifteenth century?
Moore demonstrates clearly and conclusively that at least from the twelfth century a whole series of scapegoats was targeted by the authorities: lepers themselves, but even more so such moral lepers as prostitutes, heretics and Jews. The result at best was ghettoization; at worst extermination (as with the Albigensian heretics in the south of France). The story Moore tells of the development of ecclesiastical orthodoxy and of inquisition is, in one sense, familiar enough, but it is given two important twists which significantly revise our notion of the contribution of medieval to modern society.
First, Moore insists that it will not do, despite a long tradition of liberal historiography, to lay the blame for the rise of persecution solely upon the Church, for secular authorities were equally responsible. Indeed, those princes who colluded most energetically in the rise of persecution were precisely those (such as Henry II in England) who have traditionally got a good press from historians as ‘capable’, ‘efficient’, ‘progressive’, bringers of ‘justice’ and so on. Thus historians have,