(Early Modern Literature in History) Kathleen Miller (Auth.) - The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England-Palgrave Macmillan Uk (2016) PDF

Early Modern Literature in History
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University of Reading
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Kathleen Miller
The Literary Culture

of Plague in Early
Modern England
Kathleen Miller
Salem, Massachusetts,
United States
Early Modern Literature in History

ISBN 978-1-137-51056-3 ISBN 978-1-137-51057-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950442
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For Savannah
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I first became interested in plague writing of the early modern period

during my master’s studies at NUI Galway. Under Marie-Louise
Coolahan’s excellent supervision, I carried out research on early modern
plague texts, which sparked my enduring fascination with how the trans-
mission of plague texts was tied to their meaning. Marie-Louise’s insight-
ful comments on my writing while completing this monograph and her
ongoing encouragement have been greatly appreciated.
My sincere thanks to my PhD supervisor at Trinity College Dublin,
Crawford Gribben, for the time he has spent reading over my work and
providing concise and thoughtful advice on my writing. He has provided
unparalleled support and has been a wonderful mentor as I completed my
postgraduate studies and this monograph. I would also like to thank my
PhD examiners, Nicholas McDowell and Emma Vyroubalová, for their
thorough advice on my completed dissertation, which helped to develop
this project. In addition, I would like to acknowledge Michael Pyper,
Caitlín Higgins Ní Chinnéide, Joshua Searle and my other peers on the
Texts, Contexts, Cultures programme, as well as Mark Sweetnam—all of
whom helped to shape my time at Trinity.
The guidance I have received while researching this monograph has
allowed it to evolve in valuable directions. My research was greatly assisted
by Elizabethanne Boran at the Edward Worth Library in Dublin, whose
support has significantly advanced my study of plague in private book
collections and as a subject of interest in the international book trade. I
am also tremendously appreciative of Sarah C. E. Ross’s advice on my
work on Katherine Austen’s Book M. I am grateful to Julianne Simpson at
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the Wellcome Library in London for her invitation to consider the

Library’s copy of The Christians Refuge, in addition to help I received
from librarians at the Wellcome Library while reviewing their plague texts.
I would also like to express my gratitude to staff at the British Library and
Houghton Library at Harvard University for their help with accessing
documents essential for preparing this work. In addition, I would like to
acknowledge the help I received from the Huntington Library and The
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign when procuring images for this monograph, as well as Medical
History and Library & Information History for granting me permission to
include material I had previously published in each journal.
I am grateful to the English faculty at NUI Galway and for the oppor-
tunity to lecture on the Renaissance body in English literature as part of
the University’s Studies in Renaissance Literature course during the period
I worked on this monograph. I appreciate advice I received from Lindsay
Ann Reid, Daniel Carey, Victoria Brownlee and Sean Ryder. I also want to
express my sincere appreciation to Mary and Mark Hanley for their hospi-
tality during my time in Galway.
Both Benjamin Doyle and Tomas René at Palgrave Macmillan have
been a pleasure to work with, and I am grateful for the ongoing advice
and support they have provided in the process of publishing this
monograph.
This book would not have been possible without the encouragement
and support of my parents, Wendy and Duncan, as well as help from my
sister, Laura. My mother has provided unwavering assistance as I com-
pleted this monograph, for which I will always be grateful. Finally, I am
truly thankful to my husband, Alan, whose reassurance and patience have
been helpful each step of the way.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 Continuities in Plague Writing 25
3 Medical Debates on Plague 57
4 Plague and Nonconformity 95
5 Katherine Austen’s Reckoning with Plague in Book M 131
6 Pestilence and War 161
7 Pestilential Poesies 183
8 Conclusion: Recalling the Plague of 1665 in Later Literary

Culture 211
Bibliography 219
Index 235
ix
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 2.1 Anonymous, The Mourning-Cross: Or, England’s Lord Have

Mercy Upon Us (1665). EB65 A100 B675b v.2 [No. A170
of the Marquess of Bute Broadsides]. Houghton Library,
Harvard University 29
Fig. 2.2 Anonymous, The General Bill of Mortallity: With a
Continuation of This Present Year, 1666 (1666). EB65 A100
B675b v.2 [No. A172 of the Marquess of Bute Broadsides].
Houghton Library, Harvard University 30
Fig. 3.1 Frontispiece and title page, George Thomson, Loimotomia:
Or The Pest Anatomized (1666). Credit: 148060, The
Huntington Library, San Marino, California 59
Fig. 4.1 Frontispiece and title page, William Dyer, Christs Voice to
London (1666). Credit: Courtesy of the Rare Book &
Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign 115
Fig. 7.1 Frontispiece and title page, W. W., The Christians Refuge
(1665). Credit: Wellcome Library, London 184
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
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.1 The year provided a novel new
context for the disease, one in which medical pamphlets, statistically focused
broadsides, political proclamations, religious tracts, life writing and corre-
spondence erupted with commentary on the infection. Citizens negotiated
the turbulent plague year and in turn responded to this print culture,
debating the merits of plague writing and its messages. The seething
© The Author(s) 2016 1

K. Miller, The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England,
Early Modern Literature in History,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION
print culture of the two decades prior to the Restoration established the
power of the printed word and fostered an increased comfort with voicing
one’s opinions in a text that could be read by many. The wealth of printed
texts contributing to the literary culture of the visitation assisted Defoe in
creating a striking portrait of plague-ridden London from a distance of half
a century. Even if fewer canonical texts responded to the epidemic, there
was no lack of textual response to the Great Plague of London in 1665.
Apothecary William Boghurst’s account of the outbreak,
Loimographia (1666; edited edn 1894), details the measures citizens
took in the face of the outbreak:
I shall name some particulars: First, what care was taken about letters. Some
would sift them in a sieve, some wash them first in water and then dry them at
the fire, some air them at the top of a house, or an hedge, or a pole, two or
three days before they opened them. Some would lay them between two cold
stones 2 or 3 days, some set them before the fire like a toast, some would not
receive them but on a long pole. A Countryman delivered one thus to my wife
at the shop door, because hee would not venture too near her.2
Methods of offsetting the threat of legtters by washing, airing or toasting

them provide a curious portrait of sodden letters and their incomprehen-
sible contents or futile attempts to read a charred letter that was left to
toast too long. Boghurst describes the fear of transmitting the plague by
way of letters and by extension of conveying the disease through texts.
Measures like those described by Boghurst highlight an appreciation of
pestilence within the material realm.3 In early modern England, it was
understood plague could be conveyed through the paper on which these
texts were transmitted, with pestilence potentially infesting the rags from
which paper was made.4 Late seventeenth-century citizens were unaware
that pestilence could be traced to a bacterium and was spread by fleas;
however, the notion that plague passed from one person to the next, from
one object to the next, was well-established by 1665. In conjunction with
this appreciation of the potential for plague to be transmitted by contact
came an analogous image of texts being transmitted, duplicated through
the press or passed by letter, carrying with them the potential to spread
perilous, incorrect and inflammatory ideas. Furthering this metaphor was
plague’s ability to mark itself on the body, with the skin etched in boils,
blains, tokens and buboes, becoming a page of text that could be read,
interpreted and, most horribly, passed to someone else.5
DESCENDING INTO EPIDEMIC 3
The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England describes the

literary culture that emerged from, during and in the aftermath of this
epidemic. The outbreak and its accompanying death toll marked the
disease’s climax in early modern England. Textual transmission impacted
upon and simultaneously was impacted by the events of the plague, playing a
pivotal role in the course of the epidemic. Writings that emerged from this
context expressed a multiplicity of voices and breached social boundaries
by targeting laypeople and experts with many of the same documents. These
texts were essential to sharing information, including messages of self-pro-
tection, hope and practical knowledge. Though strict regulations governed
the publishing industry, many texts presented speculation, exaggerations
and tenuous statements as truth. Londoners approached many of these
documents with trepidation. These texts’ levels of accuracy were determined
through oral discussion and debate within the public and private spaces of
print and manuscript cultures. Furthermore, writing about plague saw citi-
zens capturing the enormous event within accepted forms and subgenres of
plague writing that had persisted and developed throughout the early mod-
ern period. Plague writings map the progress of the disease and the response
of its writers.
The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England looks beyond
what is known about print culture during the outbreak—that printing
increased considerably in 1665 as compared with previous outbreaks.6
This book provides a detailed account of the impact of print and manuscript
cultures on representations of the disease through micro-histories and case
studies of writing from that time and by interpreting the place of these media
in 1665. I consider the theoretical place of disease and death, and how these
elements are accommodated in these texts. Print influenced how people
dealt with, wrote about and communicated information during the epi-
demic. Print, in particular, often plays a key role in these documents along-
side the subject of plague. The macabre history of plague in early modern
England largely ended with the Great Plague of London, but the transfor-
mative moment in print culture that it represented left behind the miscellany
of plague writings that forms the subject of this book.
DESCENDING INTO EPIDEMIC

Plague struck London with impressive force in 1665. With the epidemic
falling just a few years after the Puritan Revolution and the subsequent
Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the England accommodating the
4 1 INTRODUCTION
outbreak provided a novel context for a well-known early modern foe. The
dreadful realities of the disease, however, remained constant in spite of
the flux of the worlds it visited in early modern England. Caused by the
bacillus now known as Yersinia pestis, plague is exceptionally dangerous and
most often lethal when transmitted to humans. Though typically carried and
suffered by rats, the disease can pass to humans via fleas and continue on to
devastate a human population, thriving in humid and warm conditions.
Death from plague is often gruesome, swift and largely unavoidable, with
60–80% of people who contract the illness dying, typically within 8 days.7 In
addition to the victim’s descent into the agony of infection, defined by fever,
vomiting and delirium, plague marks itself on the body. Lymph nodes
swell into the buboes so frequently referred to in plague writing, while
abscesses spot the skin in a multitude of colours, from blue to black to
purple, forming the oft-described ‘tokens’8. Descriptions of sufferers from
early modern England recount bodies where the borders of the skin have
been distorted and warped by the disease, where the fragile boundary
between the inside and outside of the body is breached by the pustules,
swellings and carbuncles that erupt over the skin.9 These were the tor-
ments experienced by plague sufferers during the outbreak of 1665. By the
end of an epidemic punctuated by the cries of victims shut in their homes,
there were 68,598 plague burials recorded—the single greatest period of
plague deaths in early modern England.10 The outbreak reaped the great-
est number of deaths of London’s early modern plague epidemics.11 The
number represents an even greater impact on London’s population when
considered in relation to the diminished number of citizens who remained
in city.12 With many fleeing, London’s normally busy streets were struck
by an otherworldly solitude in contrast to the typical racket and clatter.13
Not everyone was able to or even interested in escaping the city as it sat in
the clutches of the disease. Some of those who remained tell the stories
that are described in this book, from dissenting ministers who took up
pulpits to preach amongst those left in the city to medical practitioners
who hoped to gain better insight into how plague wreaked its revenge on
their patients’ bodies. The presence of other citizens is gleaned from the
thousands of dead that populated the bills of mortality throughout the
visitation or in the descriptions of those jobs executed during an outbreak
that were outlined in official orders, such as for searchers and watchmen.
Though 1665 marked London’s largest outbreak in terms of human fatal-
ities in the seventeenth century, most years saw plague deaths recorded in
the bills, and the city had dealt with significant bouts of the disease in 1603,
1625 and 1636.14 A plague epidemic of the magnitude seen in 1665

transformed the city.
A precedent existed for dealing with plague, and a discourse had devel-
oped around the disease during earlier outbreaks, aspects of which were
recorded in print and manuscript documents. From cures proposed to orders
enacted, plague inspired complex and varied responses from England’s
writers and authorities. The disease placed stress on society, often forcing
situations to their limits or inspiring responses unlike those seen in years
when plague deaths were few. An epidemic could disrupt the course of print
production and the commerce associated with the print marketplace, such as
the obstacles encountered by the pioneering science periodical Philosophical
Transactions, founded in 1665, the production of which could no longer
take place in London during the outbreak, resulting in a 3-month break in
the intended publication schedule.15 With plague taking lives, those
involved in the printing process were at risk as well. The disease took 80 of
those working within the already limited printing services under the new
monarchy.16 Alternatively, opportunities in the print realm could emerge
during an outbreak. Advertisements for documents containing cures and
medicines appeared in the newspapers The Newes and The Intelligencer.17
The bills of mortality took on the utmost importance during an outbreak.
From 1603 there were official methods in place to ensure the regular
collection, printing and sharing of mortality information through the bills,
giving a great number of citizens access to this information.18 Plague could
inspire longer and more involved narratives on the lives lived and lost in the
city under stress. In plague years, the burial notes found in parish registers
contained greater detail than seen in years of lower mortality.19 The opposite
could also be true, with an epidemic causing ‘gaps or confusions’ in
records.20 Plague could result in interruptions, breaks and obstacles in
print production or writing ventures, but it was far from a silencing force
when it came to written response. Each major outbreak saw an outpouring of
textual commentary and an increase in writing on the topic.
Plague writing changed in 1665, both in terms of what was written and
how much publishing occurred. In The Impact of Plague in Tudor and
Stuart England (1985), Paul Slack has noted that:
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
6 1 INTRODUCTION
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.21
The changes Slack describes are reflected in plague writing completed

during or inspired by the events of 1665. Despite innovation in the
discourse surrounding the disease in 1665, many documents drew upon
a tradition of reprinting and recycling plague writing from previous out-
breaks, creating direct continuities from past visitations. Printers and
booksellers produced and sold works that drew heavily on acquired knowl-
edge from previous epidemics. Cures that had allegedly been used a
century earlier now found their way into the print marketplace, their
reappearance justified by their stated efficacy during an earlier outbreak.22
Medical texts providing practical advice and remedies for citizens appeared
repeatedly throughout the seventeenth century. Official orders to thwart
the spread of plague enforced rules first enacted in the late sixteenth
century. Furthermore, the changes made to the 1609 London Orders
were reprinted during the 1630, 1636, 1646 and 1665 outbreaks with
little emendation.23 Even the imagery associated with plague in seven-
teenth-century England, etched in black and white, was reproduced with
the onset of each major outbreak.24 While print provided an opportunity
for far-reaching dissemination of knowledge about plague, during earlier
outbreaks and into 1665 the medium could enforce a climate of stilted
innovation in response to epidemic.
These elements of continuity were joined by new dialogues specific to
the outbreak and its historical context. In tandem with the onslaught of
plague, an epidemic of original printed material spread through London’s
streets, commenting on and contextualizing the outbreak. Many of these
texts represented discontinuities from the established responses to plague
that had persisted throughout the early modern period in England. More
than during any earlier plague outbreak in the seventeenth century, the
epidemic saw a sharp increase in publishing on the illness that understood
it in natural and statistical terms and a movement away from religious
interpretations. Citizens were increasingly audience to a running discourse
comparing the current epidemic to earlier outbreaks, medical commentary
on the natural causes of plague and newspaper coverage of the epidemic’s
spread.25 Yet the change was greater than that noted by Slack, and much
of the innovation found in these responses could only emerge from the
specific situation citizens faced during the 1665 outbreak and with the
influence of the preceding years. The textual world that responded to the
visitation in 1665 was at times linked to the years of upheaval from 1642
to 1660 and the ideologies, conflicts and ways of expressing opinions that
were prevalent during that two-decade period. The prior turmoil left
England in a vulnerable position in the face of the outbreak, particularly
given continuing tension with dissenting ministers after the Restoration.26
Changes to the print marketplace during that period impacted the way
authors expressed themselves in the medium during the epidemic and in
its aftermath. The upsurge in printing during the Puritan Revolution, the
willingness to express opposition and the creation of an increasingly public
dialogue in print influenced means of expression in 1665. Hangovers from
the revolutionary years make appearances in the dialogue surrounding the
outbreak, particularly in relation to religious and medical writing.
In contrast to the preceding years, however, new regulations governed
how texts made their way into the print sphere after the Restoration. Those
producing the printed dialogue surrounding the epidemic worked within a
complex and restrictive system. They were compelled to operate within the
limitations of the 1662 Licensing of the Press Act, which enforced pre-
publication censorship and registration requirements for books while limit-
ing the number of master printers in England.27 There were limits to the
amount of control provided by the Act. Though the book trade was con-
trolled by strict and complex legislation, it often veered from the rules and
expectations under which it was governed.28 Contemporaries praised the
Press Act for muffling rebellious voices, but despite an ongoing struggle to
restrict the number of printing houses, particularly during the early stages of
the Restoration, there remained around 40 printing houses when the Fire of
London occurred in 1666.29 While fewer pamphlets were produced during
the Restoration than during the previous two decades, an ‘opposition press’
comprised of ‘Presbyterians, Quakers and later Whigs’ existed.30 Citizens
approached print technology with caution, especially women. This trepida-
tion in approaching the medium was exacerbated in a society under the
pressure of an epidemic. Given the struggles over the press and tempestuous
role of print both before and during the Restoration, in conjunction with the
heightened desire for information in plague times, the role of authorship
during the epidemic was necessarily a complex one that required many
interruptions and caveats to guide the reading audience. Many authors
referred to the insufficiency of printed documents on the plague and the
tendency for these documents to spread false information. Attitudes toward
8 1 INTRODUCTION
print and the print marketplace influenced the literary author’s decision to
either engage with that marketplace or to compose in script. Evidence of
these challenges with print often emerge in the paratextual periphery of
printed texts—in epistles and notes to the reader.
Within the medical and religious responses to the disease, in particular,
innovations in the plague dialogue of 1665 became specifically connected
to the period that had come before, both during the revolutionary years
and in the early period of the Restoration, creating entirely new and novel
responses to the outbreak. Fluxes in the medical profession, where differ-
ing philosophies of medicine became entangled in debate during the
revolutionary years and were further impacted by the Restoration, resulted
in a charged print landscape filled with vigorous debate in response to the
outbreak. The epidemic would stand as a climactic event in the dispute
between two schools of physicians, Helmontians and Galenists. Fracture in
the country’s religious landscape with the Restoration and the limits and
sanctions placed on nonconformists gave new impetus to the religious
dialogues emerging in response to the disease. Nonconformists’ motiva-
tions for producing writings on the disease were often linked to their
recent struggles, rendering their responses to the visitation unique to the
year. In the areas of medical and religious writing, two of the recognized
plague writing subgenres that persisted throughout the early modern
period, reactions to the disease were innovative and often mediated by
the recent struggles felt in the country and the corresponding rise and fall
of medical and religious philosophies. In this climate, old plague sub-
genres were invigorated by new interpretations. By tracing these micro-
histories and aspects of their accompanying textual expression about the
epidemic, The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England
explores new ways of understanding plague that emerged in 1665.
In Thomas Dekker’s plague pamphlet A Rod for Run-Awayes (1625), the
pamphleteer and dramatist describes an encounter with a plague text: ‘A Bill
printed, called, The Red Crosse, or, Englands Lord have mercy vpon vs, being
read to a Farmers Sonne in Essex, hee fell into a swound, and the Calfe had
much a doe to be recouered’.31 The Red Crosse (1625), a broadside detailing
a plague-time prayer, preservative medicine and mortality statistics, is read to
the ‘Farmers Sonne’, demonstrating the capacity for plague writing to trans-
cend the boundaries of literacy. Many of the most popular printed docu-
ments on plague, such as the bills of mortality, orders and plague broadsides
like The Red Crosse, were intended to be read aloud, allowing their content to
reach a literate and illiterate public.32 Frequent references to the figures
from the bills of mortality that appear in plague writing also gesture to how
plague texts were read and interpreted by readers. These statistics were used
by authors for a variety of purposes, and the specificity with which the figures
are invoked in other plague texts indicates that precise statistics were widely
available. Evidence of reading plague broadsides that collated mortality
statistics, such as The Red Crosse, shows their figures were sometimes
extended after the page was initially purchased. Readers added to the number
of dead as new mortality figures became available, using the blank space left
on many of these pages in the section detailing deaths for the current year.33
Thus, people actively engaged with plague texts by listening to and reading
their contents. Despite high levels of illiteracy in early modern England,
written information produced during the outbreak was not necessarily rele-
gated to the literate. The overlap between the printed word and orality meant
that information in print could be received by the illiterate.34 Language
choice and writing in the vernacular could widen a text’s reading audience.
Medical works composed in the vernacular had potentially large and surpris-
ingly varied readerships, comprising both laypeople and medical profes-
sionals.35 Steadily rising literacy levels amongst women and men between
1500 and 1714 meant more citizens were able to read medical texts.36
Amongst English women, literacy rose from 10% in 1600 to possibly 30%
in 1700, while for English men it increased from around 30% in 1600 to
nearly 50% in 1700.37 However, literacy levels were not even across the
professions or classes, and while high levels of literacy were noted amongst
the ‘gentry and professional classes’,38 ‘husbandmen and labourers were
highly illiterate’.39 Within the context of religion and religious study, literacy
was viewed as a spiritually significant skill. The ability to read meant the Bible
could be consulted at home to further religious studies—a desirable ambition
by the late sixteenth century.40 There was a Christian duty to spread literacy,
which would help others read God’s word.41 Reading was a defining activity
for puritans, helping to demarcate the religious community.42 Puritans
engaged in ‘collective, social and public reading’, which satisfied aspects of
their religious beliefs, but also demonstrates another way in which texts could
be consumed under different circumstances and by different groups.43
Finally, the ability to write, typically acquired after one could read, only
furthered the possibility of harnessing literacy toward spiritual ends.44
Katherine Austen’s spiritual diary, Book M (1664-1668: edited edn
2011),45 discussed in Chap. 5, sees her frequently recording and interpreting
sermons, as well as composing her own occasional meditations for spiritual
ends. While literacy rates were low during the outbreak, there were still
10 1 INTRODUCTION
considerable reading and listening audiences for many of the plague texts
produced in 1665.
In the years following the outbreak, plague texts survived and were
collected by later readers. The Bute Broadsides collection, held in
Houghton Library at Harvard University, features approximately 500
broadsides collected by John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, the third marquess
of Bute (1847–1900). The contents of the collection varies widely, includ-
ing texts by Richard Baxter and John Bunyan, amongst others, with works
that address a wide range of topics, from remedies to verse works to
commentary on government.46 The greater part of the collection derives
from the seventeenth century, and plague broadsides are well-represented
in the material, particularly those from the 1665 outbreak. Two broad-
sides describing figures from the bills of mortality are included in the
grouping of plague works from 1665: The Mourning-Cross: or, England's
Lord Have Mercy Upon Us: Containing the Certain Causes of Pestilential
Diseases (1665) and The General Bill of Mortallity: With a Continuation of
This Present Year, 1666 (1666). Through these ephemeral texts, a nine-
teenth-century collector could construct how mortality in 1665 may have
looked. Mounted and displayed in five bound portfolios, the broadsides in
the collection transcend their first life as ephemera produced during the
outbreak, retaining currency for one collector and transgressing the short
period of a year when the calamity raged.
While few of the documents from the plague in 1665 have made their
way into the literary canon, many of these lesser-studied texts, which have
not previously or rarely received treatment as literature, tell important
stories about how this epidemic was transformed into writing by authors.
These works give insight into the important innovations that emerged
within the plague discourse of the final major outbreak. Though plague
raged from late 1664 to February 1666, the boundaries of the textual
response to the event and literary representations of the epidemic cannot
be neatly confined to this period.47 Responses to the epidemic reflect a
range of voices and time periods. William Austin published his epic poem
Epiloimia Epe, or, The Anatomy of the Pestilence (1666) in the immediate
aftermath of the epidemic, looking back critically and in an effort to
recapture the horror of the outbreak.48 Defoe’s eighteenth-century A
Journal of the Plague Year, though written in response to a plague out-
break in Marseilles, France, was set in the plague-stricken London of
1665.49 Nonconformist ministers such as William Dyer and Thomas
Vincent found solace on the printed page in the aftermath of the outbreak,
CHAPTER BREAKDOWN 11
when their ability to preach to congregations in the spiritually awakened city

