Abstract
Looking back on the epidemics he had witnessed in London prior to 1630, the playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker was in no doubt which sickness stood out from the rest in terms of the fear it aroused and the devastation it caused. The plague, the sickness (note the stress on the definite article in the above account), was characterized by the rapidity of its spread, high mortality and morbidity, its defiance of medicine, and the pain and horror of its signs and symptoms. These are now known to have been manifestations of the bacterial infection transmitted by the fleas of the black rat: bubonic plague — ‘A terible Enemie’ (London Looke Backe, sig. A4v).
For all other Infirmities, and maladies of the Body, goe simply in their owne Habit…. As the Goute passeth onely by the name of the Goute: So an Appoplex, an Ague, the Pox, Fistula, &c. But that dreadfull scourge … that sudden destroyer of Mankind: that Nimble executioner of the Divine Justice: (The Plague or Pestilence) hath for the singularity of the Terrors waiting upon it, This title; THE SICKNESSE.
Thomas Dekker, London Looke Backe (1630)1
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Notes
Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Charles T. Gregg, Plague: An Ancient Disease in the Twentieth Century, revised edn (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985) pp. 113–28. Gregg is a microbiologist researching Y. Pestis.
Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (paperback rpt from 1st edn, 1969; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971) pp. 13–29.
Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (paperback imp. 1985; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) p. 13.
See Richard Palmer, ‘The Church, Leprosy and Plague in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, in The Church and Healing, ed. W. J. Sheils (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982) pp. 79–99.
Raymond Crawfurd, Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1914).
Marvin W. Anderson, Evangelical Foundations: Religion in England, 1378–1683, American University Studies, series VII: Theology and Religion, vol. 33 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987) p. 330.
See Siegfried Wenzel, ‘Pestilence and Middle English Literature: Friar John Grimestone’s Poems on Death’, in The Black Death: The Impact of the Fourteenth-Century Plague, ed. Daniel Williman (New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982) p. 145.
William Langland, The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, ed. W. W. Skeat, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), see B Passus V. 13, C Passus VI, ll. 114–16, and C Passus IX 348–50.
John Lydgate, ‘A Dietary, and a Doctrine for Pestilence’, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Part II, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, Early English Text Society, Original Series no. 192, vol. 2 (2 vols; London: Oxford University Press, 1934) stanzas 1–3, p. 702.
On the sermon ‘exemplum’ see G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 149–209
and Woodburn O. Ross, Introduction, Middle English Sermons from British Museum MS Royal 18B xxiii, for the Early English Text Society, Original Series no. 209 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940) p. x.
Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, in The Complete Works, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) l. 675.
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 54.
On personification and cognition see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980) p. 33. The burgeoning field of discourse analysis surrounding AIDS reveals that construing the disease as an enemy, ‘a monster’, as ‘death’ — ;the grim reaper’ — has been a regular feature, particularly of news reporting, but also, interestingly, of health education campaigns.
See, for example, Deborah Lupton, Moral Threats and Dangerous Desires: AIDS in the News Media (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994) pp. 51–90.
Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (California: Huntington Library Publications, 1953) p. 243.
Catherine Cole Mambretti, ‘William Bullein and the “Lively Fashions” in Tudor Medical Literature’, Clio Medica, 9.4 (1974) p. 289. Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine’, p. 305.
William Mitchell, ‘William Bullein, Elizabethan Physician and Author’, Medical History, 3 (1959): p. 198.
Henry Sigerist, Civilization and Disease (Phoenix paperback, 1943; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) p. 184.
David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984) p. 14.
This point was also stressed by Alan Sinfield in Literature in Protestant England, 1560–1660 (London: Croom Helm, 1983).
Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer (London: Royal Historical Society, University College, 1989) p. 56.
See Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (Basingstokes: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1993), pp. 1–37.
Thomas More, ‘Letter to Firth’, The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. E. F. Rogers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947) p. 441.
See David G. Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance England (The Hague: Moutan, 1971) p. 57.
See David F. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992) p. 24.
Elizabeth McCutcheon, ‘William Bullein’s Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence: A Sixteenth-Century Anatomy’, in Miscellanea moreana: Essays for German Marc Hadour, ed. Clare M. Murphy, Henri Gibaud and Mario A. D. Cesare, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 61 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989) pp. 341–59.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957) pp. 310–11.
Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 4.
Thomas G. Benedek, ‘The Influence of Ulrich Von Hutten’s Medical Descriptions and Metaphorical Use of Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 66:1 (Spring 1992) pp. 355–75.
See Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp. 158–9.
Cited in John S. Farmer (ed.), The Dramatic Writings of John Bale (London: Early English Drama Society, 1907) pp. 300–4.
M. G. Davies, The Enforcement of the English Apprenticeship, 1563–1642 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956) p. 31
W. H. Price, The English Patents of Monopoly (London: Constable, 1906) pp. 9, 15–16.
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) p. 32.
William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976r) p. 236, has drawn attention to the intimate relation between pilgrimages (as spiritual quests and quests for physical health) and plagues: the poor hygiene arrangements and close confinement of people associated with pilgrimages also attracted epidemic disease.
D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth (New York: Longman, 1983) p. 19.
Quoted in Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) p. 35.
Edmund Spenser, Prosopopoia: or Mother Hubberds Tale, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop and Richard Schell (New Haven Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 335–79.
Susan Sontag, Aids and its Metaphors (London: Penguin, 1989) p. 93.
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© 2001 Margaret Healy
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Healy, M. (2001). The Plaguy Body: Part I. In: Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510647_3
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