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The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England pp 1–23Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction

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Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

Abstract

The Great Plague of London in 1665 has long been remembered as the most memorable of the early modern outbreaks that struck England. Writers responded to the visitation with a great outpouring of texts in which novel interpretations of the disease flourished. However, the epidemic failed to leave behind a significant trail of canonical works by authors such as Ben Jonson, John Donne, William Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker, each of whom had contributed to the literary character of earlier epidemics. How do we reconcile the vivid memory of the outbreak in 1665 against the relative dearth of literary output—in contrast to the dramatic texts, celebrated writers and memorable verse produced during or responding to prior sixteenth- and seventeenth-century outbreaks? The best-known work that responded to the Great Plague of London was, instead, penned over 50 years later in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). The enduring memory of the outbreak in 1665 may be interpreted, in part, through the vast increase in print production that addressed the epidemic. Unprecedented levels of textual response emerged across the plague writing subgenres—medical, religious, political, private and public.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rebecca Totaro describes the plague writing subgenres as those that ‘addressed religious, medical, civic, social, and individual needs’. Rebecca Totaro, ‘Introduction’, in The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, ed. by Rebecca Totaro (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2010), pp. xi–xvi (p. xi). (Totaro 2010)

  2. 2.

    William Boghurst, Loimographia: An Account of the Great Plague of London in the Year 1665, ed. by Joseph Frank Payne (London: Shaw and Sons, Fetter Lane, 1894), pp. 53–54. (Boghurst 1984)

  3. 3.

    Achinstein discusses the shift in thinking between outbreaks in 1597 and 1630, and the move toward a materialist understanding of the disease alongside religious understanding: ‘Yet the health officials’ placement of these marks upon the doors of contaminated households also promoted materialist explanations of the disease. The doors were marked so that other citizens would stay away, and in these acts of quarantine and segregation, city officials practiced a theory of disease closer to our modern treatments of infection and contagion’. Sharon Achinstein, ‘Plagues and Publication: Ballads and the Representation of Disease in the English Renaissance’, Criticism, 34.1 (1992), 27–49 (p. 30). (Achinstein 1992)

  4. 4.

    Achinstein, ‘Plagues and Publication’, p. 34. (Achinstein 1992)

  5. 5.

    Ernest B. Gilman provides a compelling reading of plague in relation to language. Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 94–100. (Gilman 2009)

  6. 6.

    As Paul Slack explains, ‘The plague epidemic of 1665, the first serious visitation in London for nearly thirty years, generated responses which were partly familiar, partly novel. Much of the novelty lay in the amount of information about the epidemic which was made available to contemporaries. At least forty-six publications concerned with plague appeared in 1665 and 1666, rather more than in 1625–6, and a much larger proportion of them – nearly two-thirds as opposed to one-third – dealt directly with the natural causes of plague, with natural remedies or with the incidence of disease’. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 244 (Slack 1985); Andrew Wear extends this idea to the medical realm, stating: ‘It was not until 1665 that the religious element, which is most conspicuous in the prefaces and introductions of the plague treatises, declined. Medical writers began, like their religious counterparts, by stressing that plague exceeded all other diseases in its destructiveness’. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 278. (Wear 2000)

  7. 7.

    Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 7. (Slack 1985)

  8. 8.

    Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p.8. (Slack 1985)

  9. 9.

    Ibid

  10. 10.

    This figure is taken from a note that states in reference to a chart taken from Slack’s The Impact of Plague: ‘The figures in this table for 1665 are incomplete. Corrected totals were 97,306 (all burials) and 68,598 (plague burials)’. A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C. Moote, The Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 10–11. (Moote 2004)

  11. 11.

    Moote, The Great Plague, pp. 10–11. (Moote 2004)

  12. 12.

    ‘The loss of nearly 100,000 persons from all causes in 1665 constituted a huge jump from the 15,000 to 20,000 fatalities recorded annually during the previous five years. The total death toll of nearly 100,000 was also considerable as a percentage of the metropolitan population: 20 percent of the 500,000 residents and visitors we estimate to have been in the capital at the beginning of 1665. And that figure of 20 percent masks a far deeper crisis because a huge number of Londoners had fled to the country to avoid the infection’. Moote, The Great Plague, p. 11. (Moote 2004)

  13. 13.

    Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 157. (Cockayne 2007)

  14. 14.

    Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 146. (Slack 1985)

  15. 15.

    Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 500 (Johns 1998); For detailed information on the printing history of Philosophical Transactions, see David A. Kronick, ‘Notes on the Printing History of the Early “Philosophical Transactions”’, Libraries & Culture, 25.2 (1990), 243–268.

  16. 16.

    Walter George Bell, The Great Plague of London in 1665 (London: John Lane, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1924; repr. London: Bracken Books, 1994), p. 216. (Bell 1994)

  17. 17.

    Elizabeth Lane Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), p. 135. (Furdell 2002)

  18. 18.

    Stephen Greenberg, ‘Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67.4 (2004), 508–527, p. 527. (Greenberg 2004); Erin Sullivan describes the history of death records and ‘proto-bills’ that preceded those bills from 1603. Erin Sullivan, ‘Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality’, in Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, ed. by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 76-94 (p. 78).

  19. 19.

    Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 172–173. (Smyth 2010)

  20. 20.

    Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England, p. 173. (Smyth 2010)

  21. 21.

    Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 244. (Slack 1985)

  22. 22.

    An example of this phenomenon from 1665 may be seen in a plague cure that appeared in A Collection of Seven and Fifty Approved Receipts Good Against the Plague Taken Out of the Five Books of that Renowned Dr. Don Alexes Secrets, for the Benefit of the Poorer Sort of People of These Nations (1665), which instructs the afflicted to drink a concoction of treacle, aquavite and human urine for three consecutive days—a ‘remedy proved in Venice in the year 1504’. W. J., A Collection of Seven and Fifty Approved Receipts Good Against the Plague. Taken Out of the Five Books of that Renowned Dr. Don Alexes Secrets, for the Benefit of the Poorer Sort of People of These Nations (London: 1665), p. 4; Alternatively, The King’s Medicines for the Plague: Prescribed for the Year, 1604. By the Whole Collodge [sic] of Physitians, Both Spiritual and Temporal. Generally Made Use of, and Approved in the Years, 1625, and 1636. And Now Most Fitting for this Dangerous Time of Infection, to be Used All England Over was published nearly unchanged in 1636 and 1665. An earlier, lengthier text with much of the same content is attributed to James Godskall. James Godskall, The Kings Medicine for this Present Yeere 1604. Prescribed by the Whole Colledge of the Spirituall Physitions, Made After the Coppy of the Corporall Kings Medicine, Which was Vsed in the City the Former Yeere (London:1604). (Godskall 1604)

  23. 23.

    The last major revision to the London Orders was the addition of a clause that called for six surgeons to be appointed to different areas of the city to manage medical decisions. After this addition in 1609, the Orders were reprinted nearly word for word during the outbreaks noted; Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 215. (Slack 1985)

  24. 24.

    Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England, p. 110. (Gilman 2009)

  25. 25.

    Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 245. (Slack 1985)

  26. 26.

    Moote, The Great Plague, pp. 9-10. (Moote 2004)

  27. 27.

    Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 31. (Rose 1993)

  28. 28.

    Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 55. (Raymond 2003)

  29. 29.

    Johns, The Nature of the Book, p. 72. (Johns 1998)

  30. 30.

    Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, p. 327. (Raymond 2003)

  31. 31.

    Thomas Dekker, A Rod for Run-Awayes (London: 1625), n.p. (Dekker 1625)

  32. 32.

    Peter Murray Jones, ‘Medical Literacies and Medical Culture in Early Modern England’, in Medical Writing in Early Modern English, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 30–43 (p. 33). (Jones 2011)

  33. 33.

    Mark S. R. Jenner, ‘Plague on a Page: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us in Early Modern London’, The Seventeenth Century, 27.3 (2012), 255–286, pp. 264–265. (Jenner 2012)

  34. 34.

    David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 14. (Cressy 1980)

  35. 35.

    Ville Marttila, ‘New Arguments for New Audiences’, in Medical Writing in Early Modern English, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 135–157 (pp. 138–139). (Marttila 2011)

  36. 36.