during the outbreak was thwarted with the return of normalcy after the
epidemic. For these nonconformist ministers, printing the legacy of their
preaching provided a reminder of a time when, under the worst circum-
stances, they were able to provide spiritual guidance. Print pamphlets
addressing the medical debates of the day demonstrate the dynamic nature
of the printed word, as the measured tone of Hodges’ Vindiciae Medicinae
(1665) is transformed by the appended details of the plague outbreak in the
edition published in 1666. Through the addition of the section ‘As also an
account of the present pest, in answer to a letter’, the work’s tone is altered,
transforming the second edition into a highly relevant work of medical
plague writing. The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England
endeavours to situate a range of plague writing—medical treatises, procla-
mations, life writing, official orders, poetry and fiction—within the context
of the literary culture of the outbreak. Though these documents reflect
various modes of writing and convey different facets of information on the
plague, they remain connected by their attempts to comprehend the visita-
tion within the written realm.
CHAPTER BREAKDOWN
The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England addresses the
continuity and innovation in the literary culture of plague in 1665 through
chapters that consider the primary areas of plague writing, with a view to
historical context. These chapters adhere to the major subgenres of plague
writing.50 As becomes apparent, however, there are numerous connections
between works, with many authors taking interdisciplinary approaches to the
disease and outbreak. This book first considers continuities in plague writ-
ing, examining expressions of the disease that persisted and remained largely
unchanged from previous outbreaks. The next two chapters address innova-
tions in plague writing and provide micro-histories on medical and religious
writing, in which articulations of the disease were in many ways specific to
Restoration England, when these established subgenres of plague writing
were invigorated by new interpretations. I follow these discussions of con-
tinuity and innovation with three chapters that trace personal responses to
plague, considering life writing, correspondence and literary responses to the
outbreak. The final chapter, a conclusion, looks at plague within later literary
culture and addresses theoretical concepts appropriate to reading plague
writing on the outbreak in 1665.
12 1 INTRODUCTION
Innovations in plague writing in 1665 co-existed with a strong tradition

of reusing material from past outbreaks. Chapter 2 considers this tradition
of republishing plague writings and reproducing ideas and myths from the
past during subsequent outbreaks. Numerous texts first produced during
earlier outbreaks were reprinted when plague struck again years later. For
example, a document entitled The King’s Medicines for the Plague
Prescribed for the Year, 1604. By the Whole Collodge 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 (1665) was published during
outbreaks throughout the seventeenth century.51 The London Orders
from 1609 remained largely unchanged throughout seventeenth-century
outbreaks and were reprinted with few changes in 1665.52 In this chapter,
I consider plague broadsides that were printed during seventeenth-century
outbreaks virtually unchanged, with only the mortality statistics growing
and fluctuating from outbreak to outbreak. These broadsides, like those
from the Bute Broadsides collection, were some of the most affordable
publications on plague and provided citizens from all classes with basic
information on the illness.53 Printing ventures such as these show how the
spread of the disease was conveyed to Londoners. Despite such works’
throw-away nature, these broadsides became cornerstones in how citizens
dealt with and responded to the illness. Having established evidence
pointing to reprinting and recycling of printed documents, I address
royal proclamations from seventeenth-century plague outbreaks, investi-
gating continuities in their approach to public gatherings in plague times,
with a focus on a number from 1665 and how these were written to
control and conversely encourage certain activities. Finally, I turn to
texts that describe narrowly avoided premature interment in plague
times, distilling the reasons for the persistence of these anecdotes.
With natural understanding of plague increasingly represented in the
writing of 1665, the work of physicians and their interpretation of the
disease speak to the state of medicine during the epidemic. Medical writ-
ings that responded to the epidemic were influenced by the professional
and philosophical debates that emerged during the Puritan Revolution,
contributing to the novel medical narratives on plague in 1665. In Chap. 3,
I examine the most significant medical debate during the visitation, the
controversy between Helmontian and Galenic physicians, which reached a
turning point during the outbreak. While scholars have considered the
roles of Galenic and chemical medicine in relation to plague texts
CHAPTER BREAKDOWN 13
produced across early modern England, I narrow in on how these differing

philosophies were expressed during England’s final major outbreak. The
chapter addresses two leading physicians who worked in the city during
the outbreak and their writings on the epidemic and disease: George
Thomson, a Helmontian physician, and his work Loimotomia (1666)54
and Nathaniel Hodges, a largely orthodox physician who was a member of
the College of Physicians, and his work on the medical profession,
Vindiciae Medicinae. By examining the debate that emerged in these
texts, I trace the role of writing and print to the physician’s work as well
as the importance of language in the fight against disease in early modern
England. Engaging in rhetorical attacks was central to the physician’s
battle against plague in 1665, where much rested on establishing author-
ity for views at a time when two schools of thought vied for dominance in
a city ravaged by disease.
The increase in natural and statistical understanding of plague did not
quell religious interpretations of the outbreak. While placing plague epi-
demics in a religious context was widespread throughout the seventeenth
century, in Chap. 4 I examine how the national unrest in the two decades
prior to 1665 and limitations placed on dissenting ministers during the
Restoration led to religious interpretations informed by these events that
were unique to the outbreak in 1665. The suppression of dissenting
ministers after the Restoration was challenged by the visitation, which
left pulpits empty in London. Some nonconformists took up these pulpits,
preaching to citizens left in the city. In the aftermath of the illness, some
ministers who could no longer preach looked back on the chaos that had
brought them back to the pulpit and reflected on the experience of plague,
death and the reasons for these judgement in print. I consider two texts by
nonconformist ministers, Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City (1667)
55
and Dyer’s 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 (1666).56 In each work, I examine how print
comes to play a role in affirming and recalling these opportunities to
preach, creating a subversive retort to the prohibitions placed on non-
conformist ministers.
With change rife in the plague writing that appeared in 1665, as described in
the micro-histories of the previous two chapters, examining personal responses
to plague in life writing, correspondence and literary responses to the disease
shows how these innovations and continuities were interpreted by citizens.
14 1 INTRODUCTION
Life writing reveals how citizens incorporated an understanding of the

plague outbreak in works not intended for publication. In Chap. 5, I
address contemporary life writing about the outbreak, locating plague in
an example of women’s writing from the epidemic with a case study of
Katherine Austen’s Book M manuscript. Pestilence is encompassed within the
providential framework of Book M and is entwined in a narrative of events
that are personally relevant to Austen. I further examine the role of mortality
statistics in life writing and how they serve a unique purpose in these
narratives, considering also Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and how
he uses mortality statistics to lend an air of authenticity to his fictional
account of plague. A text like Austen’s demonstrates reflections on the
illness that, unlike documents destined for the print marketplace, remained
comparably untainted by issues of commerce or an unknown audience. As
such, it provides important points of contrast to writing composed specifi-
cally for the public sphere. In Chap. 6, I extend my work on life writing by
addressing two diarists of the outbreak, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn,
taking into consideration not only their diaries but also the correspondence
the two shared with each other and others over the course of the outbreak.
What emerges in these texts is a reflection of how the Second Anglo Dutch
War and plague became interconnected in writing produced by figures who
were both invested in the conflict and present for the epidemic.
Literary writing brought plague to the realm of metre and rhyme.
Chapter 7 provides a case study of two works that wrestle with the sub-
ject of the plague, Austin’s epic poem on the outbreak, Epiloimia Epe, or,
The Anatomy of the Pestilence (1666), and William Winstanley’s work
published under W. W. and entitled The Christians Refuge (1665).
Direct literary responses to the outbreak are relatively few in number.
These works reveal the extent to which literary responses were invested
in the print marketplace and its products, often commenting on and
referencing peripheral documents related to the epidemic. Furthermore,
each work’s paratext reveals the tension that existed between the body of a
plague text and the messages contained in this peripheral material.
UNDERSTANDING THE WRITING OF THE GREAT PLAGUE

OF LONDON
The discursive web describing plague history and writing, as well as early
modern studies of print in relation to the disease inform this book. Several
notable historical studies construct a vision of the disease through archival
UNDERSTANDING THE WRITING OF THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON 15
research, including Paul Slack’s magisterial study of The Impact of Plague in

Tudor and Stuart England (1985), Richelle Munkhoff’s ‘Searchers of the
Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England,
1574–1665’ (1999)57, and A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C. Moote’s The
Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year (2004). In The Impact
of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, Slack frames print as a social response
to plague, but the textual artifacts he mentions also form aspects of a unique
literary culture. Though he offers some hypotheses for new lines of inquiry in
the area of book history and for factors driving the transformation of the print
marketplace in 1665, he does not address the complexity of the literary
culture of the outbreak. I develop many of Slack’s comments on these
documents, which often centre on how print functioned within a social
history framework, and interrogate these documents as aspects of a specific
and often innovative literary culture. Book history scholarship has seen
specific discussions of print in plague times, such as Sharon Achinstein’s
‘Plagues and Publication: Ballads and the Representation of Disease in the
English Renaissance’,58 Rebecca Totaro’s The Plague in Print: Essential
Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603 (2010), Stephen Greenberg’s ‘Plague, the
Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London’ (2004)
59
and Paula McDowell’s ‘Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling
Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year’ (2006),60 which explores the
construction of print in a post-seventeenth-century context. A number of
recent monographs and volumes have gone far to establishing the study of
plague writing, including Ernest B. Gilman’s Plague Writing in Early
Modern England (2009), Margaret Healy’s Fictions of Disease in Early
Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (2001),61 Rebecca Totaro’s
Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literary Studies from
More to Milton (2005), and the collection Representing the Plague in Early
Modern England, edited by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman (2011).
These works have furthered the study of plague writing immensely but leave
room to study the specific literature and literary culture of the final major
plague epidemic of early modern England, considering how the specific
historical context influenced literary production and discourse on the disease.
This book makes a significant advance upon existing literature studies of
plague writing and upon historical considerations of England’s most signifi-
cant plague outbreak. These two areas of inquiry, historical and literary, have
remained remarkably independent in studies of the 1665 epidemic. Existing
monograph-length studies of early modern plague writing often analyze
literary themes or genres across the early modern period. The literature of
16 1 INTRODUCTION
the outbreak in 1665 has never been analyzed as plague writing inextricably
tied to an epidemic. In 1665, what was published changed, the quantity of
what was published increased significantly, and the origins of understanding
the disease were challenged by the novel historical context specific to
Restoration England. The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern
England represents a significant departure by locating the literature of the
outbreak within the historical context from which it was produced. In
keeping with the historicity of my topic and each text’s close relationship
to a moment in the early modern period, my research cannot escape its ties to
the seventeenth century when, perhaps, the rules governing print culture
bent to the pressures of epidemic as much as London’s population.
Literature that responds to the outbreak may not reasonably be detached
from the events surrounding its creation. Furthermore, these texts, whether
literary or factual, respond and comment on one another so frequently that
the true impact of the plague, as a historical event, on literary production
may not be ignored. By taking into consideration canonical and non-cano-
nical texts in an extended literature study, The Literary Culture of Plague in
Early Modern England proposes an innovative new way of theorizing and
understanding plague writing about the Great Plague of London that sees
previously neglected areas of plague writing—women’s plague writing,
medical debates, religious texts—treated as essential to fully appreciating
the literary culture of the outbreak.
This book is framed within the discipline of book history and focuses on
early modern print and manuscript cultures. Despite the strong historical
issues accommodated in this work, it is largely a work on literature, and
specifically the literature that responded to the plague. I analyze the literary
aspects of these texts, whether previously received as canonical works or
perceived as better left in the past. As such, I deploy literary critical analysis
and the close reading of plague writing. Through such analysis, the meta-
phors, stories, superstitions and myths surrounding plague may be analyzed,
revealing unexpected links between works and also demonstrating the wide
gaps that separate works from a single moment in history. Like Margaret
Ezell’s insistence upon a ‘recovery of “perished” authors’ and that we
‘rethink our current assumptions about who writes and who reads’, this
book argues that plague writing cannot be summed up through a discussion
of only canonical authors.62 A similar challenge has been noted with regard
to plague texts in Totaro’s The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources,
1558–1603: ‘The most essential English plague writing is often left out of
consideration largely due to the interdisciplinarity that gave it viability in the
UNDERSTANDING THE WRITING OF THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON 17
early modern marketplace of print’.63 The Literary Culture of Plague in Early

Modern England expands the accepted and most-often discussed works of
plague writing from 1665 to provide a more thorough examination of the
literary culture of the outbreak. This approach allows the connections
between works and contemporary anxieties associated with plague that are
often specific to the outbreak to be revealed through the plague writing
subgenres. Some of these subgenres and the plague writing arising from
them have not been adequately theorized from a literature perspective.
Furthermore, the changes within these subgenres that occurred in 1665
and that could not have been predicted are essential to understanding the
specific literary culture of the outbreak. I propose a wider range of texts to be
considered both as material artifacts of a small but complex moment in print
history and as literary documents that tell the story of how people formed the
discourse on plague in the public forum of print and in personal responses.
Only by considering these sources outside the canon can we establish a
holistic picture of the literary culture of the outbreak.
In addition to historicizing literary and factual works within the frame-
work of the outbreak, I find myself turning to the boundaries and borders
that surface in these texts and that are renegotiated and transgressed in
plague writing. Distrust of the printed word is a common thread in many
of these works, and the question—‘what is the truth?’—that is frequently
posed by these texts most often emerges when the expected is turned on
its head. A similar distrust develops with regard to the human body in
these texts, as it bends to the pressures of sickness and death. To further
examine the body’s negotiations with plague, I turn to Julia Kristeva’s
theory of abjection, as described in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
(1982), in which the boundaries of the self and other are compromised,
threatening subjectivity and self-hood.64 The abject is that ‘which is
rejected and distanced from the self to form the subject’;65 it is ‘neither
subject nor object’.66 This division reaches its zenith when the border
separating life and death is disturbed in plague writing.67 I also turn to
Mikhail Bakhtin’s consideration of grotesque imagery to interpret the
impact plague had on the body and to better understand the flickering
line between life and death that was often exposed in these plague writ-
ings, where images of death can as easily slip into the language of genera-
tion. Through these theoretical lenses, I examine the periphery of the
body struck by plague, the border between life and death, and the surpris-
ing transgressions and ways of describing and understanding illness and
death that appear in these works.
18 1 INTRODUCTION
CONCLUSION
The Great Plague of London marked a moment of transformation in the
early modern print marketplace. The following pages trace this transforma-
tive moment through documents that committed the horror of the epidemic
to the written realm. These texts on the outbreak reveal an obsessive ques-
tioning of the story of the plague and the information that contextualized
the visitation. Print could perpetuate the bad and inflame an already horrific
epidemic. In contrast, virtuous texts related the story of plague, committed it
to posterity and gave readers a compass for how to judge other writing. The
distinction between an infected text and safe literary harbour, however, was
often arbitrary and suited the needs and motivations of the author. However
information about the outbreak was conveyed, whether in a widespread
printed document or composed in the relative privacy of a spiritual journal,
the literary culture of the epidemic reveals contemporary anxieties about the
disease and its corresponding discourse. Against the existing continuities in
plague writing, the innovations that occurred in 1665 were unique to the
historical circumstances under which these dialogues were produced, result-
ing in the unique literary culture of the visitation.
NOTES
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. 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. Achinstein discusses the shift in thinking between outbreaks in 1597 and
1630, and the move toward a materialist understanding of the disease along-
side religious understanding: ‘Yet the health officials’ placement of these marks
upon the doors of contaminated households also promoted materialist expla-
nations 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. Achinstein, ‘Plagues and Publication’, p. 34. (Achinstein 1992)
NOTES 19
5. Ernest B. Gilman provides a compelling reading of plague in relation to lan-

guage. Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 94–100. (Gilman 2009)
6. As Paul Slack explains, ‘The plague epidemic of 1665, the first serious visita-
tion 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. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 7. (Slack 1985)
8. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p.8. (Slack 1985)
9. Ibid
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 incom-
plete. Corrected totals were 97,306 (all burials) and 68,598 (plague bur-
ials)’. 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. Moote, The Great Plague, pp. 10–11. (Moote 2004)
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. Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 157. (Cockayne 2007)
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
20 1 INTRODUCTION
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. 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. Elizabeth Lane Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England
(Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), p. 135. (Furdell 2002)
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. Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 172–173. (Smyth 2010)
20. Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England, p. 173. (Smyth 2010)
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. 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)
NOTES 21
24. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England, p. 110. (Gilman 2009)
25. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 245. (Slack
1985)
26. Moote, The Great Plague, pp. 9-10. (Moote 2004)
27. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 31. (Rose 1993)
28. Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 55. (Raymond 2003)
29. Johns, The Nature of the Book, p. 72. (Johns 1998)
30. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, p. 327.
(Raymond 2003)
31. Thomas Dekker, A Rod for Run-Awayes (London: 1625), n.p. (Dekker 1625)
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. 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. 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. 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. Jones, ‘Medical Literacies and Medical Culture in Early Modern England’,
pp. 31–32. (Jones 2011)
(Raymond 2003)
38. Jones, ‘Medical Literacies and Medical Culture in Early Modern England’,
p. 31. (Jones 2011)
(Raymond 2003)
40. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, p. 3. (Cressy 1980)
42. Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in
England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
p. 7. (Cambers 2011)
43. Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England,
1580–1720, p. 7. (Cambers 2011)
22 1 INTRODUCTION
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. 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. ‘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. 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. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. by Louis Landa (London:
1722; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, Revised edn). (Defoe 2010)
50. Totaro, ‘Introduction’, in The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources,
1558–1603, p. xi. (Totaro 2010)
51. The King’s Medicines for the Plague: Prescribed for the Year, 1604 (London:
1665).
54. George Thomson, Loimotomia: Or The Pest Anatomized: In These Following
Particulars (London: 1666). (Thomson 1666)
55. Thomas Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (London: 1667). (Vincent
1667)
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. 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)
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. 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)
NOTES 23
61. Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies,

Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave,
2001). (Healy 2001)
62. Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 3. (Ezell 1999)
63. Rebecca Totaro, ‘Introduction’, in The Plague in Print: Essential
Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603, p. xiv. (Totaro 2010)
64. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). (Kristeva 1982)
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. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 1. (Kristeva 1982)
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).
CHAPTER 2
Continuities in Plague Writing
On the page, a woodcut of a winding sheet and a rough image of a coffin

flank the broadside’s title, Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Us. A border
runs down either side of the sheet; the skulls, crossed bones, grimacing full
skeletons with empty black eye sockets and shovels fit to accompany the
coffin at the top create a visual dialogue about death. The macabre state-
ment made by the collection is direct and unequivocal. The stark nature of
the images adds to the haunting page, as skeletons, bones and skulls crowd
the perimeter. A framed image draws the reader’s eye to the centre of the
morbid squall vomited on this broadside. A hunched man presses forward;
women kneel, though it is unclear whether in mourning or prayer, and a
cart makes its way through the street. These signs of life appear on a
London landscape blighted by winding sheets and coffins. In the fore-
ground stands a skeleton holding an arrow and hourglass, overseeing the
horrors of plague and reigning over a sickly London. In the sky, an angel
of death parts the clouds and looks down upon the spectacle below.
Beneath the image, lines of verse describe London’s battle with plague.
The tone of these images is bleak, a sentiment not altogether tempered by
the small space allocated on the page for cures and preservatives, such as a
medicine that appears to the left of the central image: ‘TAke a pint of new
Milk, and cut two cloves of Garlick very small, put it in the Milk, and drink
it mornings fasting, and it preserveth from infection’.1 The motivation for
printing the sheet was the plague outbreak in 1665, as evidenced by the
page’s subtitle:

