Melaten is Cologne’s great cemetery, but before it became a nineteenth century burial ground, the area was associated from the twelfth century with a medieval leper hospital and the communities pushed to the edge of urban life. This relief from around 1629 is a small but rather direct reminder of that older rather hidden history, as lepers were not at all welcome in the city centre. As is visible in the relief, any lepers who were potentially getting close to others were expected to shake a rattle to alert everyone as to their presence. Seems rather less than ideal for those with leprosy, especially as it isn’t actually that contagious.
Leprosy was not just a slightly sub-optimal medical condition in the medieval imagination, but a moral and communal category as well, wrapped up in ideas of sin, contagion and charity to try to mitigate the guilt. It’s something of a reminder that although the inhabitants of the leper hospital were to be helped and prayed for, they were also going to be shut away.