This dissertation examines the cultural dimensions of contagion in the early modern Spanish empire. Drawing on printed and archival sources from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish America, it argues that epidemic outbreaks led to significant literary and cultural transformations in the empire, giving rise to new social, political, and professional roles of writing. By analyzing how writers from diverse social and professional backgrounds questioned established notions of the social and political logic of epidemics, the ethics of contagion, and the legitimacy of public health measures, it demonstrates epidemic emergencies fundamentally galvanized the purposes of literature and its circuits of production, distribution, and consumption.

The first chapter demonstrates how physicians and essential workers, who assisted in epidemic outbreaks, developed novel writing practices to engage with a public sphere that discussed, criticized, and ventured improvements in both medical care and public health measures that circulated in printed and manuscript plague tracts. Fulfilling a cultural demand for medical information, I show these plague tracts established transregional and transoceanic networks of medical penmanship that addressed peers and lay readers alike, making writing a cardinal exercise of civic medicine across Spain and Spanish America.

Chapter two examines the manuscript diary of the Catalan tanner Miquel Parets, as an example of private literary responses to the experience of the plague in Barcelona in 1651. It highlights how writers outside the medical profession engaged with plague prescriptions, challenged public health measures, and reflected on their duties and communities in the aftermath of contagion through the written expression of both private and public grief.

Chapter three examines the religious chronicle Parayso Occidental (1684) by Mexican polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, addressed to the nuns of the Conceptionist convent of Jesús María in Mexico City. This chapter argues that the convergence of hagiography and historiography in Sigüenza’s work aims to fashion a local narrative that connects Mexico’s violent past to a history that legitimizes creole sovereignty in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Chapter four examines the local agendas pursued through festive cultures in the wake of epidemic catastrophes. By analyzing Alonso Ramírez de Vargas’ celebratory poem heralding the end of a viruela outbreak in Mexico City in 1668, and Ignacio de Saavedra’s anthology commending the miraculous halt of the plague in Cádiz in 1681, this chapter argues that festive plague poetry reinstated the social and political order temporarily upended by plague and gave cities of the empire a sense of local pride and identity, that often favored the interests of ruling elites.

Through these texts, Writing Contagion recovers the encompassing notion of early modern pestilence and demonstrates how epidemic episodes fostered writing practices that addressed and reworked contagion’s threat of social disintegration. By bringing out of hermeneutic isolation texts that were in dialogue with each other, this study provides insight into the early modern Spanish empire’s cultures of plague, which have been overlooked by scholarship due to the tendency to study individual outbreaks in specific regions through the lens of contemporary disease identities.