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_2
26 2 CONTINUITIES IN PLAGUE WRITING
A true Relation of Seven modern Plagues or Visitations in London, with the

numbers of those that were Buried of all Diseases; viz The first in the year of
Queen ELIZABETH, Anno 1592. The second in the year 1603 the third in
(that never to be forgotten year) 1625. The fourth in Anno 1630. The fift in
the year 1636. The sixt in the year 1637. and 1638. The seventh this present
year, 1665.2
Though printing the sheet was prompted by the outbreak of 1665, the
numerical figures running down the sides show how interconnected epi-
demics were in the early modern mind. Statistics dating back to the sixteenth
century are featured on the page. The columns describing these past out-
breaks express the wax and wane of plague deaths. The timeliness of the page
to its contemporary audience is driven home by the phrase at the bottom,
‘Buried this week of all diseases, 1787. Of the Plague, 1414’.3 The page
captures a ‘week’ in the outbreak of 1665 and places it in the context of a
century of plague. The outbreak in 1665 was uncompromising and deadly,
leaving in its wake a shocking number of human fatalities due to London’s
population growth and the sickly state of the city. Statistics from the 1665
outbreak are slotted into the destructive landscape of plague epidemics
described on the page. The sheet captures the horrific reality of the outbreak
in question, that in 1665, but what makes it more notable is that every
element described above, down to the curative recipe and framing imagery,
appears on another broadside—one that predates the 1665 plague by 28
years. Existing dialogues and their impact on the appearance of the print
landscape informed material manifestations of the last major epidemic.
Direct continuities in the print landscape have been noted by scholars, but
this chapter considers how continuity and repetition informed the literary
culture of plague writing and printing in 1665.4
Traces or outright copies of earlier plague texts became relevant again
during the 1665 epidemic, whether their content was accepted or debated,
presented in precisely the same manner or in an entirely new way. Works that
present high levels of continuity fall into three broad categories: those
transmitted with little change, such as the London Orders; printing in
which data changed but the form remained consistent, such as royal procla-
mations issued in plague times or the ubiquitous plague broadsides; and
finally stories that maintained relevance and appeal from outbreak to out-
break, such as a number of anecdotes that relate instances of narrowly avoided
premature interment in a humorous manner. These three categories of
continuity demonstrate how certain ways of thinking about and describing
LONDONS LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US 27
plague retained currency from outbreak to outbreak. Documents that were

reproduced throughout the seventeenth century feature images and text that
transmitted a timeless message about pestilence, often with a focus on death
and preservation from illness, both bodily and spiritual. The reproduction of
dialogues and works also serves to highlight areas of significant innovation in
the literary culture of the epidemic.
This chapter describes a route of plague transmission that transcended the
confines of time—the texts and stories that spread with ease from one
epidemic to the next, forming an essential part of the print pastiche of each
seventeenth-century outbreak. What has popularly become known as the
Great Plague of London was only the last major epidemic in a long series of
outbreaks that blighted the early modern landscape. By tracing some of these
dialogues that broke free from a single outbreak, spreading over the years, the
contagion of certain plague writing over time draws a distinct contrast to the
innovative narratives that emerged in 1665. Many plague dialogues, particu-
larly in religious and medical writing, were unique to the final major English
outbreak; however, the legacy of an inherited past continued to be felt.
LONDONS LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US

The repeated plague epidemics that besieged early modern England and
their corresponding message of a sustained state of sickliness created a
printed landscape scarred by former battles with the disease. That past
informed the appearance of each new epidemic on the page. Plague
broadsides illustrate the relevance of past epidemics to conceptualizing
views of the visitation in 1665. These broadsides understood a plague
epidemic within the context of other plague outbreaks on a single sheet.
Many depict plague as an early modern affliction, though not an afflic-
tion specific to 1665, while others look back to biblical plagues to
interpret the current outbreak. Examples of these broadsides from a
number of years survive, and they were some of the most affordable
and likely some of the most widely available texts produced during
outbreaks.5 In each broadside, the current affliction is added to the
long narrative of the disease.
Broadsides printed during major plague epidemics in the seventeenth
century show how dialogues surrounding the disease evolved over time,
with the production of these pages prompted by recurring instances of
pestilence, from which further information could be gathered to furnish
the page. The Red-Crosse: Or Englands Lord Have Mercy Vpon Vs (1625)
encompasses numerous outbreaks, with some of these reflecting a time well
before the bills of mortality: ‘In the yeere of Christ, 81. and in the yeere 188.
there continued a great time a Plague in Rome, of which there dayly dyed
two thousand people’.6 In a broadside entitled The Mourning-Cross, Or,
England’s Lord Have Mercy Upon Us (1665) (Fig. 2.1), much of the same
text may be found, including a ‘A Necessary Prayer for this Present Time’;7
however, the layout of each of these broadsides, from 1625 and 1665, is
unique to the year. In the 1625 document, the broadside is text-based apart
from a decorative border that runs down each side of the page. The 1665
document features a cross positioned in the centre-top of the page, reminis-
cent of the red crosses painted on the doors of visited houses, and includes
mortality statistics from the years 1591, 1603, 1625, 1630, 1636, 1637,
1638 and 1665 displayed in columns. The emphasis on mortality figures in
the later broadside gestures to the rising statistical interpretation of the
disease and corresponding ways of quantifying plague in 1665.8 Another
set of broadsides, H.C.’s Londons Lord Have Mercy Vpon Vs (1637), Londons
Lord Have Mercy Upon Us (1665) and The General Bill of Mortallity: With a
Continuation of This Present Year, 1666 (1666) (Fig. 2.2), show similar
progression in how plague was presented and interpreted over the course of
several epidemics. The 1637 Londons Lord Have Mercy Vpon Vs describes
certain plague outbreaks as significant, with the subtitle, ‘A true Relation of
five modern Plagues or Visitations in London, with the number of all the
Diseased that were buried’, describing those outbreaks in 1592, 1603, 1625,
1630 and 1636, which is described as ‘this now present Visitation’.9 In the
later broadsides from 1665 and 1666, the subheading notes, ‘A true
Relation of Seven modern Plagues or Visitations in London, with the number
of those that were Buried of all Diseases’, covering the years 1592, 1603,
1625, 1630, 1636, 1637, 1638 and 1665, with the broadside from 1666
including statistics from that year. The similarities in these succinctly told
narratives of plague epidemics are striking when these broadsides, produced
during different seventeenth-century outbreaks, are laid side by side. The
focal point, even in the 1637 example that is decidedly lacking in the
statistical force possible by 1665, is the mortality associated with plague
and the fragility of life. Most of the broadsides list both plague deaths and
those who have died from all other causes. On these broadsides, from 1625,
1637, 1665 and 1666, mortality statistics are accompanied by prayers and/
or medicines to preserve oneself during a visitation. This subtext of spiritual
and temporal preservation is overshadowed by the undeniable threat
Fig. 2.1 Anonymous, The Mourning-Cross: Or, England's Lord Have Mercy
Upon Us (1665). EB65 A100 B675b v.2 [No. A170 of the Marquess of Bute
Broadsides]. Houghton Library, Harvard University
Fig. 2.2 Anonymous, The General Bill of Mortallity: With a Continuation of This
Present Year, 1666 (1666). EB65 A100 B675b v.2 [No. A172 of the Marquess of
Bute Broadsides]. Houghton Library, Harvard University
conveyed by mounting plague deaths, typically listed in columns by 1665, as

epidemics jostle for space on the page. These broadsides demonstrate an
ongoing narrative of plague, with figures that can stretch back to biblical
times and no promise of reprieve from the affliction in the future. This
continuity was not just conceptual, but could be reproduced image by
image, word by word. Ernest B. Gilman has described a ‘vast and repetitive
outpouring’ of works associated with plague, and proposes these form a type
of ‘traumatic repetition’.10 While these broadsides represent paralysis in the
country’s response, they also capture, at the most basic level, the fears and
real concerns facing citizens, which were timeless from outbreak to outbreak
in the early modern period—infection, death and mortality.
Those elements that pass from outbreak to outbreak—infection, death,
mortality—are captured in the poem at the centre of three of these broad-
sides, Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Us (1637 and 1665) and The
General Bill of Mortallity (1666). The act of re-printing the verse with
some small variations, while the figures around the lines grow and shift,
encapsulates how inescapable plague and the inevitable death and suffer-
ing it brought with it were in the early modern mind. The verse appearing
on the 1637 broadside carries an attribution at the bottom of the page,
‘Written by H.C.’11 H.C. is thought to refer to Humphrey Crouch, a
writer during the first half of the seventeenth century, who composed a
number of popular works and was recognized for his wit and facility for
writing ballads.12
The verse on the broadsides reads as follows:
Reader, what ever thou art, rich or poor,

Rowse up thy self, for Death stands at the (door;
If God sayes strike, he must & wil come in
For death we know is the reward of sin.
His very breath is so infectious grown,
He poysons every one he breathes upon;
He is the Rich-man’s terrour, makes him flye,
And bear away his baggs, as loath to die.
What shall the Poor do that behind do stay?
Death makes them rich, by taking them away.
But what shall Poor men do, that here do live,
‘Tis surely fit the Rich should comfort give,
And weekly Means unto them still afford:
Oh such Rich men shall be rich in the Lord!
Death startles all, but more the guilt of sin,

Which sinful man long time hath lived in,
Doth make them fearful of that punishment
Due unto sin for time that’s evil spent.
Oh why was this not thought on long ago!
When God expected our Repentance so?
Seventeen years since, a little Plague God sent,
He shoke his Rod to move us to repent:
Not long before that time, a dearth of Corn
Was sent to us to see if we would turn:
And after that, there’s none deny it can,
The Beasts did suffer for the sin of man:
Grass was so short and small, that it was told,
Hay for four pounds a Load was daily sold…
Oh stubborn England! childish and unwise,
So heavy laden with iniquities:
Return, return, unto thy loving Father,
Return I say with speed, so much the rather,
Because his Son thy Saviour pleads thy cause,
Though thou hast broken all his holy Lawes:
Say to thy self, My sins are cause of all
Gods judgements that upon this Land do fall,
And sin’s the cause that each one doth complain,
They have too much, sometimes to little rain:
Say to thy self, this Plague may be removed,
If I repent, as plainly may be proved
By Niniveh, that City great and large,
For God hath given unto his Angels Charge.
To strike and to forbear, as he sees fit;
If it be so, then learn thou so much wit,
To use thy best endeavour to prevent
A plague, which thou mayst do if thou repent!
Let all infected Houses be thy Text,
And make this Use, that thine may be the next:
The Red Crosse still is us`d, as it hath bin,
To shew they Christians are that are within:
And Lord have mercy on us on the door,
Puts thee in mind, to pray for them therefore.
The Watchman that attends the house of sorrow,
He may attend upon thy house to morrow.

Oh where’s the vows we to our God have made!
When death & sickness came with axe & spade,
And hurl`d our Brethren up in heaps apace,
Even forty thousand in a little space:
The Plague among us is not yet removed,
Because that sin of us is still beloved.
Each spectacle of Death and Funerall,
Puts thee and I in mind, We must die all.13
Composed in rhyming couplets, the verse is simplistically con-

structed. Addressing the reader at the outset, the author outlines
the horrors to come, what has brought plague upon London and
the best recourse for those struggling during the outbreak. The
author warns all, rich and poor, that death can strike anyone. In the
lines, miasma issues forth from death himself, his infectious breath
poisoning those God instructs him to strike. Questions are posed
—‘What shall the Poor do that behind do stay?’, ‘But what shall
Poor men do, that here do live?’—but their answers are insufficient
in the face of the threat. For the poor forced to stay behind, ‘Death
makes them rich, by taking them away’. The rich have a responsibility
to the poor, according to the author. Yet the affliction is brought on
by more than the sinful actions of citizens, and the author turns his
attention from the reader, chastising and infantilizing instead
England, accusing her of being ‘stubborn’, ‘childish’ and ‘unwise’.
The country is urged to ‘Return, return, unto thy loving Father’.
Making a biblical allusion to the city of Nineveh, which is portrayed
as both a great city filled with the wicked (Jonah 1:2) and as one
whose citizens repent in the face of temporal punishments from God
(Matthew 12:41), the author draws a connection between biblical
stories and those punishments suffered by early modern England,
also a great city filled with the wicked in the author’s estimation.14 He
extends this allusion and advises England: ‘To use thy best endeavour to
prevent/A plague, which thou mayst do if thou repent’. The next section
describes marking houses visited by plague, ‘Let all infected Houses be thy
Text’,15 and sees Crouch’s language play on the integral roles texts and readers
perform in plague outbreaks. Plague outbreaks were rife with signifiers that
the disease has descended, and these had to be interpreted by citizen readers,
who could interpret the signs of danger that accompanied an epidemic. The
verse ends on an awkward rhyme, creating a jarring conclusion to the poem:

‘Each spectacle of Death and Funerall/Puts thee and I in mind, We must die
all’. No text or marking of houses or repentance offered up too late will give
the reader leave of the truth driven home not just by the verse but by the entire
page—its statistics, its images, its verse—that mortality is inevitable, ‘We must
die all’. From epidemic to epidemic, facing death was one truth that was
timeless and inescapable. The message of this inevitability was inscribed on
these pages, passing from outbreak to outbreak. In many regards, little had
changed from previous visitations when plague struck in 1665. The London
Plague Orders were repeatedly published with few changes. Plague was still a
terrible affliction. Whether an outbreak fell in the first half of the seventeenth
century or in the second half, the bleakest threat during an epidemic—death
—remained alarmingly consistent across time.
PLAGUE-TIME PROCLAMATIONS
Political writing and the controlling function it played during a plague
epidemic was uniquely tied to the capacity to print. Amongst the
documents that sought at once to convey information and moderate
behaviour were the bills of mortality, the plague orders and royal
proclamations. Each of these categories of printed text represented
continuity in attempting to control the spread of plague, and they
were called upon from outbreak to outbreak, directing the messages
that citizens received about the specific epidemic being endured.
Established methods of production and distribution meant these
texts were pillars of the political language surrounding plague.
Plague had widespread repercussions for governments, ranging from
its effect on war to its drastic potential to impact the economy,
including trade.16 Governments gathered information on the spread
of the disease, both domestically and in foreign contexts, in order to
properly manage the public health crisis a major epidemic represented.
Outside outbreaks that threatened British soil required advanced
thought and measures to halt the approach of the disease. A domestic
outbreak meant that various measures had to be taken and commu-
nicated in order to protect citizens and prevent the unnecessary spread
of disease. Print was harnessed to control the messages that were
disseminated and how these were framed. Political plague texts made
citizens aware of the threat and the national or regional measures
being taken to manage that threat.
PLAGUE-TIME PROCLAMATIONS 35
Political texts represented an area in which significant repetition was

seen across early modern plague outbreaks. The bills of mortality for
London, for example, which were funded by the city, were systematically
collected, printed and distributed from 1603 onwards.17 Royal proclama-
tions produced during seventeenth-century plague outbreaks bear striking
similarities. Robert Steele (1910) notes in his introduction to A
Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns
(1910) that proclamations were recognizable and familiar texts for the
people of English cities: ‘A series of documents of this kind has been
proclaimed and posted up in the accustomed places with unfailing regu-
larity ever since the end of the fifteenth century’.18 Used to convey infor-
mation about regulations and issues of public concern, these formed
another type of political text used during plague times, playing the dual
role of informing citizens of plague measures and attempting to control
and modify undesirable activities or behaviours. While many of the plague-
related proclamations issued in 1665 pertained to changes to and move-
ment of governing bodies due to the spread of the disease, other proclama-
tions advised of measures to tackle plague—some of these from a place of
material prevention and others appealing to providential protection.
Royal proclamations issued in 1665 were consistent with those issued
during earlier outbreaks, though the price and printing details changed over
time. In the year of the outbreak, the imprint on royal proclamations
included John Bill and Christopher Barker, with some of these imprints
noting the proclamation was printed by Leonard Lichfield for John Bill
and Christopher Barker. Proclamations were essential vehicles for informa-
tion sharing during serious plague outbreaks. From modifying and directing
citizens’ behaviour by encouraging positive activities, such as donating funds
toward worthy causes or providing guidance on prohibited activities, they
served a variety of messages with the goal of raising awareness amongst large
groups of people. In other instances they provided information on govern-
ing bodies’ activities that were impacted by the disease—‘By the King.
A Proclamation, Concerning the Adjournment of Michaelmas Term’
(1665);19 ‘By the King. A Proclamation Concerning the Prorogation of
the Parliament’ (1665);20 ‘By the King. A Proclamation for Removing the
Receipt of His Majesties Exchequer from Westminster to Nonsuch’
(1665).21 Proclaiming in plague times was an established tradition in
England, with some of these proclamations giving insight not just into
how governance was impacted by plague but also how plague was con-
structed in the public consciousness.
A number of royal proclamations issued in relation to the visitation

pertained to the concourse of people. Under most circumstances the
concourse of people was vehemently prohibited in political plague texts,
upholding an understanding of material protection against the threat of
contagion. However, the persistent belief in the moral dimension of
illness manifested in proclamations that gestured to instances when
gatherings could be justified, in the interest of providential salvation.
On 6 July, measures for designated fast days and the severity of the
growing outbreak were proclaimed in a text entitled ‘By the King. A
Proclamation for A Generall Fast Throughout this Realm of England’.22
Fast days during plague had been enacted first during an outbreak in
1563 under Elizabeth I, who, alongside her council and the church,
scheduled prayer and fasting, with fasting on Wednesdays.23 The move-
ment of the outbreak through the country in 1665 raised alarm, and the
proclamation noted it ‘seems to threaten a general and most dreadful
Visitation’. The text made faith-based recommendations, designating
fast days, first on the twelfth of July and going forward on the first
Wednesday of each month, ‘until it shall please God to withdraw this
Plague and grievous Sickness’. The proclamation requested that citizens
not only maintain the request, ‘And that the solemnization of these days
may be with such Order and Decency as is requisite’, but that a collec-
tion should also be made for plague victims at ‘the respective Churches
and Chappels then Assembled’. The first appointed fast day, 12 July,
saw the churches teeming with people.24 While the concourse of people
threatened to spread the infection, moral obligation to gather under
specific terms in relation to the epidemic trumped what little was under-
stood of how plague was transmitted. It was known that plague passed
through cities, with flight from an infected area perceived as the surest
way to avoid infection, but for those who could not escape a prayer for
salvation was offered up.
Meetings in churches continued throughout the outbreak, though
the circumstances changed once many pulpits were left abandoned by
their Anglican ministers. The flight of ministers meant nonconformist
ministers took up the task of preaching at some of the vacant pulpits.
Writing of the height of the epidemic, nonconformist Thomas Vincent
described the scene at a church in God’s Terrible Voice in the City:
‘Now there is such a vast concourse of people in the Churches, where
these Ministers are to be found, that they cannot many times come
PLAGUE-TIME PROCLAMATIONS 37
neer the Pulpit doors for the press’.25 He describes textual attacks on
fleeing ministers and a corresponding call for nonconformists to take
up these pulpits:
Now some Ministers, formerly put out of their places, who did abide in
the City when most of Ministers in place were fled and gone from the
people, as well as from the disease, into the Countreys, seeing the people
crowd so fast into the grave and eternity, who seemed to cry as they went
for spiritual Physicians; and perceiving the Churches to be open, and
Pulpits to be open, and finding Pamphlets flung about the streets,
of Pulpits to be let, they judged that the Law of God and nature did
now dispense with, yea command their preaching in publick places,
though the Law of man (it is to be supposed in ordinary cases) did
forbid them to do it.26
The crowds Vincent describes in the churches parallel those crowding

‘into the grave and eternity’. An anonymous pamphlet was released, A
Pulpit to be Let. With a Just Applause of those Worthy Divines that Stay with
Us (1665), carrying a scathing message for ministers who had abandoned
their posts:
BEloved; and he sweetly thus goes on,

Now, where's Beloved? why, Beloved’s gon.
No morning Mattens now, nor Evening song:
Alas! the Parson cannot stay so long.
With Clarken-well it fares as most in town,
The light-heel'd Levit's broke, and the Spark flown;
Broke did I say? they ne're had quit the place,
Had they but set up with a spark or grace!
They did the Pulpit as a Coffin greet,
And took the Surplice for a Winding-sheet.27
Despite the threat of contracting plague through professional service

as a minister or in these religious spaces, and in a time when fleeing
ministers treated the pulpit as a coffin and the surplice as a winding-
sheet, citizens sought out divine comfort in these gatherings. While the
type of concourse described by Vincent defied what was commonly
understood about the material causes of plague, religious gatherings
were sought out with enthusiasm.28 The proclamation defining general
fast days lays out clear information in its call to action for the reader or
listener, a request to behave correctly during fast days and to contribute
to sufferers generously. It also implicitly accepts the concourse of people
for divine and moral purposes. The same could not be said, however,
when the concourse of people related to activities perceived as less-than-
wholesome.
In Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), Bartholomew Cokes
utters in frustration, ‘Ay, as I am a honest man; would I were an
arrant rogue else! A plague of all roguy damn’d cut-purses for me’
(Bartholomew Fair, II. 6. 102–104), upon realizing he has been
targeted by a cutpurse.29 Hapless Cokes, relating plague to the crim-
inal element of the fair was not alone in describing the festive space as
fraught with the perils of pestilence. The greatest surviving textual
evidence of fairs may be found in the negative responses these gather-
ings provoked.30 The year prior to the epidemic saw a July description
of a fair in the Newes, lamenting the degraded nature of the event and
stating the ‘Fair at St James’s is put by, as considered to tend rather to
the advantage of looseness and irregularity, than to the substantial
promoting of any good, common and beneficial to the people’.31
Proclamations prohibiting fairs are numerous amongst the plague-
related proclamations issued in 1665. Previously a cloth fair,
Bartholomew Fair was transformed over Charles II’s reign, with the
gathering lengthened and its entertainment elements becoming a
greater focus.32 In the year prior to the visitation, Samuel Pepys
marvelled at the Fair’s entertainment, ‘there shewed them and myself
the dancing on the ropes, and several other the best shows’, while
Evelyn, writing in the mid-century, described the event in more scep-
tical terms, ‘To London from Sayes Court, and saw the celebrated
follies of Bartholomew Fair’.33 The Fair drew a crowd comprised from
all circles, and was located outside of the walls of the city, in
Smithfield. Bartholomew Fair was targeted by proclamation in 1665
but had also been the subject of royal proclamations during plague
outbreaks in 1593, 1625, 1636, 1637 and again in 1666.34 The
proclamation issued on 7 August 1665 notes that ‘no good means of
Providence may be neglected to stay the further spreading of the great
Infection of the Plague, doth find it necessary to prevent all occasions of
publick Concourse’ until the current epidemic was resolved.35 The text
names two fairs, Sturbridge Fair and Bartholomew Fair, ‘unto which
there is usually extraordinary resort out of all parts of the Kingdom’,
INHERITED MYTH: THE STORY OF THE PIPER 39
stating ‘the holding whereof at the usual times, would in all likelihood
be the occasion of further Danger and Infection to other parts of the
Land, which yet, by Gods mercy, stands clear and free’.36 It appealed to
‘Lords of the said Fairs, and others Interested in them, That they all
forbear to hold the said Fairs, or any thing appertaining to them at the
times accustomed’.37 Penalties, it stated, would be levelled against
those in violation of the regulation. In contrast to the proclamation
aimed at establishing a general fast, satisfying a divine interpretation of
the disease and the potential for providential protection, which encour-
aged positive activity and monetary exchange for the benefit of the
poor, proclamations prohibiting fairs dissuaded citizens from negative
and potentially harmful behaviours, with a subtext of immorality. As the
quote from the Newes suggests, more than just a place for the frenzied
concourse of people, the fair was a breeding ground for debauchery.
The perception of plague as a judgement of God meant fairs deserved
their fate during an outbreak on two grounds, moral and material.
Culturally constructed views of plague as it related to spiritual
salvation and to the morally corrupt behaviour associated with fairs
persisted throughout the seventeenth century. These were reflected in
proclamations issued during epidemics, with official texts policing the
border between morality and immorality. Royal proclamations played
an important role in notifying citizens of expectations during a plague
outbreak, joining the plague orders and bills of mortality as a textual
space that raised awareness of the disease and directed behaviour
accordingly. Woven into the language of the proclamation promoting
a general fasting day and the numerous proclamations forbidding the
concourse of people at fairs is an implicit statement about the accept-
ability of certain types of meeting spaces in plague times and the
corresponding bodily danger of indecent behaviour. In contrast to
the support of religious meetings and activities, restrictions placed on
commonly perceived immoral spaces meant these were invested with
increased significance during an epidemic.
INHERITED MYTH: THE STORY OF THE PIPER