    Jones, ‘Medical Literacies and Medical Culture in Early Modern England’, pp. 31–32. (Jones 2011)

  37. 37.

    Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, p. 89. (Raymond 2003)

  38. 38.

    Jones, ‘Medical Literacies and Medical Culture in Early Modern England’, p. 31. (Jones 2011)

  39. 39.

    Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, p. 89. (Raymond 2003)

  40. 40.

    Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, p. 3. (Cressy 1980)

  41. 41.

    Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, p. 4. (Cressy 1980)

  42. 42.

    Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 7. (Cambers 2011)

  43. 43.

    Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720, p. 7. (Cambers 2011)

  44. 44.

    Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, p. 6. (Cressy 1980)

  45. 45.

    Katherine Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M British Library, Additional Manuscript 4454, ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011). (Austen 2011)

  46. 46.

    Hugh Amory, ‘Introduction’, in Bute Broadsides in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Guide and Index to the Microfilm Collection (Research Publications Inc., 1981), n.p. (Amory 1981)

  47. 47.

    ‘The Great Plague of London, 1665’, in Harvard University Library Open Collections Program: Contagion <http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/plague.html> [accessed 21 February 2009].

  48. 48.

    William Austin, Epiloimia Epe, or, The Anatomy of the Pestilence (London: 1666) (Austin 1666); Rebecca Totaro writes a detailed introduction on plague epics in plague writing and provides an annotated copy of the first part of the poem in, Rebecca Totaro (ed.), The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603–1721 (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 1-49, 227–56. (Totaro 2010)

  49. 49.

    Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. by Louis Landa (London: 1722; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, Revised edn). (Defoe 2010)

  50. 50.

    Totaro, ‘Introduction’, in The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, p. xi. (Totaro 2010)

  51. 51.

    The King’s Medicines for the Plague: Prescribed for the Year, 1604 (London: 1665).

  52. 52.

    Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 215. (Slack 1985)

  53. 53.

    Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 242. (Slack 1985)

  54. 54.

    George Thomson, Loimotomia: Or The Pest Anatomized: In These Following Particulars (London: 1666). (Thomson 1666)

  55. 55.

    Thomas Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (London: 1667). (Vincent 1667)

  56. 56.

    William Dyer, Christs Voice to London. And The Great Day of Gods Wrath. Being the Substance of II. Sermons Preached (in the City) in the Time of the Sad Visitation. Together with the Necessity of Watching and Praying. With a Small Treatise of Death (London: 1666). (Dyer 1666)

  57. 57.

    Richelle Munkhoff, ‘Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665’, Gender & History, 11.1 (1999), 1–29. (Munkhoff 1999)

  58. 58.

    Achinstein, ‘Plagues and Publication’, p. 28. (Achinstein 1992)

  59. 59.

    Stephen Greenberg, ‘Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 67.4 (2004), 508–527. (Greenberg 2004)

  60. 60.

    Paula McDowell, ‘Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year’, PMLA, 121.1 (2006), 87–106. (McDowell 2006)

  61. 61.

    Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001). (Healy 2001)

  62. 62.

    Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 3. (Ezell 1999)

  63. 63.

    Rebecca Totaro, ‘Introduction’, in The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, p. xiv. (Totaro 2010)

  64. 64.

    Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). (Kristeva 1982)

  65. 65.

    Sean Teuton, ‘“Put Out of Her Course”: Images of the Mounstrous in de Bry’s Illustrations of Atalanta Fugiens and the America’, in Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture, ed. by Kathleen P. Long (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 87–115 (p. 102). (Teuton 2010)

  66. 66.

    Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 1. (Kristeva 1982)

  67. 67.

    Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 3–4 (Kristeva 1982). For a discussion of plague in relation to abjection see, Kari Nixon, ‘Keep Bleeding: Hemorrhagic Sores, Trade, and the Necessity of Leaky Boundaries in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year’, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 14.2 (2014), pp. 62–115 (Nixon 2014); For a discussion of the ‘corpse in early modern Christianity’ see, Susan Zimmerman, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Corpse’, Shakespeare Studies, 33 (2005), pp. 101–108. (Zimmerman 2005).

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    Kathleen Miller

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Miller, K. (2016). Introduction. In: The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_1

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