What does disease mean, and how should we respond to it? This course will examine this question by focusing on how Muslims and Christians in Iberia dealt with pandemic disease during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. It will draw on religious studies, history, ethics and medicine to contextualize Muslim and Christian communities’ varied responses to the challenge of contagious disease. Abrahamic communities shared a medical heritage and an ethical imperative to care for the sick while also possessing their own unique religious traditions when it came to defining the significance of pandemic disease. The class will read plague treatises, studies of the social, economic, and political effects of plague, as well as consider the history of public health in the premodern world. The course will include trips to Toledo, Granada and Seville.