Plague may at first seem an unlikely location for laughter. It is difficult
to think of something more heart wrenching than the shrieks of the
dying and the stench of death. Adding to fears of the disease the
prospect of premature interment and the expected outcome would be
one of unimaginable horror—or so one would surmise. Under the

correct circumstances, however, the prospect of being buried alive, in
conjunction with the horror of pestilence, became a location for
humour—if a particularly virulent form of gallows-humour. This fear
manifested itself astutely in the literature of plague times. The sheer
number of victims that an outbreak reaped caused extraordinary stress
and raised many questions. Where would the dead be buried with
mortality rising each day and week? How could tradition with regard
to funeral and burial practices be upheld during an epidemic? The levels
of death seen when plague descended placed great pressure on the
city.38 The hurried burials of an epidemic brought with them the real
possibility of burying the living with the dead.39 Orders in place to stop
the spread of the disease were not in the spirit of those expectations
held by family and friends regarding burial and grieving practices.40
Shutting up houses and the order preventing public gatherings chal-
lenged early modern expectations for burial in London, which included
family and friends gathering to honour the individual.41 Anxieties that
emerged with the enormous rise in the death toll and surrounding the
treatment of the dead were examined and pushed to their limits in
seventeenth-century plague writing.
In Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a humorous anecdote is
shared in which a very inebriated piper is accidentally collected along
with plague corpses and placed in a dead-cart to be transported to one
of London’s plague pits. During the journey, the piper awakens and
makes the collectors aware that he is not, in fact, a corpse. In a number
of plague-time texts, a moment of mistaken identity is captured, when
life and death collide. Stories of threatened premature burial, which may
be found in a number of reincarnations in just over a century, are
typically introduced as true tales, related to the teller by the friend of
a friend, accompanied by statements such as that made in Defoe’s A
Journal of the Plague Year: ‘It was under this John Hayward’s care, and
within his Bounds, that the Story of the Piper, with which People have
made themselves so merry, happen’d, and he assur’d me that it was
true’.42 In the case of Defoe’s rendition, it is believed he was conveying
a story that is also related in Sir John Reresby’s memoirs. A sexton by
the name of John Hayward may be traced to parish register records
from 1684, who followed on from a ‘John Field our Sexton’, whose
burial is recorded as 6 November 1666.43 Whether based in fact or
fiction, stories of threatened premature interment in plague times are a
persistent expression of plague humour, re-emerging across seventeenth-

century plague writing. These moments of mistaken identity resonated
with plague-time readers. An epidemic provided an ideal space in which
these stories could thrive, when premature burials were not only feared
but a distinct possibility under the strained circumstances surrounding
burial. Examples of these anecdotes appear in a book, a pamphlet, and a
personal diary, with many gesturing to the oral tradition through which
the story was passed from friend to friend. The remainder of this chapter
examines the persistence of these stories and their appeal in plague
times and considers how a number of plague writers frame stories of
evaded premature interment as humorous, narrowing in on a moment
of duality between life and death. These texts interrogate plague and the
accompanying fear of death that overshadowed periods of epidemic
through humour. Whether in the plague cart or underneath a coffin
awaiting burial, the subversive heroes in these stories and their emer-
gence from a state of seeming death comment on the challenges
endured by a city experiencing the increased mortality that accompanied
pestilence.
At least four different works that addressed seventeenth-century plague
epidemics contained these narratives.44 Each instance of the anecdote coin-
cides with a significant plague epidemic in England—specifically those out-
breaks in 1603, 1636 and 1665—or in the case of Defoe’s A Journal of the
Plague Year, the 1720 outbreak in Marseilles, France.45 An early example is
found in The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie (1604), written by Thomas
Middleton ‘with help from’ Thomas Dekker.46 A later work signed by the
initials H. C. is thought to have been written by Humphrey Crouch, and is
entitled Londons Vacation, and the Countries Tearme. Or, A Lamentable
Relation of Severall Remarkable Passages Which It Hath Pleased the Lord to
Shew on Severall Persons Both in London, and the Country in This Present
Visitation, 1636 (1637).47 Crouch is also likely the author of the verse on the
Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Us broadsides. Two versions of the story
place the event during the Great Plague of London in 1665, first John
Reresby’s memoirs, published in 1734 under the title The Memoirs of the
Honourable Sir John Reresby, Bart. And Last Governor of York, and finally
Defoe’s fictional work on the outbreak, A Journal of the Plague Year.48
Anecdotes illustrating the funnier side of buboes and the chaos that
accompanied pestilence often appeared in tandem with writing in a more
serious vein and between the covers of a single text. Defoe’s A Journal
vacillates between first-person, and typically macabre, encounters with the
disease, written as a journal detailing one man’s encounter with an epi-

demic, and lighter anecdotes like that of the piper. These stories of a
lighter nature are often described as being relayed to the authorial persona
from another source and then transcribed in his journal, and many of these
comic interludes are delivered with a moral end in sight. Middleton, in The
Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie, arranges his plague pamphlet as a
framed narrative, the heart of which consists of tales being told at a
gathering at an ordinary, which frequently take a funny, unbelievable or
shocking turn. The pamphlet is introduced by vicious verse between War,
Pestilence and Famine. The existence of humour in plague times has been
well theorized by a number of scholars and is evident in early modern
plague writing.49 In studies of plague writing with comic elements from
the early modern period, it is believed laughter functions as an antidote to
sickness. Humour in plague times is typically theorized as a purgative or
‘inoculation’ against the illness. Humour preserves and has an important
place in written attempts to interpret epidemic and infection. Comedy
may also be understood as countering authority, which is particularly
relevant during an outbreak, when actions that at other times would be
deemed acceptable became the subject of strict regulation by authorities.50
During the periods of plague from which the story of the piper and
stories like it emerge, the disease was viewed as an affliction of the poor,
despite its indiscriminate killing during an epidemic of those unfortunate
enough to remain within its reach. Pestilence most often emerged first in
impoverished parishes, and those living in these parishes had the least
means with which to flee to less-diseased pastures—recipe books of cures
addressed to the ‘poorer sort’ abounded. In his discussion of ‘The Body
Grotesque and Monstrous’ in Bodies Politic, Roy Porter points to the
negative associations that accompanied the disease:
The pious trope of the vile body could be confirmed by the findings of
medicine and science. Plague proved the infirmities of the flesh, and syphilis
and other deadly and disfiguring afflictions clinched the ties between lust,
sin and suffering.51
Speaking in part about Dekker’s plague pamphlets, Rick Bowers explains

in Radical Comedy in Early Modern England (2008) that comic figures,
often unwashed and unclean, ‘smear the pretentious cleanliness of upper
class figures who would dominate them’.52 During a plague outbreak, this
drive to ‘dominate them’ became interchangeable with ‘desert them’. In
each of these stories of avoided premature burial, the author’s sleight of

hand confuses life and death, sickness and health. The protagonist in each
text, typically an oft-drunken man who is patently unclean, challenges
expectations of who should survive during a plague outbreak. In three of
the four relations of the tale, he has passed out from drinking and is not
rendered in a God-fearing light. In fact, he is so unwholesome as to be
taken as a corpse and picked up alongside the bodies of plague victims.
Before the punch-line is delivered, we see ‘death infecting life’.53 He is the
picture of ill health, giving the impression of a corpse, a body that has
transgressed even the limits of life itself. And, of course, a corpse was
nothing unique in a plague epidemic. More than making a statement
against the ‘pretentious cleanliness of upper class figures’, each figure in
these anecdotes opposes the fragility of human life in plague times and
laughs in the face of the terrifying knowns that marked plague
outbreaks.54
The comic aspect of the story challenges expectations of the disease. In
each text, against logic, death is encountered and ultimately conquered.
There was a remarkable difference between life during an epidemic and in
a year when only a handful of plague deaths were recorded in the bills of
mortality. Serious outbreaks resulted in the release of official plague
orders, describing the city or country’s response to the disease and the
process of identifying the diseased body. Meanwhile, the bills of mortality
exploded with the mounting number of plague deaths. Thus, an official
and long-standing discourse accompanied epidemics, expressed through
statistics and official dictates. Othering of plague victims was prescribed
practice, written into plague orders that described how the city would deal
with an epidemic by shutting up the infected in their homes with the
uninfected. The threat of the living and dying being trapped in close
quarters was inherent to an outbreak. The manner of dealing with the
disease and the corpse was described in official language in orders:
That the Burial of the dead by this Visitation be at most convenient hours,
alwaies either before Sunrising, or after Sun-setting, with the privity of the
Churchwardens or Constables, and not otherwise; and that no Neighbours
nor Friends be suffered to accompany the Coarse to Church, or to enter the
house visited, upon pain of having his house shut up, or be imprisoned.55
Within the discursive space of official responses to an outbreak, a plague

corpse was a clear and intelligible sign—at least until the tale of the piper. In
these stories, the division between life and death is precisely where humour is
located. It is a liminal space that comes alive during plague, a fleeting
moment between truth and fiction. Providing a counter dialogue to a disease
that could officially be contained in stark terms and within a defined scope,
the story of the piper challenged what was perhaps the greatest known
during an outbreak: death.
It takes some linguistic prowess to make the story of a man taken for
dead, buried under corpses and nearly deposited in a plague pit funny. Most
accounts of the story, however, are prefaced carefully to establish a humor-
ous tone, though not every author notes the story’s comic merit. A second
focus on establishing the veracity of the tale also emerges as each author
introduces his unfortunate victim. Where two of the authors, Crouch and
Reresby, seem unsure of whether the story should inspire laughter or fear,
all but Middleton make some reference to the story’s specific background.
Middleton alerts his reader to the merry nature of the story, which is only
one of several amusing anecdotes about plague in The Meeting of Gallants at
an Ordinarie. The host of the ordinary exclaims: ‘And now I returne to
more pleasant Arguments, gentlemen-gallants, to make you laugh ere you
be quite out of your capon: This that I discourse of now is a pretty, merry
accident that happened about Shoreditch, although the intent was sad and
tragical, yet the event was mirthful and pleasant’.56 Whether the reader finds
the story funny or simply ‘tragical’, Middleton frames this and the other
stories shared with the oblique humour of the pamphlet’s outermost frame,
which is comprised of verse lines delivered by Pestilence, War and Famine,
as each affliction is personified and fights for supremacy as the most brutal.57
The text easily moves between the gruesome and the gruesomely funny.
Pestilence addresses War, boasting:
As for lame persons, and maim’d soldiers,

There I outstrip thee too. How many swarms
Of bruisèd and cracked people did I leave,
Their groins sore pierced with pestilential shot,
Their armpits digged with blains, and ulcerous sores
Lurking like poisoned bullets in their flesh?
Othersome shot in the eye with carbuncles,
Their lids as monstrous as the Saracens’.58
Pestilence argues for her ability to infect over War and Famine. She out-
strips their impact through a brutal regime of her own, inflicting sores and
carbuncles and eventually death. Pestilence warns War: ‘Beware, War, how
thou speak’st of me,/I have friends here in England, though some dead/
Some still can show where I was born and bred’.59 So effective is pestilence
in laying claim to everything in her path that even those who have survived
bear the visible signs of her attack. Pestilence’s story is inextricable and
made patchy from the death she inflicts, as she boasts: ‘I slay forty
thousand in one battle,/Full of blue wounds, whose cold clay bodies
look/Like speckled marble’.60 Humans are unrecognizable within the
context of Pestilence’s works, rendered closer to grotesque sculptures,
made from clay and marble. Bodies are broken down into their respective
parts—an infected eye, a sore groin, pocked flesh. War counters that
Pestilence, ‘Thou plaguy woman’, is unchecked in her killing, taking
with her ‘Four hundred silkweavers, poor silkworms, vanished/As many
tapsters, chamberlains, and ostlers’.61 Such frivolous carnage cannot com-
pare to War’s ‘kingly tragedies’.62 The victims did not choose to enter this
battle with Pestilence and the outcome, according to War, is no victory.
These victims include many of the poor and disenfranchised, such as the
drunk man whom Middleton revives from the dead.
In contrast to Middleton’s delineation between the serious and not-so-
serious sides of plague, Crouch takes a more ambiguous approach to jest in
his telling of the story. The verse from Crouch’s Londons Vacation, and the
Countries Tearme containing the story is entitled ‘Of the man that revived
again in S. Georges Church-yard’, though the collection features a motley
line-up of anecdotes, with such titles as ‘Of one that lay unburied foure
dayes after he was dead, being of the sicknesse’ and ‘Vpon a Gentleman full
of the Tokens in Woods-Close, that lay there two days, and afterwards
dyed’. Crouch introduces his own version of the mistaken identity story as
follows: ‘A Countrey man, as ‘twas to me reported,/About some business
to this town resorted’.63 While the assertion is that the story, if not true, is at
least not the author’s invention, the author does not emphatically designate
the lines that follow as humorous. Reresby follows suit, and gives little
indication of whether he views the story as funny or not, though he is
quite insistent that his reader accepts the story as the truth, writing, ‘It was
usual for People to drop down in the Streets as they went about their
Business; and a Story is reported for a certain Truth’.64 Defoe is even
more convincing when narrating his account, stating, ‘It was under this
John Hayward’s Care, and within his Bounds, that the Story of the Piper,
with which People have made themselves so merry, happen’d, and he
assur’d me it was true’.65 Establishing truth gives the tale value, whether
told in verse by Crouch or collected in a fictional journal by Defoe. There is

a significant difference in the cadence of the story when presented by an
author who is well-versed in comic writing and attempting to establish the
work’s comedic value, such as Dekker, as compared to the more earnest
tone used in conveying the story in a personal memoir, as in Reresby’s text.
At the heart of each story is an unfortunate instance of mistaken identity
—a moment when the living and dead exist in a single body. The comedy
emerges when this misidentification is realized; when the grotesque and sick
body is revealed to the reader or narrative’s onlookers to be a living and
healthy body; when the transgression is revealed. The story of the piper
adheres to Bakhtin’s description of the grotesque image:
The essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and

double-faced fullness of life. Negation and destruction (death of the old) are
included as an essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth
of something new and better. The very material bodily lower stratum of the
grotesque image (food, wine, the genital force, the organs of the body)
bears a deeply positive character. This principle is victorious, for the final
result is always abundance, increase.66
The character in each story embodies at once destruction and renewal.

The body in each story is brought down to its base parts, drunken,
diseased and rendered a corpse to observers, and then brought back,
unbelievably, to life. The character has revelled so much in some of the
stories, overindulging to such an extreme that only this shocking moment
of restoration brings him back from the dead and reverses the expected.
The piper encapsulates the ‘double-faced fullness of life’.
In each work, humour is most keenly felt in the moment where duality
is exposed and the division between life and death is exploited by the
author. The circumstances and details change. In Middleton’s example the
protagonist is a very drunk man who has passed out near the corpse of a
servant. The owner of the house, ‘sorely pestered with the death of
servants’, devises to have the body picked up in the shadow of night before
the plague could be identified in his house, which would result in it being
shut up according to the plague orders:
a shipwreck drunkard (or one drunk at the sign of The Ship), new cast from
the shore of an alehouse and his brains sore beaten with the cruel tempests of
ale and Beer, fell flounce upon a low stall hard by the house. There being little
difference in the carcass, for the other was dead, and he was dead-drunk.67
Middleton’s play on words jests on the duality felt in the body. Crouch
describes neither a piper nor a drunk, but simply a ‘Countrey man’ who ‘to
this town resorted’. Crouch explains:
Finding himself not well, strait way he went

Into S. Georges fields in discontent,
He drunk a penny-worth of milk ‘tis said,
And down upon the ground himself he laid;68
The milk-woman, finding him in what is described by the poet as a trance, tells
the sexton of the parish. The searchers are summoned. Crouch writes, ‘And
when the corps the Searchers had survaid,/They saw no cause why they
should be afraid;/For of the Plague they found the man was free’, and it
was decided he should be buried. When he awakes beneath a coffin, where the
Sexton has hidden him for burial the following day, he throws off the casket
and emerges to the shock of the world. In Reresby’s brief account, he writes of
the piper awaking: ‘the Fellows that drove the Cart, who could see nothing
distinctly, that in a Fright they betook them to their Heels, and would have it
that they had taken up the Devil in the Disguise of a dead Man’.69 And of
course, Defoe’s piper asks those pulling the dead-cart: ‘But I an't dead tho’,
am I?’.70 Each author strips away the black and white division between life and
death, though in each narration of this merry story life is triumphant. Certainly
life’s victory plays a central role in the comic aspect of the anecdote, but these
stories also efficiently challenged official views and texts on the illness that so
neatly packaged the messy issues of life and death in plague times.
The conclusion in each work is a moment of fracture. It was understood
that close contact with those who had contracted plague was an efficient way
to catch the disease. Resolution in the story of the piper does not simply
occur when the man rises. The sub-text of each story begs us to consider
what lies beyond the borders of the page. Despite the common belief that
close proximity with the infected and plague corpses could result in infec-
tion, none of these authors inflicts the disease on his protagonist, though not
everyone gets away unscathed. Perhaps there was some benefit to the alcohol
so enthusiastically imbibed by Middleton, Reresby and Defoe’s protagonists,
as each of these carry on with their usual antics. Only Crouch’s milk-drinker
succumbs to death. While the author assures his reader the man is very much
free from plague—‘As cleare a corps as ever did they see’—he ends up in the
graveyard where the sexton was waiting to bury him. In his bittersweet
conclusion to the poem, Crouch writes:
Five dayes after he liv’d, retaining breath,

And then he chang’d his mortall life for death.
Now in the same Church-yard his bones remain
Vntill the Trumpet raise them again.71
Meanwhile, the enthusiastic drinkers stagger away from the incident. The
subject of Middleton’s story ‘returned to his old vomit again, and was
drunk in Shoreditch before evening’,72 while Defoe’s piper ‘went about
his Business’ following his brush with death.73
In each story of narrowly avoided premature interment, the body divided
between life and death, sickness and health, becomes a fixation, as percep-
tions and expectations are challenged in the punch line of this morbidly
funny tale. Each story counters official and practical expectations and the
greatest known during plague epidemics, death. Perhaps the story of this
narrowly escaped premature interment is not unlike a particularly persistent
strain of pestilence or in fact the reams of plague texts, true and untrue,
authoritative and not, that refused to be buried. These stories of barely
avoided premature burial, that, like the piper, rise up at the most unexpected
times countered the overwhelming sense of death, loss and despair that
coloured so many of the plague texts carried forward in print and manu-
script. These subversive figures not only refuse to be buried in each of these
stories, they refuse to be buried over the continuum of plague epidemics
faced by England in the early modern period. His re-emergence in each
rendition of the story allows the fear of live burial and the literary responses
to that fear to break the confines of a single epidemic, spreading from
outbreak to outbreak throughout the seventeenth century. At the heart of
each story, the impossible survival of the poor and marginalized, is not only
humorous but inspiring in that it breaches all that is knowable about plague,
in stark contrast to official texts on epidemic. This piper, against all odds,
defeats the greatest message sent by a plague epidemic, and that is death. In
turn, the story also points to the unpredictable nature of the disease, placing
into question definitive statements of who and why one catches plague that
were ever-present in the literature of outbreak.
CONCLUSION
Existing scholarship has tended to view the print culture surrounding
plague outbreaks in England that demonstrated repetition and little inno-
vation as being in a state of paralysis, ‘traumatic repetition’, a perception
CONCLUSION 49
consistent with views put forward by Gilman.74 What has been described as
paralysis within printed documents that respond to plague is one way of
describing the extent that reprinting and reworking the same documents and
the same fears, epidemic after epidemic, abounded throughout seventeenth-
century England. Considering the transmission of ideas and information
reveals an alternative way of interpreting this repetition. These moments of
repetition point to some of the stories, images and ways of describing plague
that persisted and maintained relevance from each passing outbreak and into
the final major early modern visitation in 1665. The imagery associated with
the print culture of early modern plague epidemics in England is often bleak
and two-dimensional.75 The persistence of certain modes of expression,
however, shows how apt these forms were for expressing a country struck
by illness. This persistence points, too, to the extent to which England was
riddled with the disease in the seventeenth century and the functionality of
these modes of expression. These inherited elements added to the growing
bulk of printed response to the disease. In some instances, as in stories of
avoided premature burial, popular anecdotes emerged in the fabric of 1665’s
plague dialogue. When plague broadsides from past outbreaks were revised
with the onset of a new epidemic, no issue was taken with outright repeti-
tion, providing an ongoing salve for the horrors of outbreak. Royal procla-
mations responding to plague outbreaks established a language of control
that was advanced during each early modern outbreak, applying culturally
constructed understanding of the disease to citizen’s activities in an effort to
moderate behaviour.
Understanding where continuity existed in the plague discourse of
1665 draws attention to areas where significant innovation emerged
in the literary culture of the outbreak. While certain ways of con-
ceptualizing the disease were consistent across the seventeenth cen-
tury and certain forms were revived during each epidemic due to their
suitability to addressing the realities and fears associated with an
outbreak, in other subgenres of plague writing radical shifts were
taking place. In some areas of plague writing, the ways in which
citizens contextualized, described and coped with the illness were
changing. The subversive humour of the piper story easily breached
the confines of each outbreak, when the pressures of death and
mounting burials forced people to seek out inoculation from the
horrors around them through laughter. The form of the plague
broadsides, capturing years of death and sentiments of mortality on
a single page, was an exceedingly economical and effective expression
of an epidemic. Yet in other areas of plague writing, such as medicine

and religion, older dialogues and ways of understanding pestilence no
longer applied. In these areas, while some inheritance of old ideas
took place, the vigour of innovation led to new understandings of a
very old foe, plague.
NOTES
1. Anonymous, Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Us (London: 1665).
(Anonymous 1665). I work from the broadside of this title that lists dates
up to 7 November (Wing (2nd ed.) / L2937).
(Anonymous 1665)
(Anonymous 1665)
4. For a discussion of Renaissance plague stories passed on between outbreaks,
with a focus on Italy, see Ann G. Carmichael, ‘The Last Past Plague: The
Uses of Memory in Renaissance Epidemics’, Journal of the History of
Medicine, 53 (1998), pp. 132–160 (Carmichael 1998); Gilman makes a
case study of plague broadsides in England and notes the importance of
these as a ‘form of visual language’ (p. 117), making the point of plague
representation in England that ‘in the English Reformation, the infliction of
plague is to be understood fundamentally as a language event foreshadowed
by, and issuing from, the Word’ (p. 73). Gilman, Plague Writing in Early
Modern England, pp. 109–117 (Gilman 2009). For a study of plague
broadsides, see: Jenner, ‘Plague on a Page: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us in
Early Modern London’, pp. 255–286 (Jenner 2012). Separate discussions
of plague broadsides may be found in: Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular
Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.
227–230. (Watt 1991)
5. Jenner, ‘Plague on a Page: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us in Early Modern
England’, p. 256, 258. (Jenner 2012)
6. Anonymous, The Red-Crosse: Or Englands Lord Have Mercy Vpon Vs
(London: 1625). (Anonymous 1625). I work from the broadside of this
title that includes mortality statistics up to 4 August 1625 (STC (2nd ed.)/
20823).
7. Anonymous, The Mourning-Cross, or, England’s Lord Have Mercy Upon Us
(London: 1665). I work from the version collected with the Bute
Broadsides, which includes mortality statistics up to 5 September 1665.
8. Jenner, ‘Plague on a Page: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us in Early Modern
England’, p. 266. (Jenner 2012)
NOTES 51
9. H. C., Londons Lord Have Mercy Vpon Vs (London: [1637]). I work from
the broadside with mortality statistics printed up to 31 March 1637 (STC /
1300:06).
11. H.C., Londons Lord Have Mercy Vpon Vs (London: [1637]) (H. C. 1637);
Attributing the verse has caused great consternation over the years. A nine-
teenth-century scholar proposed that they may have been written by Rev.
Joseph Some, the vicar of Aldenham, who according to the short article that
appeared in Note and Queries was ‘ejected from his living in 1643, and
restored 1660'. This justification falls into the easy trap of being based on
the lines being penned by the vicar, as ‘the handwriting appears to be his’,
suggesting the lines are from 1665. Henry H. Gibbs, ‘Lines from Aldenham
Parish Register’, in Notes and Queries: A Medium of Inter-Communication
for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. (London: 1855), pp.
281–282 (Gibbs 1855); An earlier article in The Literary Chronicle points to
a description of the said lines and of a Lord Have Mercy Upon Us broadside
in The Witch-Finder General, attributing them to the reign of James I,
though the lines in The Witch-finder General point to the 1637 publication.
Anonymous, The Literary Chronicle for the Year 1824; Containing A Review
of All New Publications of Value and Interest (London: 1824), p. 494.
(Anonymous 1824)
12. Jason Mc Elligott, ‘Crouch, Humphrey (fl. 1601–1657)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [www.
oxforddnb.com] <accessed 25 March 2016>. (Elligott 2004)
(Anonymous 1665)
14. For a discussion of Nineveh in plague writing, see: Rebecca Totaro, The
Plague Epic in Early Modern England, pp. 33–34. (Totaro 2012)
15. In conjunction with the images of houses depicted in the woodcut on the
broadsheet, the lines are interpreted by Gilman as follows: ‘Its value (as ‘thy
Text’) resides not in what one invests in the image, but in what one draws
out of it’ and that these signs of plague are ‘to be read as a composite text’.
Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England, p. 114, 112.
16. Stephen Porter, The Great Plague (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton
Publishing, 1999), p. 27.
17. Greenberg, ‘Plague, the Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-
Century London’, p. 510. (Greenberg 2004)
18. Robert Steele, ‘Royal Proclamations: Their Documentary History’, in A
Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns:
and of Others Published Under Authority, 1485–1714, ed. by Robert
Steele and James Ludovic Lindsay Crawford, vol. 1, pp. ix–xxiii (p. ix).
(Steele 1910)
19. England and Wales. Sovereign (1660–1685: Charles II), ‘By the King. A
Proclamation, Concerning the Adjournment of Michaelmas Term’ (Oxford:
1665). (England and Wales 1665)
Proclamation Concerning the Prorogation of the Parliament’ (London:
1665). (England and Wales 1665)
Proclamation for Removing the Receipt of His Majesties Exchequer from
Westminster to Nonsuch’ (London: 1665). (England and Wales 1665)
Proclamation for a Generall Fast Throughout this Realm of England’
(London: 1665). (England and Wales 1665)
23. Totaro, ‘Introduction’, in Representing the Plague in Early Modern
England, p. 11. (Totaro 2012)
24. Bell, The Great Plague of London in 1665, p. 94. (Bell 1994)
25. Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 50. (Vincent 1667)
27. Anonymous, A Pulpit to be Let. With a Just Applause of Those Worthy Divines
that Stay with Us. (London: 1665). (Anonymous 1665)
28. For a consideration of the bending of expectations and norms during plague
times, see: Patrick Wallis, ‘Plagues, Morality and the Place of Medicine in
Early Modern England, The English History Review, 121.490 (2006), pp. 1–
24 (pp. 14–15). (Wallis 2006)
29. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. by Suzanne Gossett (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 94.
30. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 32. (Stallybrass and White
1986)
31. Quoted in Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p.
33. (Stallybrass and White 1986)
32. Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995), p. 172. (Porter 1995)
33. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by Esmond Samuel de Beer, vol. 2
(1955) (Evelyn 1955)
34. Robert Steele and James Ludovic Lindsay Crawford (ed.), A Bibliography of
Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns: and of Others
Published Under Authority, 1485–1714, vol. 1, p. 96, 169, 208, 211, 418.
(Steele et al. 1910)
Proclamation Prohibiting the Keeping of Bartholomew Fair, and Sturbridge
Fair.’ (London: 1665), n.p. (England and Wales 1665)
NOTES 53
38. Vanessa Harding, ‘Burial of the Plague Dead in Early Modern London’,
Epidemic Disease in London, ed. by J. A. I. Champion (London: Centre for
Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, University of
London, 1993), pp. 53–64 (p. 53). (Harding 1993)
39. Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 31–32. (Bondeson
2001)
40. Harding, ‘Burial of the Plague Dead in Early Modern London’, pp. 53–64
(p. 54). (Harding 1993)
41. Harding, ‘Burial of the Plague Dead in Early Modern London’, pp. 53–64
(p. 54). (Harding 1993)
42. Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, p. 78. (Defoe 2010)
43. Bell, The Great Plague of London in 1665, pp. 134–135 (Bell 1994); F.
Bastian, ‘Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered’, The Review of
English Studies, 16:62 (1965), pp. 151–173 (p. 157). (Bastian 1965)
44. Manuel Schonhorn in ‘Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year Topography and
Intention’ lists a number of texts where this story appears. Manuel
Schonhorn, ‘Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year Topography and
Intention’, The Review of English Studies, 19.76 (1968), pp. 387–402, pp.
387–388. (Schonhorn 1968)
45. On the title page, Crouch refers to ‘the present visitation, 1636'. Another
year of significant plague deaths, however, was 1637.
46. Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, ‘The Meeting of Gallants at an
Ordinary: or, The Walks in Paul’s’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected
Works, ed. by Gary Taylor, John Lavagnino (London: 1604; Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 186–94 (Middleton and Dekker
2007); For further information on attributing the work, Gary Taylor,
Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford
University Press, 2007), p. 183 (Taylor 2007), and Paul Yachnin, ‘Works
Included in this Edition: Canon and Chronology: The Meeting of Gallants
at an Ordinary’, in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A
Companion to the Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
p. 349 (Yachnin 2007).
47. Humphrey Crouch, Londons Vacation, and the Countries Tearme. Or, A
Lamentable Relation of Severall Remarkable Passages Which it Hath Pleased
the Lord to Shew on Severall Persons both in London, and the Country in this
Present Visitation, 1636 (London: 1637) (Crouch 1637)
48. John Reresby, The Memoirs of the Honourable Sir John Reresby, Bart. And
Last Governor of York (London: 1734). (Reresby 1734)
49. Beatrice Groves, ‘Laughter in the Time of Plague: A Context for the
Unstable Style of Nashe’s Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem’, Studies in
Philology, 108.2 (2011), 238–260 (Groves 2011); Rick Bowers, Radical
Comedy in Early Modern England: Contexts, Cultures, Performances
(Hampshire, UK: Ashgate: 2008), esp. chapter on The Wonderful Year.
(Bowers 2008); Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, p. 52-53; Nichole DeWall,
' "Sweet recreation barred": The Case for Playgoing in Plague-Time',
in Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, ed. by Rebecca
Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman (New York and London: Routledge,
2011), pp. 133-149.
50. Bowers, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England, p. 9. (Bowers 2008)
51. Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900
(London: Reaktion, 2001), p. 41. (Porter 2001)
53. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. (Kristeva 1982)
55. Corporation of London. Court of Aldermen, Orders Conceived and Published by
the Lord Major and Aldermen of the City of London, Concerning the Infection of
the Plague (London: 1665), n.p. (Corporation of London 1665)
56. A second story in a similar vein appears in the text, introduced with the title,
‘Of one that fell drunke off from his Horse, taken for a Londoner, dead’, in
which those who find the drunken man only realize he is not a corpse after
they have attempted to set the body on fire and the man leaps up, thor-
oughly confused, and terrifies those trying to remove the danger of his
supposedly diseased body. Middleton and Dekker, ‘The Meeting of
Gallants at an Ordinary: or, The Walks in Paul’s’, p. 193.
57. Healy notes that ‘Vivid images of personified plague, of a hunter stalking his
victims in the darkness, are scattered throughout late medieval and early
modern sermons and pamphlet literature’ (p. 56). Later, Healy explains that
‘in Dekker, plague is vividly personified as a merciless, cruel tyrant first laying
siege to, then ravaging London. There was clearly a strong mental associa-
tion between the devastating effects of war and pestilence, which were
linked, at both an imaginary and literal level, with shortage of food—famine’
(p. 58). Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England, p. 56,
58 (Healy 2001)
58. Middleton and Dekker, ‘The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary: or, The
Walks in Paul’s’, p. 186. (Middleton and Dekker 2007)
NOTES 55
63. Crouch, Londons Vacation, and the Countries Tearme, n.p. (Crouch 1637)
64. Reresby, The Memoirs of the Honourable Sir John Reresby, p. 10. (Reresby
1734)
66. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (1968;
reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Midland Book, 1984), p.
62. (Bakhtin 1984)
69. Reresby, The Memoirs of the Honourable Sir John Reresby, p. 11. (Reresby
1734)
CHAPTER 3
Medical Debates on Plague
The head of the Coffin being taken off, and the linen cleared away, I could not
but admire, to behold a skin so beset with spots black and blew, more remarkable
for multitude and magnitude than any that I have yet seen.
Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 71–72. (Thomson 1666)
Mr. Picks’ servant was laid outside, above a porringer of burning

sulphur. The physician’s first cut brought forth a ‘virulent Ichor’,
‘yellow and greenish’.1 Though distended and foul, the small guts
lacked the spotted appearance of the skin, contrary to what other
physicians had claimed. Succumbing to plague following gruesome
and prolonged symptoms that would result in madness before death,
the 15-year-old servant’s passing was reprieve from the suffering that
had come before. Dr. George Thomson was pleased, writing: ‘I being
much exhilarated in my spirits, having obtained that desire which was
often denyed me by those who pretended several slight excuses’.2 The
body, covered in a ‘multitude’ of black and blue spots, provided the
perfect canvas for Thomson to narrate one story of plague. Far from
the lectures and Latin tomes that dominated teaching practices in the
British medical schools, Thomson had what could not be learned in
those books or lectures lying on the table before him.3 Each cut
represented a tangible attempt to better understand the affliction
terrorizing London. As a follower of Jean Baptiste van Helmont’s
chemical philosophies, Thomson not only narrates the importance of

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_3
58 3 MEDICAL DEBATES ON PLAGUE
this dissection of a plague corpse in his pivotal work on the visitation

of 1665, Loimotomia, but also the cause of Helmontian physicians and
their rightful place to practice at the level of the College of Physicians.
Medical writing played a key role in the innovations that distinguished
the literary culture of plague in 1665. While certain dialogues and
accepted forms for interpreting the disease were revived during the out-
break, medical writing was informed by the struggles in the medical
community that erupted during the previous two decades. The increased
interest in Paracelsian and Helmontian writings during the Puritan
Revolution, in addition to ongoing conflicts over the regulation of the
medical profession, meant vying medical philosophies clashed in the face of
the epidemic, resulting in entirely new responses to and ways of under-
standing a disease that had been endured for centuries.
Responding in part to this debate and in part to the outbreak of plague
were the two physicians described in this chapter. As leading physicians
during the outbreak, these medical authors debated in the print sphere to
either side of the conflict between Galenists and the chemical physicians
known as the Helmontians: first, Nathaniel Hodges in the 1666 edition
of his Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum: or An Apology for the Profession
and Professors of Physick In Answer to the Several Pleas of Illegal
Practitioners; Wherein Their Positions are Examined, Their Cheats
Discovered, and Their Danger to the Nation Asserted. As Also an Account
of the Present Pest, in Answer to a Letter (1666), and second George
Thomson in Loimotomia: Or, The Pest Anatomized in These Following
Particulars (1666).4 A number of peripheral works also informed the debate
that forms the main focus of this chapter, namely Hodges’ Loimologia, or, An
Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665: With Precautionary
Directions Against the Like Contagion (1671), (Fig. 3.1) which was one of
Defoe’s sources for A Journal of the Plague Year, and Thomson’s Loimologia.
A Consolatory Advice, And Some Brief Observations Concerning the Present
Pest (1665).5 The controversy between Helmontians and the College has
been described in historical scholarship, but the nature of the debate, with its
focus on language, authorship and the power of printing one’s views, means
it may be situated within the specific context of the literary culture of the
1665 visitation.6 Medical writing produced by these authors and others
during the outbreak marked great innovation and change in the ways that
plague was being understood in London. While the College of Physicians
had enjoyed a leadership role during previous plague outbreaks, in 1665 the
pressure the visitation placed on health care meant increasing reliance on
MEDICAL DEBATES ON PLAGUE 59
Fig. 3.1 Frontispiece and title page, George Thomson, Loimotomia: Or The Pest
Anatomized (1666). Credit: 148060, The Huntington Library, San Marino,
California
apothecaries, chemical physicians and other unorthodox medical practi-

tioners remaining in the city.7 While plague was still touted as the ‘Rod
of the Almighty’ in the pages of many tracts, self-preservation of a temporal
nature was sought out with unprecedented enthusiasm. Recipe books of
cures were widely available, adding to the carefully transcribed plague
cures recorded in journals or those repeated between family and friends.
Advertisements in newspapers promised quick cures for pestilence, with
fantastic new prophylactics, and promoted cures supported by the College
of Physicians, chemists and quacks.8 Galenists and Helmontians alike
turned out lengthy volumes on the disease. The print landscape revealed
a plethora of opinions and options for medical-based treatment and
the prevention of the plague.
Yet just beneath the surface of this influx of medical writing, debate was
boiling and pamphlets became the weapon of choice for frustrated
physicians. Vernacular medical books, offering up recipes for the sick and
those avoiding infection, were presented in a print marketplace alongside
pamphlets in which persuasion and defamation of others offering medical
services and advice abounded. A significant volume of pamphlets published
during the outbreak contributed to the debate between Helmontians and
Galenists.9 The divisive nature of the argument perfectly fitted the pamphlet,
a form that was both literary and the choice vehicle through which to engage
in and express controversy.10 A very strong literary dimension exists in these
debates, despite their focus on medicine and how best to govern the profes-
sion. With medical writing on plague appearing in print at an unprecedented
level, the outbreak sparked debate and ignited the imagination of practi-
tioners who remained in the capital. This war of words in conjunction with
the pressures brought on by the epidemic resulted in new dialogues on
plague emerging, charging the literary culture of the outbreak in 1665
with innovative ideas and countless debates. The controversies and pamph-
lets described in this chapter also represent texts that contributed to one of
the most abundant areas of publishing during the epidemic—writing on the
natural basis of plague. Hodges, primarily reflecting the views of the Galenic
orthodox medical community, and Thomson, as a chemical physician, both
defended their philosophies on medicine in the print sphere in particularly
charged terms under the pressure of epidemic.
In these pamphlets, each physician engages with the plague body and
death, showing how those delivering medical care during the epidemic
both comprehended and articulated the liminal space occupied by a dis-
eased body on the cusp of death and the plague corpse that has trans-
gressed the boundaries of life. The plague body was a divisive space due to
the contentious state of medical practice. Medical texts describing plague,
those written either by orthodox or chemical physicians, and not the
recipe books of cures that abounded during the outbreak, demonstrate a
fraught relationship with their subject. While many authors contributed to
the growth of publishing in the area, Thomson and Hodges were two of
the most prominent figures at either side of the debate in 1665. These
physicians-cum-authors debate, reflect and engage with one another on
the printed page over their opposing interpretations of the disease and
how to best manage the affliction. The message that emerges in these
debates is that success on paper was an essential weapon in the battle
MEDICAL THOUGHT IN 1665 61
against a disease for which, whether one was visited by a Galenic or

Helmontian physician, there was no reliable cure.
MEDICAL THOUGHT IN 1665
Medicine was a fractious discipline in the seventeenth century. In 1665,

the body was a space of intellectual and political conflict, ravaged both by
the disease and by clashing views of medicine that defined the care of
plague victims and medical constructions of their illness. Many of these
conflicts and debates had erupted long before the outbreak, during the
period of the Puritan Revolution and into the Restoration. The epidemic
placed pressure on medical institutions and practitioners, exacerbating
existing tensions. Two schools of physicians dominated debates in the
profession during this final major plague outbreak, Helmontians (the
primary representatives of the chemical interest at this time and followers
of van Helmont’s medical philosophies) and Galenists. Galen, a Greek
doctor who left behind over 500 works on medicine, refined understand-
ing of humoral theory, which would persist throughout the medieval and
much of the Renaissance period as the dominant perspective on illness and
healing.11 Based on the four bodily humors—yellow bile, black bile,
blood, phlegm—the theory proposed that the root of all illness could be
attributed to an imbalance of the humors.12 Galenists held a number of
beliefs regarding the disease based on the Greek doctor’s writings. Galen
noted the danger of ‘unburied corpses’, ‘stagnant pools’ and ‘the stink
of graveyards’, and the idea of miasma persisted in 1665, with these
deemed perilous during an epidemic.13 Phlebotomy was a common prac-
tice for Galenists, resulting in scathing criticism from chemists who saw it
causing more harm than good. Thomson writes of blood and Galenists in
Loimotomia: ‘How cautious should we be to exhaust and spend prodigally
this treasure of Life, as the Galenists, who to satisfie their erroneous
Documents, without any solid Reason, or approved Experiments, rashly
let it out in many trivial Diseases, which might easily be Cured by proper
Medicaments’.14 Followers of Galenic medicine promoted the use of
treacle (theriac) or mithridate.15 Galen’s teachings remained prominent
in 1665; however, physicians practicing Galenic medicine found
themselves under attack during the visitation due to existing upheaval in
the medical profession and to the rise of iatrochemistry.
The College of Physicians, founded in 1518, was built primarily

on Galenic thought.16 One of its primary purposes was regulating
the medical profession, but the College’s purpose and activities were
challenged during the Puritan Revolution. The College found itself
under increasing attack, charged with being monopolistic and overly
invested in protecting its members. The Puritan Revolution saw voice-
given to those challenging the College, and these views were put into print
for a ‘lay audience’.17 Within the new political climate and in the context
of hostile attitudes towards its purpose and activities, the College ceased
its regulatory function.18 These challenges resulted in an identity crisis for
the College, which was forced to redefine its purpose.19 Amongst the
measures taken to gain relevance within this new world, the College
began to integrate chemical medicine into its work and research, establish-
ing a laboratory and appointing William Johnson as its official chemist.20
The Restoration of the monarchy did little to quell the controversies the
College found itself embroiled in over the previous two decades, particu-
larly given that Charles II expressed great interest in chemistry, appointing
a ‘personal’ Professor of Chymistrie, Nicaise Le Febvre.21 A laboratory was
constructed at Whitehall and the monarch counted Helmontians amongst
his physicians.22 Coupled with the founding of the Royal Society, the
climate in early Restoration England leant firmly in the direction of
Helmontians. Despite attempts to renew its image and incorporate new
medical philosophies during this tumultuous period, College physicians
were forced to defend their knowledge in the rapidly changing areas of
medical philosophy, understanding and education. The attacks waged on
them and their defences became entangled in the innovative discourse on
plague and medicine that emerged in 1665.
In contrast to the stresses felt by Galenists and the College during the
years leading up to the outbreak, chemical medicine and Helmontian
thought enjoyed a steady rise. The perpetuation of Galen’s writings and
their reproduction in print and manuscript throughout the medieval and
Renaissance periods was contested by the emergence of the Swiss-born
physician Paracelsus and those defined as the chemists. Born at the end of
the fifteenth century, Paracelsus derided Galen’s humoral theory and
instead established a medical philosophy centred on chemical experi-
ments.23 He further advocated for a number of mystical cures, and, as
Elizabeth Lane Furdell notes, ‘Like other Neoplatonist magi, he grounded
his iatric beliefs in Hermetic philosophy which he valued as more authentic
than Galen and closer to God’s initial revelations to Adam than to the
MEDICAL THOUGHT IN 1665 63
pagan Greeks’.24 Numerous Paracelsian works were published in England

during the 1640s and 1650s.25 It was to this chemical philosophy of
medicine that van Helmont adhered and made his own contributions.
Though van Helmont died in 1644, publications of his work appeared and
were popular throughout the 1640s, 1650s and 1660s, charging a medical
landscape divided between traditional Galenists and the pioneering
Helmontians.26 The rise of Helmontian and Paracelsian thought, how-
ever, was not relegated to medical practitioners and writers, as these
philosophies resonated in the religious and political climate of the two
decades preceding the Restoration. Paracelsus was re-contextualized in
this period of revolution. Whereas during the Elizabethan period recipe-
heavy versions of his works were foregrounded, these were replaced with
texts that placed a greater emphasis on his principles.27 Religious writings
from sectarians flourished in the relative freedom of press in the 1640s and
1650s, but so, too, did medical writings. Perceived as emphasizing anti-
rationalism, Paracelsian and Helmontian medicine were viewed by sectar-
ians as an ‘alternative to the Aristotelian natural philosophy’.28
Helmontianism was well established by the Restoration.29 Central to van
Helmont’s understanding of plague was the archeus, defined as ‘The
immaterial principle supposed by the Paracelsians to produce and preside
over the activities of the animal and vegetable economy; vital force’ or ‘the
vital spirits of man’.30 Plague, according to Thomson, could be contracted
from external or internal forces:
I pass to the Essence and Quiddity of the Pest; which is a Contagious

Disease, for the most part very acute, arising from a certain peculiar vene-
mous Gas, or subtile Poyson, generated within, or entering into us from
without: At the access, or bare apprehension of which, the Archeus is put
into a Terror, and forthwith submitting to the aforesaid Poyson, invests it
with part of its own substance, delineating therein the perfect Idea or Image
of this special kind of Sickness distinct from any other.31
Thomson describes the idea of venomous gasses that align with the con-
cept of miasma adhered to by Galenists. For followers of van Helmont,
plague understanding bore many similarities to Galenists’ beliefs.32
However, the terms, or ‘metaphors’, used to describe the phenomenon
of the disease were different.33 The ominous understanding of plague
within the Helmontian context meant it could be contracted in numerous
ways, even emerging from within the victim himself. The disease was
insidious, putting the archeus ‘into a Terror’. The idea that plague could
lurk both inside and out before pouncing on the unsuspecting archeus was
consistent with the disease’s ability to transgress boundaries and resist
control.
Galenists and Helmontians took to print prior to the outbreak, each
defaming the opposing school of thought and its practitioners, curry-
ing favour from authority figures and spreading their medical philoso-
phies via the printing press. Language, writing and developing an
authorial persona of knowledge and authority were paramount in the
struggle that ensued, becoming the basis upon which arguments suc-
ceeded or failed. The lifting of rigorous censorship over the press
during the revolutionary years had an impact on printing in many
areas, and medical writing and debates within the field were not
exempt from this rule. Plague struck in the aftermath of an exception-
ally fertile period for medical publishing against the orthodoxy. The
ideologies planted during the revolutionary years and the importance
of print to gaining support and attacking opposing philosophies fed
into the climate of controversy that was reinvigorated by the epidemic.
Mastery of language and the ability to influence through words were of
great importance in the environment of sparring texts that responded
to the epidemic, which inflamed debates on medical practice that had
festered for years.
These tensions peaked during the outbreak, with Helmontian medicine
forming a critical pillar of medical care during the epidemic.34 In 1665,
Helmontians sought to establish their own college—the epitome of the
Helmontian physicians’ efforts to codify their own identity. Helmontian
physicians took a definitive stand in 1665, publishing ‘a declaration
announcing their intention of applying for letters-patent to found a
“Noble Society for the advancement of Hermetick Physick” ’.35 Backed
by an impressive array of public figures, the declaration held support from
religious and political persons of note, including the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon; the Bishop of London, Humphrey
Henchman; the Duke of Ormond; and the Earl of Albemarle, amongst
others.36 The onset of the outbreak raised the stakes for Helmontians, and
the group’s commitment to combating the disease was essential to their
effort to establish themselves as a professional entity. Helmontians
described Galenists as fleeing the city during the outbreak. In an attack
on the group and their actions during the visitation, Thomson writes in
Loimologia:
THOMSON AND HODGES 65
I have condescended to the persuasive Arguments of my friends, to

divulge some Active Chymical Remedies, (yet much inferiour to the best
I am Master of) in these Contagious times, which (being duly taken) will
(through a blessing from above) be powerfull in preserving from and
curing this Heteroclite and feral disease the Pest, from which (to their
infinite shame) the Ablest of the Galenists cowardly and unworthily run
away, leaving this great City destitute of their Help, when it most stands
in need of it; causing others through their detestable example to
Despond, and to become faint-hearted, who otherwise by confidence
and resolved Magnanimity, the best preservative in Nature (forasmuch as
none was ever infected by the Pest, but either from an Idaea or Image of
Hatred, Terrour and Diffidence in the phantasie of the individual Person,
or in the Archeus, the Innate Spirit of every part of the body, as Helmont
hath proved) might withstand, exclude and conquer, so truculent, fell and
cruel an Enemy.37
While Thomson describes cowardly Galenists running from the outbreak,

flight was one of the surest ways to avoid infection and death. Assertions
such as Thomson’s, implying the bravery of those who remained in
London throughout the epidemic, though admirable morally, did not
save Helmontians from the disease they sought to stop, and the plague
epidemic marked a turning point in the intellectual conflict between
Helmontians and Galenists.
THOMSON AND HODGES

Medical practitioners Thomson and Hodges approached their field with
dedication and zeal during the outbreak in London. The city placed
emphasis on preserving cleanliness and order as opposed to executing
faultless medical care—there was no known cure for the disease, after all,
but in the very least civic measures could prevent the city falling into chaos
until the sickness ran its course.38 Furthermore, medical practitioners were
no more likely to remain in a plague-ridden city than the general popula-
tion, when for all citizens flight to the country was a means to avoid
infection. Thomson and Hodges remained, desiring to interact with the
illness and its victims, risking self-preservation. That shared desire, how-
ever, did little to unite the two against the illness they each sought to
better comprehend and, if possible, eradicate.
Though Thomson and Hodges engaged with one another on the
printed page—Thomson in a direct attack on Hodges and Hodges in a
general attack on chemists—they lived very separate professional lives in

terms of academics, philosophies and clinical experience. Thomson’s
story is marked by a fierce desire to practice as a physician. Little is
known of his early life. He was educated in both Galenic and chemical
medicine but was prevented from attending the medical schools at
Oxford or Cambridge due to the death of his father.39 After a period
in the royalist army, Thomson returned to medicine, receiving an MA
from Edinburgh.40 He was examined by the College of Physicians, in
hopes of obtaining a license to work as a physician in London, but
though found to have the necessary medical skill could not afford the
College’s fee.41 Upon the suggestion of one of the committee,
Thomson went to Leiden to complete an MD, where he soon thereafter
submitted a dissertation, ‘De Apoplexia’.42 These early years suggest
Thomson was an eager student, and one who was unwilling to be
thwarted by the rules dictating who could enter the College of
Physicians. It is not a stretch to suggest these experiences further
added to Thomson’s drive to establish himself as a spokesperson for
the cause of chemical physicians, a group contrary to the College of
Physicians. Pushed to the periphery, Thomson’s evident persistence and
tenacity were unfaltering. Such attributes were invaluable with the pres-
sure placed on society by a plague outbreak, when the ordinary and
accepted were all too often not enough.
Upon Thomson’s return to England and after completing his
medical studies, he began work in Essex.43 His interest in opening
up bodies and his debate with Galenists began around this time.
Thomson performed a successful splenectomy on a dog—the canine
would live for an additional 2 years and 3 months—and believed he
had been the first to perform the procedure.44 Unfortunately a trip to
London with the dog did not lead to the acknowledgement he
anticipated.45 Charges of plagiarism were drawn by Thomson against
‘an anonymous Galenist’, and Thomson went on to publish two
works in which he described and defended his right to be recognized
as the first to perform a splenectomy.46 Thomson became an adherent
of van Helmont’s philosophies and teachings by the middle of the
1650s, and though he had no licence, he began to practice medicine
in London in 1659.47 When plague struck in 1665, he remained in
the city, alongside many of van Helmont’s followers. The plague
became a motivating factor for much of Thomson’s writing against
Galenists, whom he charged with fleeing the city with the onslaught
THOMSON AND HODGES 67
of plague instead of remaining to care for the sick. His work during
the outbreak included the dissection of a plague corpse, described at
the beginning of this chapter, in addition to caring for and even
allegedly curing patients and preparing medications for the sick.
Hodges, in contrast to Thomson, settled on a comparatively linear
path to becoming a physician. Hodges attended Trinity College,
Cambridge, receiving a scholarship, and later transferred to Oxford,
where he was honoured with ‘a studentship at Christ Church’.48
During his college years he was a member of the Oxford Experimental
Philosophy Club.49 He was admitted to the College of Physicians first as
a Candidate in 1659 and, after a considerable time, as a Fellow in
1672.50 Though Hodges represents the orthodox side of the debate,
his own views of the medical discipline were not as rigid as Thomson
might have us believe; Hodges’ experiences and studies indicate he
mediated his philosophies of medicine between Galenic and Paracelsian
beliefs, and his interpretation of plague ‘showed the influence of
Paracelsian ideas’.51 Hodges directed physicians in London during the
outbreak and was entrusted with caring for the poor within the city’s
walls, thus having a direct impact on the orthodox medical community’s
management of the epidemic.52 A broadside notice from 13 July 1665,
printed by James Fletcher, ‘Printer to the Honourable City of
LONDON’, and signed by Hodges and Thomas Witherley, the second
physician who was appointed by the mayor to provide care for the city’s
poor, details advice for citizens.53 Following an introduction that iden-
tifies the authors as, ‘We who are appointed the Physicians for the
Prevention and cure of the Plague’, the notice advised:
It will be matter of great incouragement to us, and of no less advantage to

such as shall be sick, if we may receive timely notice after their first appre-
hension that they are infected, that we may take an early opportunity to treat
them with Remedies according to Indications, forasmuch as no one
Medicine or Antidote, (whatever Pretenders may infuse into unwary heads
to their destruction) can be of energy to relieve all persons of several
Constitutions and in different Conditions.54
It emphasized the physicians’ availability for the sick:
we shall be at our several Houses from seven until nine in the Morning, and
from one till three in the Afternoon to receive any intimation from the
Examiners, and take the complaints of such who shall be infected, the rest of
the day we shall spend in visiting the Sick, and other discharges of our duties.55
Hodges’ tried and tested treatment for the disease, which he purport-
edly used with success on a patient brought ill, involved using
‘sack’, defined as ‘A general name for a class of white wines formerly
imported from Spain and the Canaries’.56 He was a contagionist and
believed plague was spread between people via ‘pestilential efflu-
viums’.57 He encouraged isolation of the ill and those who had come
in contact with the sick, though separately to avoid the unnecessary
spread of the disease.58 His moderate views surrounding the treatment
of the illness, integrating Galenic and Paracelsian medical theories,
however, were tested during the outbreak, by the end of which he
described chemists as ‘These scandalous opposers of the Colledg’.59 As
a physician at the forefront of London’s medical response to plague,
Hodges had a vested interest in how the medical community
responded to the outbreak. His exasperation, expressed in the quota-
tion above, is examined at length in the 1666 edition of Vindiciae
Medicinae.
Thomson and Hodges faced frustration and considerable danger
while working as physicians during the visitation. Yet, as so often
happens with figures who turned to the pen in the face of the out-
break, each physician found a level of distinction in his service.
Hodges, as one of the College’s few responders to the outbreak,
advised on how the illness should be treated in London. Thomson,
whose career timeline highlights disappointments and numerous
obstacles, turned the horrifying illness into an opportunity to estab-
lish himself at the frontlines of the city’s medical community. By
writing about their combat with pestilence in the beleaguered city,
Thomson and Hodges became authors of the disease. Their identity
as writers is inextricably connected to their professional work and the
challenges each met during the outbreak. As each iterates time and
again, the profession of medicine and its combat against the pest
hinged as much on the written word as it did on the plethora of
medicines available to counter infection and remain healthy during a
decidedly unhealthy time. In the battle between the orthodox arm of
medicine and chemists, the use of print and the written word were
long established as key weapons in the politically delicate world of
medical care.
THE HORROR OF THE PLAGUE BODY 69
THE HORROR OF THE PLAGUE BODY

Physicians treating plague patients witnessed the atrocities the disease
wreaked on previously healthy bodies firsthand. In Hodges’ words:
I do well ponder the wonderful energy of Pestilential effluviums, which can

instantaneously imprint indeleble characters on bodies before sound and health-
ful, and conform them to the like efficacy in contagious communications . . . I
need not produce examples to illustrate the inexpressible vigor of these
Ferments.60
Their descriptions recorded a horror that other authors rarely articulated

through direct observation or with such rigorous focus on the bodily
impact of the infection. Yet in their descriptions, too, was a sense of
awe. From Thomson’s unbridled joy at performing a plague dissection
to Hodges’ descriptors—‘inexpressible vigor’ and ‘wonderful energy’—
that could as easily describe an entirely benign element, physicians
practicing during the epidemic found themselves in an unusual relation-
ship with death and the disease. Despite the horror of the outbreak,
there is a sense of joy in the possibilities that might be stumbled upon in
the devastation.
Physicians who came into contact with the infected—at the event’s
height the few who remained in London to practice would have had
frequent contact—constantly risked infection, and many fled with the
rest of London’s population.61 Andrew Wear notes that physicians like
Thomson and Hodges who ‘could write from personal experience of
plague were few’.62 One of the main premises of Thomson’s Loimotomia
is that he succeeds as a physician precisely because he came into contact
with plague and suffered through the disease and its affliction on his body:
‘I have ventured my own Life to save thine, passing through a way little
trodden, full of Bryars and Thorns; and finding a shorter Cut, I have given
thee such Directions, which if thou strictly follow, may make thy passage
through this vally of miseries more happy’.63 Thomson placed his life in
jeopardy but more importantly he glimpsed what few could safely do given
contemporary laws regarding the management of plague. A citizen practi-
cing outside of the medical arts who found him- or herself around the
diseased and dying, if discovered by the authorities, would be shut up in
his or her home for the prescribed time of 40 days in 1665.64 To be shut
up was understandably perceived as a death sentence, and such close
proximity between the healthy and infected led to more, and often
unnecessary, deaths. In contrast, Thomson encountered and engaged with

the disease, suffered subsequent infection and survived. These elements
provide the cornerstones of his argument. Thomson’s insights demon-
strate the unique nature of these medical narratives of epidemic. They
provided clarity on the otherwise invisible aspects of the disease. While
other authors described the sounds of screaming victims in their homes or
the unknowingly infected falling dead in the street, Thomson and other
physicians observed victims firsthand and on a frequent basis. While
horrors abounded in London’s streets, doctors’ close encounters with
victims on the threshold between life and death allowed them to peer
into human bodies on the brink.
Physicians’ observations of plague bodies differ from those of the
general population and from political documents. They focus unflinch-
ingly on the body and its descent into death, subverting Kristeva’s asser-
tions about the human encounter with the corpse as one of horror;
however, once their impressions are contained in a text, the reader
becomes audience to the horror that the physician cannot appreciate or
for professional reasons will not acknowledge. Porter notes in Bodies
Politic that ‘it became a point of professional pride amongst men of science
that they, unlike the crass herd, did not sensationalize monstrosities but
viewed them coolly through eyes philosophical and detached’.65 In con-
trast, the reader, who could easily be outside of the medical profession, did
not necessarily feel any professional obligation to view these descriptions
as anything but the most intimate looks at the horrors plague could inflict
on human flesh. Thomson’s dissection, which introduces this chapter,
gives a sense of the ambivalent space occupied by the plague body in
medical writing. The pamphlet is prefaced by an image of the dissection
with a title etched on the platform holding the dissected body: ‘The
Manner of Dissecting the Pestilentiall Body’.66 The reader is confronted
immediately in the text by the horror of the corpse. It is unavoidable,
providing a deeply abject frame for the text contained within. Yet the
physician describes the process of cutting open this body with a certain
professional glee. His personal experience of this body, captured in the
image at the beginning of this book and in his description of the dissec-
tion, forms a deeply grotesque image; one which, as Bakhtin describes:
reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorpho-

sis, of death and birth, growth and becoming. The relation to time is one
determining trait of the grotesque image. The other indispensable trait is
ambivalence. For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old
and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of
the metamorphosis.67
The image at first seems to be one of definitive death. The corpse, the skin of
its torso peeled back to reveal the organs within, makes no claim to be alive.
However, the accompanying description of the dissection reveals that there is
an element of birth to counter the seeming finality of death. The skin peels
back to reveal a new world within, and as Bakhtin describes, ‘The unfinished
and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from
the world by clearly defined boundaries’.68 Upon reaching the stomach in the
dissection, Thomson remarks: ‘I came to that most excellent usefull part, the
Stomack, whose tender membranes when I had divided, a black matter like
Ink did shew it self, to the quantity (as nigh as I could guess) of a wine pint,
somewhat tenacious and slimy’.69 Though dead, the body reveals itself to the
author in a life-like manner, ‘showing itself’ to him and guiding him through
his discoveries. In this underbelly of the human body, secretions may be
described as ‘tenacious’ or they may ‘weep’ from the body like the ‘thin
yellowish excrement’ that emerges when the parenchyma of the liver is
divided. The corpse is expressive, its individual parts becoming animated
with each cut and observation. Even when Thomson does not find what he
expects, the body responds to his attention:
I disparted the descending Trunck of the Cava, and the Artery called Aorta,
expecting some considerable emanation of blood there, if any where, that
might make a little inundation, but no such thing succeeded, for only some
very few spoonfulls of a thin liquor of a pale hew came forth, which might
easily be licked up by a small handkerchief.70
Colours and liquids and textures offer themselves up from within the
body, coming forth. New knowledge of the disease and its impact on
the body is born with each cut. In particular, when Thomson is surprised
by what he finds and puzzled by what this body produces, his curiosity and
recorded observations indicate that for this physician the corpse before
him is giving birth to precious knowledge.
Thomson’s dissection delves wholly into the results of infection. He
literally abolishes the boundary between the healthy and acceptable body,
breaching the limits of the plague corpse with each cut he makes to the flesh:
‘Having finished the Dissection of this loathsom Body, I presently found
some little sensible alteration tending to a stiffness and numness in my hand,

which had been soaking and dabling in the Bowels and Entrals then warm,
though it was Ten or Twelve hours after the Youth expired’.71 Thomson’s
actions argue that the physician must abolish all trepidation standing
between his professional endeavours and a fear of the abject body.
Encounters with the plague body, alive or dead, provide the greatest oppor-
tunities for observation, as Thomson asserts in his twenty-four observations,
‘resulting’, as he explains, ‘from both dead, and my own living Body’.72 In
Observation III, he writes:
When the Natural ferment of the Stomack in the Pest is so far lost, that
instead of white, a black juice is engendered, it is a certain sign of the
abolition of the vital Spirit, and consequently of approaching Death. For I
never knew any afflicted in this kinde, whose strength failed, that vomited an
Excrement tinged black, did escape: where this blackness is, there must
needs be a privation of light, with which our spirits symbolize, they being
luminous, if so darkness, the shadow of death must needs follow; and
doubtlesse great is that darknesse that seats it self in the spirit of light and
life.73
The plague body conveys death before the victim has succumbed.
Plague is written on the body in buboes and spots, and erupts from
within in ‘an Excrement tinged black’. Thomson grants himself
authority to treat plague because of these journeys to the brink, as
he dissolves the distinction between life and death. His plague body
dissection and his own bouts with the disease demonstrate a will-
ingness to engage with aspects of the disease that few others had an
opportunity to experience or see. To a chemist seeking to better
understand medicine through observations based on the dead and
his ‘own living body’, not simply by digesting the writings of the
long-dead Galen, these opportunities provided unprecedented insight
into the illness. Thomson writes as someone who is always on the
cusp of new discovery. He is self-consciously composing history in
Loimotomia.
While not recorded with the zeal of Thomson’s plague dissection, Hodges’
encounters with the plague body reveal his understanding of its impact on its
victims’ bodies. Hodges describes the diagnostic process that accompanied
the disease and the onset of illness, writing as follows:
I might here relate two eminent stories, which I can onely without circum-
stances mention, one was of a maid whose temper seemed good, her pulse
equal and stronge, her senses were perfect at that time when I was called to
see her, she complained of no disorder or pain, and concluding her self
secure, but when I veiwed her breast and discovered very many tokens, I left
her with a Prognostick, and within two or three hours she died, not long after
I visited an ancient woman and found her at dinner with a chicken before
her on which she fed greedily, and had eaten half before I came, after a due
inquiry into her case, finding no satisfaction either from her pulse or temper
I searching her breast observed the tokens, and she expired within one or two
houres: these clear intervals (as I conceive) did happen when all manner of
fermentations were ceased, the Pestilential ferment having gained a compleat
victory, and quieted all oppositions which Nature made in order to her
preservation.74
Hodges creates a portrait of the disease in which it is wholly unnatural. In

keeping with the physician’s belief that plague could be attributed to pesti-
lential effluviums, it becomes an almost otherworldly entity that attacks not
only the body but gains supremacy over Nature herself. The hidden tokens of
plague descend unexpectedly on the two women Hodges describes, who
otherwise carry on symptomless: an ancient woman healthful enough to
greedily consume her dinner only hours before death and a young maid
who appeared to be ‘secure’. The stealth with which the disease captures its
victims and the rapidity of death’s descent creates a stark opposition between
the living and dead in the passage. The medical distance and objectivity with
which Hodges narrates the tokens makes them seem less insidious than the
impending and inevitable horror they signify. While these women are
described as vigorous and healthy apart from the tokens, the onset of plague
‘quieted all oppositions which Nature made’. Hodges does not doubt his skill
as a physician, but pestilence easily overcomes Nature herself.
Medical tracts and their physician authors captured what other writers
could not—the horror of the plague body, inside and out. Its buboes
and tokens came to life on the pages of these medical texts, aimed at a
lay-audience. The descriptions of the plague body that furnish Hodges’
and Thomson’s works share many characteristics. Embracing the sick-
ness and comprehending the horror of the cadaver were essential to
practicing their trades to the best of their ability during the sickness.
Thomson’s plague dissection took the journey into plague death to a
greater degree than Hodges’ work, but each captures the power of the
plague body. Thomson sums up his experiences as a doctor providing

care and his encounters with death as follows:
I entered into more than ordinary familiarity with a dead body . . . I searched
many dark Corners thereof to be taught something, but I bought my Learning
at a dear Rate; and what the Cadaver could not teach me of it self, was infused
into me to my sad Experience:75
These plague bodies are vibrant embodiments of the disease that each
doctor desperately tried to capture in his text. The horror of plague came
to life in these works. Each physician’s passion for his subject and assertion
of his ability to narrate the truth of the disease and its medical basis
inspired his words. These writings exposed the unique perception a phy-
sician in the city had of the diseased body and the corpse, whether
Helmontian or member of the College.
PRINT
The flickering space between what appeared in print and the truth was
exploited in the medical writings of plague-ridden London and in the
aftermath of the outbreak. The discussion in this chapter picks up at a mid-
point in these medical debates, which raged long before plague became
their central focus. Print played a role in medical response to plague,
opening up the debates between opposing theorists to a much-expanded
audience. The debate between Galenists and Helmontians was well-estab-
lished by the two authors in 1665 by works such as Thomson’s Galeno-
pale, or, A Chymical Trial of the Galenists, that Their Dross in Physick may
be Discovered: With the Grand Abuses and Disrepute They have Brought
Upon the Whole Art of Physick and Chirurgery (1665), a text devoted to
casting down Galenists, and Hodges’ 1665 edition of Vindiciae
Medicinae, which looks at the challenge facing Galenists in the politicized
and polarized medical profession.76 These texts address the larger con-
troversy between Galenists and Helmontians, which surfaced during the
Puritan Revolution and continued with the Restoration. The plague dia-
logues that emerged from the context of these wider debates and con-
troversies were innovative and unique to the period when they were
produced and to the literary culture of the epidemic. The following
section considers the use of print by Thomson and Hodges when navigat-
ing the plague outbreak and the related matters of authorship, language
PRINT 75
and shared metaphors in their works. The metaphors and views established
in these earlier dialogues between Galenists and Helmontians, before
plague became a central concern, colour the writing that responds to the
outbreak, appearing in Thomson’s Loimotomia, and Hodges’ 1666 edi-
tion of Vindiciae Mediciniae and his Loimologia. As such, these earlier
texts are implicated in the later plague dialogue. In Vindiciae Medicinae,
eventual textual entanglement with plague in the 1666 edition and appen-
dages added to the text in light of chemists’ actions during the outbreak
transform a work that once focused on regulation of the medical profes-
sion into a piece of plague writing. The question of who ultimately wins
and loses in a plague epidemic, however, has little to do with the written
word as we see in the appended material to Hodges’ Vindiciae Medicinae.
Print and language were important not only during a plague outbreak
but played key roles in the delivery of health care to England’s seven-
teenth-century population in general. Print allowed medical practitioners
from all walks to reach a great number of patients, and they engaged
numerous types of texts to do so, ranging from the advertisements that
appeared on broadsides that could be displayed in public areas to the more
respectable pamphlets produced by ordinary medical practitioners.77
Reading audiences for medical works in English were often wide, and
interest in such works was not relegated to medical practitioners.78 Wear
writes that ‘Distinctions between lay and medical readerships were blurred
and both groups might read works which were ostensibly for the other’.79
Medical texts written in the vernacular had an expanded audience as
compared to those composed in Latin, and it should be noted that a
majority of seventeenth-century medical texts in England were composed
in the vernacular.80 London’s ‘medical marketplace’ boasted a vast array of
healthcare options, a ‘buyer’s market’.81 The high levels of self-dosing and
seeking out medical care from numerous sources to solve the many health
issues that afflicted early modern patients meant wide and eager audiences
for medical writing and for the varied healthcare options on offer. Thus,
flexibility of expected roles and even audiences were frequent not only in
medical treatment but also in the consumption of medical texts.
The medium used to reach their audiences, however, was fraught with
pitfalls. Thomson acknowledges the proliferation of print in the period
around the plague outbreak in his ‘Letter to the Reader’ prefacing
Loimotomia, stating, ‘I Know thou art Cloy’d with multitude of Books
that this Scribling Age is fertil in . . . the same things still repeated, perhaps
false, or little for thy satisfactory Instruction: So that it is enough to make thee
look askew, and scorn what I have here offered to thy Perusal’.82 These were
dangerous times, and the threat was not only physiological in nature.
Authors faced a minefield when publishing their own works, just as
their own patients did in choosing where to turn for their medical
advice. Booksellers aligning with those of low repute in medicine
added to aspersions cast upon the publishing industry. In his diatribe
against ‘Empericks’, Hodges points to the vagaries of the print mar-
ketplace under certain circumstances. After explaining to his reader
in uncompromising capital letters that the most famous Empericks
are ‘HEEL-MAKERS, GUN-SMITHS, TAYLORS, WEAVERS,
COBLERS, COACHMEN, BOOKBINDERS’, not to mention ‘a
great number of the other SEX’, he goes on to claim ‘Booksellers
and others to be their PIMPS’.83 Publishing could be a crude and
licentious business, but it was essential if physicians like Thomson and
Hodges were to convince others of their right to practice medicine.
In Vindiciae Medicinae, Hodges writes in a distrustful tone consis-
tent with his membership in the College, which had ‘been thrown on
the defensive’.84 Hodges’ work establishes the legal imperative to
better oversee the medical profession and in particular those working
at its periphery—the empericks, apothecaries and chymists or pseudo-
chymists. He admonishes authority figures, from the church to govern-
ment, to consider the impact empiricks have on the profession. The
work is divided into chapters, outlining the problems and potential
solutions. His motivation to compose the work and his insecurity at
the state of the profession is not unfounded. The title of the work,
with its clarification that the text is written as a response to ‘illegal
practitioners’, defines the text as an answer and a response.85 The
epistle dedicatory to Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon furthers the sense
of Hodges’ defensive position and clarifies his motivations.
Addressing Sheldon, Hodges explains that others have sought and, as
will become apparent, gained Sheldon’s favour: ‘tis in the mean time
our Advantage that some of our highest pretending Adversaries have
made addresses to your GRACE, whose Judgment we esteem as the
Grand Test to discover all those Fallacies both in Books and Men’.86
Hodges appeals to Sheldon by creating parallels relevant to the
Archbishop, immediately demonstrating the link between medicine
and religion: ‘The neer alliance between DIVINITY and MEDICINE,
whose relation is as intimate as the Union of SOUL and BODY’.87 He
continues to draw similarities by referring back to the ‘late Rebellion’,
PRINT 77
describing how the church fell to ‘Empirical Divines who as rudely

treated peoples Souls’ and relating this to the contemporary state of
physick, in which Hodges suggests ‘Quacks in Physick’ treat people’s
bodies as these divines treated citizens’ souls.88 Hodges describes these
rogue medical practitioners as ‘Diseases in the STATE’.89 Sheldon was
a religious-political affiliation sought after by chemists, as Thomson’s
own letter to the Archbishop prefacing Galeno-Pale demonstrates.
Furthermore, Sheldon was amongst the distinguished signatories sup-
porting the formation of a society for chemical physicians.90
Medicine, Hodges argues in Vindiciae Medicinae, will not be improved
by ‘the Vulgar Experimenters’, and it is ‘alltogether illogical, and fallacious
to conclude from some particular defects in Physick, that the whole Art is
thereupon impleadable of the same misprision of insufficiency and uncer-
tainty’.91 Amongst his primarily Emperick-focused laments, Hodges
points to a general danger of meddling in the medical arts under false
pretences:
I cannot distinguish between Charms and other known and solemn meth-
ods of Sorcery and Witchcraft, and these no less prestigious and hellish
practises; in a business of such consequence, I am willing to speak plain,
that the busie and officious people of both Sexes may understand their
adventure, when either out of an ambition to gain the popular repute of
doing good, or for profits sake they give Medicines at random, not being
able either to satisfie themselves or others concerning the true Vertues
thereof, and the reason of application; if what is thus given, succeeds
not, then must they answer (at least to God) the death of the Patient, if
the party recovers, then is there just cause of suspition that the evil Feind
is their Adjutor with his long experienced skill, being willing to cure the
Body of one to destroy the Soul of another:92
Hodges describes these empiricks in vicious terms. He establishes a binary

opposition: Galenists against the illiterate or immoral rabble who are
attempting to practice medicine, all too often placing profit before patient
care. He captures a large group in his writing, with only fellow Galenists
escaping his snare. He notes that an Emperick’s success can only be
attributed negatively, writing: ‘I know not how to avoid the attributing
of their successes to any other power then the Infernal Spirits assistance:
the Divines term this an implicite compact’.93 Hodges delineates a medical
knowledge that, when it deviates from the accepted orthodoxy becomes a
dangerous tool. Medicine, when practiced at the margin, aligns with evil;
natural causes and cures no longer have bearing. He describes an alternate

set of rules governing this type of medicine, which he goes so far to
describe as being practised in corroboration with evil and underwritten
by witchcraft. Medicine as a commercial enterprise is a second concern to
the doctor, who describes practitioners who ‘for profits sake’ offer remedies
at random.94 Hodges’ lament for the state of the art is lengthy and
addresses practitioners ranging from empericks to pseudochymists to
apothecaries. Of greatest concern to this chapter, however, are his com-
ments aimed at those he describes as the pseudochymists, in the sections
‘Of Chymistry, and the Pseudo-Chymists in this Kingdom’ and ‘Of the
Pseudochymists pretended Panacaea, or universal Medicine’, as well as his
concluding section, ‘A Letter to the Author FROM a Person of Quality’.
Thomson also seeks to sway opinion in Loimotomia, which creates a
literary climate of sharp truths, insisting that its reader heed the impor-
tance of the message contained within. In his letter to the reader,
Thomson warns his audience about the inherent danger that emerged
with the pest:
Be wise at length ye Mortals, and suffer not a Dogmatist to Cheat you any
longer with a formal Recipe, sent I know not whether, to be made up I know
not how, nor by whom; but be ascertain’d, before you meddle with a Physitian,
that he have an intuitive knowledge of Animals, Vegetals and Minerals; that
he is well versed in the separation of their pure Crasis with his own hands, and
then thou needest not doubt of a happy event.95
The statement concluding his letter to the reader provides both a warning
and a promise for a solution. The address is aimed at an audience com-
prised of those who would have navigated the complex world of early
modern English medicine, when the threat of a ‘Dogmatist to Cheat’ was
relevant, and more so during a period of epidemic. The element of fear-
mongering in Thomson’s warning is justified given the context. Thomson
endured the affliction himself on multiple occasions, as he explains, ‘Three
several times have I been wounded by the venemous Arrow of the direful
Pest’.96 He knew medicine could hurt as easily as help, and in Loimotomia
describes nearly falling prey to a Galenist’s medical treacheries while
caught up in an infection:
Certainly had I been so well acquainted about Ten years pa[ . . . ] with those
Arcana’s in my Art as now, it is impossible that I should (being at that time
PRINT 79
surprized with a malignant Feaver) have been Cloystered up Seven weeks in my

Chamber; extenuated to a Sceleton, by no less than Six large Cruciating
Vesicatories prescribed by no inferiour Galenist, who, as it were, extorted me
out of the hands of an able Chymist, for the intended Repute of his own
Method; which (as soon as I was restored to my right understanding) I
declined, absolutely declaring against bleeding in the Arm, which he gave
order should be put in execution the next day; and had I not prevented it by
an unmoveable resolution to the contrary, the thread of my life had undoubt-
edly been cut off; 97
Weakened by infection, even a staunch defender of the Helmontian

cause was at risk of the Galenic influence and drive for power. The
thought of bleeding is abhorrent to Thomson, and the author assures
the reader that under this leading Galenic physician’s care, the threat
exists that ‘the thread of my life had undoubtedly been cut off’. Though
Thomson’s work begins on terms that attack the Galenic contingent in
general, the section that is of greatest consequence to the debate in
this chapter is Thomson’s direct response to Hodges’ work, falling at
the end of Loimotomia, in ‘The AUTHORS APOLOGY against the
Calumnies of the GALENISTS’.98
The integrity of Thomson’s work hinges on two elements: his dissec-
tion of the plague body and his own survival of the infection. I mention
in the section ‘The Horror of the Plague Body’ that Thomson is self-
consciously composing history. He breaks the work into seven sections:
‘The Material Cause of the PEST’; ‘The Efficient Cause of the PEST’;
‘The Subject Part of the PEST’; ‘The Signs of the PEST’; ‘An Historical
Account of the Dissection of a Pestilential Body by the Author; and the
Consequents thereof; ‘Reflections and Observations on the foresaid
Dissection’; and, ‘Directions Preservative and Curative against the
Pest’.99 In a work published in 1666, at the beginning of which cases
of plague were still coming to light, Thomson makes a statement about
his work by describing his writing as ‘An Historical Account of the
Dissection of a Pestilential Body by the Author’. He grants himself the
authority to write the history of what he views as a pivotal moment in the
outbreak—his dissection of the plague corpse. He draws attention to
both his position as the work’s author and as the author of the ground-
breaking dissection, each knife cut marking a story on the body not
unlike the one he tells in Loimotomia. Galenists, in Thomson’s opinion,
are trapped in a world of archaic learning; plague has given the author
the chance to not only extend previous knowledge but to write a

new history of plague. He suggests that this text fills a pivotal niche in
plague knowledge. As is written on the title page of the work, history is
being made in the book’s pages.
The early modern physician’s influence and authority largely hinged on
his linguistic ability. Ability with language, Thomson and Hodges both
suggest or insinuate, was correlated to the physician’s ability to prescribe
correct, helpful cures and execute clinical work. Deft management of the
written word could assert argument and defence. Medicine was more than
tinctures and recipes, it was language and philosophy. These textual
retorts and debates, more than examining each side of the medical debates
aroused by the outbreak and claiming supremacy, assert linguistic prowess,
something each author feels is essential within the medical profession.
Hodges’ text describes the importance of language to the doctor’s work.
He places his own learning and knowledge, as well as that of the other
Galenists, above that of the apothecaries, empiricks and those he defines as
the pseudochymists. In his chapter on the pseudochymists, in which he
describes why Galenists are the only practitioners who could safely and
effectively practice ‘chymistry’, he writes as follows:
I begin with the Physicians skill in the Tongues and in Philosophy, what
Hoglandus writes concerning the necessity of knowing the Tongues is
acknowledged by all true Sons of Art . . . He will be deceived who imagins
that Chymical Authors can be so faithfully translated as books treating of other
Sciences: He then who is a sufficient Linguist is most capable of interpreting
truly and beneficially the mystical and obscure Writings of the Ancients; And
in relation to Philosophy as Hippocrates requires a Physician to be excellent in
it... To conclude, Studiousness and industry do compleat a Physician whose
knowledg and pains encrease alike100
The orthodox arm of the profession relied heavily upon academic studies.
Harold J. Cook notes the essential relationship, stating ‘The connections
between learning and authority that lay behind claims to authority in
general are especially well illuminated by the ways in which the physicians
argued for possessing, maintaining, and extending their professional pri-
vileges’.101 Hodges champions the importance of language, comprehen-
sion of philosophy and classical knowledge to the doctor’s work. He sees
those skills of reading and writing as inseparable from his practice as a
doctor; knowledge and not simply, he writes, ‘curiosity and covetousness’
PRINT 81
are essential to a well-rounded physician.102 Orthodox physicians were

more inclined to see the value in publishing their works in Latin, whereas
the unorthodox would most often publish in the vernacular.103 Hodges’
argument, made here in a text composed in English, suggests the work is
targeted at a larger audience in an effort to make dramatic statements
about the current state of the profession.
It was not only the orthodox Hodges who could exercise linguistic
pyrotechnics with language and the written word in this debate—
Thomson also asserts his mastery of language in Loimotomia. For
Thomson, plague is a disease best contained by the chemist’s measures,
but it may also be accommodated by language. He writes,
I Very well know the curious Linguist will expect the Nomenclature of the
Pest in various terms; wherefore to satisfie his desire, I shall deliver them thus.
He goes on to give a multitude of names for the disease in a number of

languages, before moving to English, writing,
The English, the Plague, the Pest, the Sickness, or Disease . . . vulgarly the
Infection, Contagion, or Distemper.
From the Name, I pass to the Essence and Quiddity of the Pest; which is a
Contagious Disease,104
Thomson’s tone is dismissive in this passage, even exasperated. He grud-

gingly acknowledges the value placed on language in this fight with the
plague—he can hardly deny it given the medium through which he
expresses himself. Thomson is willing to ‘satisfie’ the ‘curious Linguist’,
but I would argue that conceding to this linguist is something of a patron-
izing act. Ernest B. Gilman, addressing this passage, suggests that
Thomson starts ‘by assuming his reader to be a “curious linguist” who
will first of all expect a proper “Nomenclature of the Pest in various terms”
as the framework for everything that follows’.105 Gilman suggests that this
list is delivered with ‘an irony that suggests his anatomy will delve deeper
into the matter than just the expected nomenclature, in order to disclose
the res beneath the “various terms” by which the plague is superficially
denominated’.106 I agree with Gilman, but interpret the passage as more
specific to the debate with Galenists that Thomson articulates throughout
Loimotomia. Coming from a background with a healthy emphasis on
experimentation, Thomson has little time for the type of words associated
with the Galenists—traditional, theoretical, ancient. Given the state of
learning in the College, and the focus on theory and books for
Thomson’s foes, he makes a curt romp through the linguistic territory of
plague, but after this short introductory paragraph to chapter one it is on
to more important issues. Thomson establishes a wide-ranging apprecia-
tion of the linguistic roots of the disease—Hebrew, Greek and Latin—so
he can move on to more pressing concerns, as Gilman suggests, so he can
‘delve deeper’. In the English portion of the title, The Pest Anatomized,
the name he bestows upon his invisible adversary is notable, though not
unique. Pest, in addition to being a noun for plague, could also mean ‘As a
curse’ or ‘A person who or thing which is destructive, noxious, or trou-
blesome; the bane of something’.107 Pest describes both a disease and a
‘destructive, noxious, or troublesome’ force. When addressing a disease
that had no lack of names, Thomson finally settles on an assertive word
that encapsulates not only the disease but a state of being that invites
trouble and destruction.
Thomson and Hodges both assert the importance of language.
Hodges, true to his orthodox training, delineates the importance of
language to the study of medicine and the fight against plague in linear
terms. A command of language and of classical languages is essential
for the physician to properly interpret medical theory and to accom-
modate medical philosophy. Thomson seems to retort the Galenic
obsession with language. He almost grudgingly points to the different
languages within which the physician could accommodate his foe but
finally lands on the most simplistic title, the Pest, also arguably the one
with the greatest impact. Though Thomson devalues an emphasis on
plague’s linguistic roots, his productive writing schedule in his ongoing
conflicts with the Galenists demonstrates that try as he might to escape
the linguistic trivialities of plague, the importance of writing and
language could not be ignored as a seventeenth-century physician.
Whether dismissing the keen linguist in a few curt lines or arguing
for the true doctor’s capacity to learn, words fuelled these debates in
print and, at points, each author finds himself driven to name-calling.
The metaphors for condemning one’s enemy were not exclusive to
either side. Characterizing the other school of thought as populated
by monstrous beings was expected in these debates. Hodges describes
his adversaries, chemists amongst them, as ‘Multitudes of Monsters, like
those which Pliny mentions whose Eyes are fixed in their Breasts’,108 and
PRINT 83
Thomson describes Galenists in his other attack on the group, Galeno-

Pale, as ‘monstrous and Anomalous as a Centaure or Syren’.109 Similarly,
the construction of empericks and quacks as forming a ‘swarm’ is an
analogy used by one author and decried by the other. In Galeno-Pale,
Thomson describes the Galenists as those ‘who have conjured up such
Swarms of Quacks in every place, (who like Locusts eat the bread out of
honest Physicians mouths) by your Profane Prescripts’,110 where in
Vindiciae Medicinae, Hodges, describing his enemy the emperick,
explains that ‘the term Emperick is notoriously known in respect of the
vast swarm of them which pester all places, confidently pretending to
Physick’.111 The image of a plague of practitioners working outside the
orthodoxy was accepted terminology, as demonstrated by the like use of
the term ‘swarm’ by Hodges and Thomson. Empericks, as constructed by
Galenists, form a biblical plague of insects, their numbers encroaching in
a great swarm. Thomson debunks this myth of the biblical swarm in
Galeno-Pale, describing a Galenist analogy used to divert attention from
their true motivations and intentions.
These debates played out in the public forum of print and often in
tandem with medical advice and insight. In a time when there were no
effective cures for pestilence, despite what physicians argued to the
contrary, these intellectual debates were perhaps what stood in place
of a cure. Thomson and Hodges argue that they did the best they could
for their patients. Under these circumstances, one’s truth described in a
book and published gained a greater importance, as did convincing
one’s reading audience that he was a bearer of truth. It should be
noted, too, that the truth Thomson and Hodges argue they possess is
never so forward as to claim a definitive cure for the plague. Theories
are presented, and medicines are proposed, but these physicians are
quick to tell their reader that not every medicine can work on every
patient. Their works gain value less for the cures they hold and more for
how each physician establishes himself as a figure of honesty and
authority, all while warning readers of the dangers in believing others.
But as the conclusion to this chapter will demonstrate, sometimes even
a well-argued rebuttal to another physician’s work was not enough to
defend oneself and one’s beliefs during plague times.
Hodges’ attack on chemists and other medical practitioners working
outside of the College of Physicians in Vindiciae Medicinae inspired
Thomson to deliver an attack of epic proportions in Loimotomia. After
establishing his knowledge of Hodges’ text, which is noted on the titled
page, ‘a Word to Mr. Nath: Hodges, concerning his late Vindiciae

Medicinae’, Thomson writes, ‘Some little cursory View I chanced to
have of it, enough to satisfie me what this Juggler and his Assistants aim
at’.112 Pondering the benefit of a chemical trial, Thomson leaps to the
heart of his argument against Hodges, writing:
To conclude, had leisure been granted me to have strictly perused Mr. N. H.

his Garrulous Tract, (contrived by one of his Sophistical wily Brethren, lying
couched in time of the Pest, and garnished with many polite, trimm words,
and back'd by specious Authority of Writers, but mis-applyed, mis-inter-
preted, nihil ad Rhombum, nothing pertinent to the main thing, which
every Honest Able Physician is bound to take in hand, i. e. to cure Man as
he ought.) . . . And once more I propose to him this undeniably equal
determination of our Controversies by Fact, that he would vouchsafe to
meet me in any Hospital, with competent Arbitratours agreed upon by us
both; and according as they shall Judge of our Actions, so let them proclaim
us to the World. If he deny to accept of this, I am resolved to publish him,
no other than a meer sounding peece of Vacuity.113
The linguistic range in this assault on Hodges is impressive. Thomson

describes Hodges’ writing as ‘garnished with many polite, trimm words’.
Though Hodges has faced the illness and remained in London, those he
aligns with, his brethren, have fled, ‘lying couched in the time of the
Pest’. Harkening back to his earlier disdain for the requirement made by
his reader, the curious Linguist, that he provide the linguistic range
associated with the word plague, Thomson asserts in this concluding
attack on Hodges that the written word in seventeenth-century medicine
can easily devolve into treachery. The literary landscape of plague is
littered with ‘polite, trim words, and back’d by specious Authority of
Writers’. Thomson ends Loimotomia on a definitive note, attempting to
wrench the war of words into the real world by requesting that Hodges
meet him in ‘any Hospital’, where their actions can be judged once and
for all.
In the letter and response that conclude the 1666 edition of Hodges’
Vindiciae Medicinae, in which the doctor adds his opinions and observations
on dealing with the disease, he is asked by a person of quality: ‘what is become of
them who assume liberty to qualifie themselves Chymical Doctors, in opposition to
the KINGS COLLEDGE of PHYSITIANS in LONDON’.114 Hodges
responds with a succinct attack on chemists:
PRINT 85
As to that part of your letter wherein you desire satisfaction concerning our
pretended Chymists, I can onely make you this return, that the people are
now convinced of their designs, their most admired preparations proving
altogether unsuccesful, and their contrivances being chiefly bent upon more
secret waies and a shorter cut to gain estates . . .
These scandalous opposers of the Colledg are now for ever silenced, since
that so many members of that most honourable Society have ventured their
lives in such hot service, their memory will doubtless survive time who dyed
in the discharge of their Duty, and their reputation florish, who (by Gods
Providence) escaped: certainly the Magistrate will protect and suitably
encourage all legitimate Physitians who have appeared most ready to serve
their Countrey in the greatest exigency.115
The conclusion to the second edition of the tract ends with its stark
warning about the integrity of the field, pointing to the continued
threat felt to ‘legitimate physicians’ by the ‘pretended Chymists’.
While the conclusion focuses on the threat from chemists, the danger
of an unauthorized presence even in the aftermath of the plague and
after the 1665 edition of the work is felt. These lines seem incon-
gruent in a work that otherwise raises its command of the English
language to sometimes unintelligible heights. This appendage to the
work, a paratext, shifts a work that was otherwise aimed at a variety of
practitioners and places it directly in the context of a post-epidemic
world. An unspoken subtext suggests life after the plague outbreak
and the death of these ‘scandalous opposers’ has led to a situation of
divine justice. Plague has delivered its own gruesome verdict while
those who ‘escaped’ did so ‘by Gods Providence’. In a tract that
otherwise attacks a variety of groups, amongst them empericks and
apothecaries, it is telling that this appended information only makes
mention of chemical medicine. The connection between the chemical
physicians and plague, by the time this later edition was produced,
was clearly established. The pressure the epidemic placed on the
medical community resulted in one conflict emerging as the most
significant amongst those invested in medical provision during the
outbreak. That is, the conflict between the College and chemical
physicians.
Though passionate Helmontians like Thomson, remaining in London,
attempting to establish a college of their own and willing to attack plague
head-on, tried to thwart the evils of the Galenist-dominated medical field,

their efforts ultimately faltered. Their passion for the subject and commit-
ment to the chemical cause were thwarted by the enemy common to
chemists and Galenists alike—plague. Though brave Helmontians may
have stayed in the city, the decision to remain was not without its draw-
backs as many died in the epidemic. With their numbers reduced by the
decision to remain in the bastion of plague infection, Helmontian physi-
cians saw their influence diminished after the epidemic. While the reasons
for this fall were complex, plague is oft-cited as a contributing factor to
their decline. Wear observes that ‘By the end of the century the English
Helmontians, who had never been numerous, had disappeared from view;
they left no successors to fight for a new practice of medicine’.116 Where
the field of chemistry would continue, Helmontian authority was dimin-
ished in the aftermath of the epidemic.117 Hodges’ words were not vacant
when he wrote ‘These scandalous opposers of the Colledg are now for ever
silenced’. Many influential Helmontians fell victim to plague, including
George Starkey and Joseph Dey, about whose death Thomson writes:
‘two of my most esteemed Consorts, Dr. Ioseph Dey, and Dr. George
Starkey, two Pillars of Chymical Physick, were both reposed in their
Graves . . . They are gone, and at rest free from Persecution, Slanders and
Obloquies of their Enemies, and have left me behind to deal with those
that are alwayes supplanting and contradicting the Truth’.118 Hodges’
final statement about death during the visitation demonstrates the ques-
tions of life and death that were on the line for physicians practicing during
the outbreak and demonstrates one reason why these debates and argu-
ments could quickly devolve into personal attacks. Hodges’ morbid note
that these ‘opposers’ are silenced adheres as much to the Helmontians’
work as physicians as it does to their writing. Despite the overwhelming
negativity invested in many of these pamphlets devoted to controversial
subjects, their authors’ commitment to writing about the disease and
debating in the print realm invested the outbreak with a medical and
literary connection that helped define the innovative nature of the literary
culture of plague in 1665. More than any plague that had come before,
this outbreak was invested in linguistically by the medical community. The
emphasis placed on printing opposing and varied medical views, written by
these physician authors, provided a new dimension to the disease, in which
it could be framed in a literary/medical culture as it never had before.
Inspired by new medical philosophies and the emergence of a con-
tentious debate within the discipline, medical writing was invigorated
NOTES 87
during the outbreak. The resulting dialogues on the disease were impos-
sible during earlier outbreaks. The broadsides of earlier plague times,
with their steady emphasis on death and mortality, continued to bear
relevance in 1665, but medical debates and increasing emphasis on the
natural basis of the disease meant that medical writing was produced
within an entirely new context. Yet medical writing was not the only
literary space in which innovations emerged. Plague resulted in oppor-
tunities, however morbid, in other areas, which would also lead to new
responses to the illness. P M. Rattansi notes of the stress and unusual
situations that arose due to the outbreak: ‘Just as non-conformist preach-
ers climbed into the pulpits left empty by the flight of many of the
Anglican clergy, so did apothecaries and Helmontians replace Galenists
in ministering to the needs of the remaining population’.119 Rattansi
draws a direct link between the stress of plague and resulting activities by
certain groups during the outbreak, namely nonconformist ministers,
apothecaries and Helmontians. Thus, it should come as little surprise
that the second area of plague writing where significant innovation was
felt in response to the outbreak was in religious writing composed by
nonconformists. Like Helmontian physicians, nonconformists found
their professional position impacted by the Puritan Revolution and the
Restoration, resulting in an outpouring of writing in response to the
outbreak that sought to understand the disease within the current con-
text of the visitation and the events that preceded it.
NOTES
1. Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 72. (Thomson 1666)
3. Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England, p. 10. (Furdell
2002)
4. Nathaniel Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum: Or An Apology for
the Profession and Professors of Physick In Answer to the Several Pleas of Illegal
Practitioners; Wherein Their Positions Are Examined, Their Cheats
Discovered, and Their Danger to the Nation Asserted. As Also an Account
of the Present Pest, in Answer to a Letter (London: 1666). (Hodges 1666)
5. Nathaniel Hodges, Loimologia, or, An Historical Account of the Plague in
London in 1665: With Precautionary Directions Against the Like Contagion,
trans. by John Quincy (London: 1720) (Hodges1720); George Thomson,
Loimologia. A Consolatory Advice, And Some Brief Observations Concerning
the Present Pest (London: 1665) (Thomson 1665)
6. A number of works of history address the debate between Galenists and

Helmontians or the rise of Helmontian thought, including Andrew Wear,
‘Conflict and Revolution in Medicine—the Helmontians’, ‘The Failure of
the Helmontian Revolution in Practical Medicine’, in Knowledge & Practice
in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), pp. 353–433 (Wear 2000); P.M. Rattansi, ‘Paracelsus and the Puritan
Revolution’, in Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry: Papers from Ambix,
ed. by Allen G. Debus (London: Jeremy Mills Pub. for the Society for the
History of Alchemy and Chemistry, 2004), pp. 344–352 (Rattansi 2004); P.
M. Rattansi, ‘The Helmontian-Galenist Controversy in Restoration
England’, in Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry: Papers from Ambix, ed.
by Allen G. Debus (London: Jeremy Mills Pub. for the Society for the
History of Alchemy and Chemistry, 2004), pp. 353–375 (Rattansi 2004);
Harold J. Cook, ‘The Society of Chemical Physicians, the New Philosophy,
and the Restoration Court’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 61.1 (1987),
pp. 61–77 (Cook 1987); Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical
Regime in Stuart London (London and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1986) (Cook 1986); Antonio Clericuzio, ‘From van Helmont to Boyle. A
Study of the Transmission of Helmontian Chemical and Medical Theories in
Seventeenth-Century England’, The British Society for the History of
Medicine, 26.3 (1993), 303–334. (Clericuzio 1993)
7. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London, p. 98, 155–
158. (Cook 1986)
9. Clericuzio, ‘From van Helmont to Boyle. A Study of the Transmission of
Helmontian Chemical and Medical Theories in Seventeenth-Century
England’, p. 325. (Clericuzio 1993)
10. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, pp. 25–
26. (Raymond 2003)
11. Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England, p. 1. (Furdell 2002)
12. Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England, p. 1 (Furdell
2002); For further discussion of humoral theory and early modern litera-
ture, with a focus on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, see: Gail Kern Paster,
The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern
England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). (Paster 1993)
15. Mithridate, n., definition 1 a: ‘Any of various medicinal preparations, usually
in the form of an electuary compounded of many ingredients, believed to be
a universal antidote to poison or a panacea. Now hist.’, OED Online (Oxford
University Press, 2012) <oed.com> [accessed 25 September 2012]; Slack,
The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 30. (Slack 1985)
NOTES 89
16. Anonymous, ‘College History: Founding the College’ <www.rcplondon.ac.

uk/about/history > [accessed 12 November 2015].
17. Rattansi, ‘The Helmontian-Galenist Controversy in Restoration England’,
p. 360. (Rattansi 2004)
18. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London, p. 104.
(Cook 1986)
(Cook 1986)
p. 361. (Rattansi 2004)
p. 363. (Rattansi 2004)
p. 363. (Rattansi 2004)
2002)
2002)
p. 353. (Rattansi 2004)
2002)
27. Rattansi, ‘Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution’, pp. 25–26 (Rattansi
2004); In The English Paracelsians, Allen George Debus writes: ‘The chief
Elizabethan translator of works on spagirical medicine had been John
Hester, and it is significant that he was far more interested in the recipe
books of Duchesne and Fioravanti than in Paracelsus. His two short transla-
tions from works falsely attributed to Paracelsus were composed of chemical
recipes, not of iatrochemical theory, and even more important is the fact that
they were the only translations attributed to Paracelsus until the 1650s’.
Allen George Debus, The English Paracelsians (London: Oldbourne, 1965),
p. 181. (Debus 1965)
28. Rattansi, ‘Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution’, p. 347. (Rattansi 2004)
p. 353. (Rattansi 2004)
30. “archeus, n.” OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2012) <oed.com>
[accessed 21 March 2016]; Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and
Stuart England, p. 248. (Slack 1985)
33. ‘Helmontians did not deny that changes in the Archeus could also be
imposed from outside by natural forces, by the poisonous gases which
arose from “fermentation” either in the earth or in other infected

bodies. Thus the notions of miasma and infection between persons
were also retained. Chemical physicians might replace Galenic humors
with the Archeus, and refer to “fermentation” rather than “putrefac-
tion”, but it was the terminology—the metaphors, as Henry Stubbe
rightly called them—rather than the basic understanding of the disease
which had changed.’ Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart
England, p. 249. (Slack 1985)
p. 353. (Rattansi 2004)
p. 365. (Rattansi 2004)
pp. 365–366. (Rattansi 2004)
37. Thomson, Loimologia, pp. 1–2. (Thomson 1665)
38. Patrick Wallis, ‘Plagues, Morality and the Place of Medicine in Early
Modern England’, The English Historical Review, 121.490 (2006), pp.
1–24. (Wallis 2006)
39. Antonio Clericuzio, ‘Thomson, George (1619–1677)’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography (Oxford University Press: 2004) <oxforddnb.com>
[accessed 21 Oct 2012]. (Clericuzio 2004)
40. Clericuzio, ‘Thomson, George (1619–1677)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography. (Clericuzio 2004)
National Biography. (Clericuzio 2004).
44. Charles Webster, ‘The Helmontian George Thomson and William Harvey:
The Revival and Application of Splenectomy to Physiological Research,
Medical History, 15.2 (1971), pp. 154–167. (Webster 1971)
45. Webster, ‘The Helmontian George Thomson and William Harvey’, p. 155.
(Webster 1971)
National Biography. (Clericuzio 2004).
48. Helen King, ‘Hodges, Nathaniel (1629–1688)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford University Press: 2004; online edn. 2007)
<oxforddnb.com> [accessed 21 Oct 2012].(King 2004)
NOTES 91
49. King, ‘Hodges, Nathaniel (1629–1688)’, Oxford Dictionary of National

Biography. (King 2004)
52. Moote, The Great Plague, p. 144 (Moote 2004); King, ‘Hodges, Nathaniel
(1629–1688)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (King 2004)
53. Moote, The Great Plague, p. 144. (Moote 2004)
54. Nathaniel Hodges and Thomas Witherly, We Who Are Appointed the
Physicians for the Prevention and Cure of the Plague (London: 1665), n.p.
55. Hodges and Witherly, We Who Are Appointed the Physicians for the
Prevention and Cure of the Plague, n.p.
56. “sack, n. 3”.Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2012)
<oed.com> [accessed 25 September 2012]. (Oxford English Dictionary
2012)
Biography (King 2004); Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (2nd
edn 1666), p. 201. (Hodges 1666)
59. Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (1666), p. 234. (Hodges
1666)
1666)
61. For a discussion of flight of medical figures during plague outbreaks, see:
Wallis, ‘Plagues, Morality and the Place of Medicine in Early Modern
England’, 1–24. (Wallis 2006)
62. Wear, Knowledge & Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, p. 334. (Wear
2000)
63. Thomson, ‘To the Reader’, Loimotomia, n.p. (Thomson 1966)
65. Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900,
p. 55. (Porter 2001)
66. Thomson, Loimotomia, n.p. (Thomson 1666)
67. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 24. (Bakhtin 1984)
68. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 26–27. (Bakhtin 1984)
71. Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 77–78. (Thomson 1666)

74. Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (1666), p. 221. (Hodges 1666)
76. George Thomson, Galeno-pale, or, A Chymical Trial of the Galenists, that
Their Dross in Physick may be Discovered with the Grand Abuses and
Disrepute They have Brought Upon the Whole Art of Physick and Chirurgery
(London: 1665). (Thomson 1665)
77. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London, p. 38, 43.
(Cook 1986)
78. See Chapter One for a discussion of the audiences for medical texts.
79. Wear, Knowledge & Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, pp. 40–41.
(Wear 2000)
2000)
(Cook 1986)
83. Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (1666), p. 47, 48. (Hodges
1666)
p. 362. (Rattansi 2004)
85. Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (1666), n.p. (Hodges 1666)
86. Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (1666), p. A4. (Hodges 1666)
87. Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (1666), p. A3. (Hodges 1666)
p, 365. (Rattansi 2004)
1666)
98. Thomson, Loimotomia, p.172. (Thomson 1666)
100. Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (1666), p. 111, 113.
(Hodges 1666)
NOTES 93
101. Harold J. Cook, ‘Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional
Authority of Early Modern English Physicians’, Journal of British Studies,
33 (1994), 1–31 (pp. 1–2). (Cook 1994)
1666)
103. Wear, Knowledge & Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, pp. 41–42.
(Wear 2000)
105. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England, p. 121. (Gilman
2009)
106. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England, p. 121. (Gilman
2009)
107. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2012) <oed.com>
[accessed 30 September 2012]. (Oxford English Dictionary 2012)
109. Thomson, Galeno-pale, or, A Chymical Trial of the Galenists, p. 19.
(Thomson 1665)
110. Thomson, Galeno-pale, or, A Chymical Trial of the Galenists, p. 8.
(Thomson 1665)
114. Hodges, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum (1666), p.194. (Hodges 1666)
1666)
2000)
p. 353. (Rattansi 2004)
p. 371. (Rattansi 2004)
CHAPTER 4
Plague and Nonconformity
London had the Gospel, Ordinances powerfull, pure, plentifull. Ministers

excellently qualified and rarely furnished with ministerial abilities; London
had as many burning and shining lights as any one such spot of ground under
the cope of heaven.
Thomas Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (London: 1667), p. 25.
(Vincent 1667)
The story of London’s judgement of pestilence and fire began years

before those first few plague deaths noted in the bills of mortality in
1664 and long before fire swept through the city—at least according to
one recorder of plague’s horrors. The reasons for plague have been aired
in the tracts left behind, which are filled with views ranging from the
most prolific in 1665, which see plague in natural terms, provide cures or
describe the extent of the infection, to those linking social and moral
causes to the spread of illness. While the beliefs in these tracts are often
issued forth with precision and conviction, providing evidence to back
their claims, few possess the passion of Thomas Vincent’s narrative voice
in identifying the moment of London’s ‘introduction to the Plague’ as
24 August 1662.1 Vincent explains:
Concerning the Judgments themselves. Here I might speak of the judgment

executed, August 24th 1662. when so many Ministers were put out of their
places; and the judgment executed March 24th 1665. when so many

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_4
96 4 PLAGUE AND NONCONFORMITY
Ministers were banished 5 miles from Corporations, the former by way of

introduction to the Plague which sometime after did spread in the Land, but
chiefly raged in the City; the later by way of introduction to the Fire, which
quickly after did burn down London the greatest Corporation in England.2
Far from indicating he lacked a sense of time and place, Vincent’s given start
date shows how inextricably his views of plague and the plight of the
nonconformist ministers intermingled. For Vincent, writing in his influential
work on the epidemic, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (1667), London’s fate
is structured around a moment before and all that follows after, and the
distinction between this before and after centres on the country’s participa-
tion in legislation to forcibly remove and negate the position of nonconfor-
mist ministers throughout the Restoration. The date he offers for plague’s
introduction, 24 August 1662, Bartholomew Day, was when the regulations
outlined in the Act of Uniformity were brought into play.3 The results of the
Act were swift and catastrophic for dissenters. Any minister unwilling to
submit to the Act’s statements, which required that only the revised Book of
Common Prayer be used in places of worship, was ejected from the Church.
It further stated ‘that every beneficed clergyman should, on one Sunday
before St Bartholomew’s Day, “openly and publicly before the congrega-
tion . . . declare his unfeigned assent and consent” to “all and everything
contained and prescribed” in it’.4 Following the ejections, a set of statutes
known as the Clarendon Code were established, further hampering non-
conformists’ actions.5 Vincent’s is an unusual way of thinking about plague,
where the suffering of the general population is linked directly to the
experience of nonconformist ministers. However, the situation facing non-
conformist ministers like Vincent during the harsh regime that followed the
free-thinking religious climate during those tumultuous years in England
between 1642 and 1660 could easily be described as unusual as well.
Bartholomew Day in 1662 marked a schism between the before and after
for nonconformists ejected in accordance with the Act. For Vincent, this
divisive day stood as the first judgement that London faced.
Vincent’s interpretation of the city and country that had cast him to
the periphery and his attempts to commit these views to paper were
consistent with the actions of other nonconformists in the late seven-
teenth century. Vincent and a second author addressed in this chapter,
William Dyer, who wrote 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 (1666), belonged to the nonconformist
PLAGUE AND NONCONFORMITY 97
literary culture of the late seventeenth century. This period resulted in a

unique flourishing of literary activity emanating from nonconformist
ministers despite their compromised position to practice. Pushed to the
margins of society during the Restoration, Vincent and Dyer were forced
from their livelihood, their spiritual life challenged. Though little was
expected from this ‘gloomy and disillusioned minority’, what emerged
was a culture of impressive literary strength that found a vibrant voice on
the page despite being shut out from those activities and actions that
seemed essential to the success and vibrancy of the group.6 And a
minority they were. In total, 1760 ministers were ejected.7 Regardless
of their compromised position and low numbers, nonconformists were
proportionately very active in the written realm. Reading was of high
priority amongst Puritans, both a central feature of their religious prac-
tice and an activity that fostered close ties amongst people of similar
perspectives.8 With nonconformists forced to find alternate modes of
expression outside of the performative activity of preaching, a consider-
able number of the small group took to voicing their beliefs through the
press. The importance of written expression to nonconformist ministers
has been eloquently delineated by Neil H. Keeble, who explains that the
nonconformists were:
heirs to a literate, literary and bookish religious tradition. Their circum-

stances, however, gave them a particular incentive to publish. ‘The Press’,
wrote Baxter explaining his own publications, ‘hath a louder voice then
mine’, and nonconformists had need of a voice which would carry far if they
were to be heard from the exile—in prison, the provinces, or abroad—to
which the Clarendon Code banished them. In their various kinds of seclu-
sion, they could in writing come to terms with the events which had,
apparently so finally, overthrown them; and through publication they
could declare their continuing, and renewed, commitment despite those
events, their willing submission to God’s Providence.9
The circumstances faced by nonconformists fostered a turn to the written

word to convey the stories and messages that could no longer be easily shared
with their congregations. The result of these unique circumstances was that
the attempt to silence nonconformists had the opposite effect of strengthen-
ing their resolve to produce textual responses to their plight.10 The Act of
Uniformity led to a greater emphasis on the individual within Puritan spiri-
tuality. The resulting interpretive leeway that emerged through this forcing of
Puritan clergymen to the periphery may be felt in what has been described as
Vincent’s ‘improvement’ of ‘divine providence’ in God’s Terrible Voice in the

City.11 Vincent and Dyer illustrate the effects of these actions against non-
conformists in their written responses to the plague epidemic.
When the outbreak struck, citizens were familiar with the dangers of sin in
the face of rising deaths, owing to prior outbreaks that saw religious writing
as the primary area of production in print materials addressing the disease.
And while religious interpretations were tempered by a thrust toward under-
standing the natural basis of plague by 1665, as well as charting its course,
they still found their way into many of the documents responding to the
disease.12 In 1665, nearly as many religious works were produced as in 1625
and 1626; however, these were a smaller percentage of the number of
publications produced in response to the outbreak in 1665 and 1666.13
While the emphasis on religion in the context of a visitation may have shifted
and evolved by the time the epidemic struck, invoking prayers and identify-
ing the spiritual aspect of coping with imminent death remained popular
topics and pervade much of the literature from that time. Given the oppor-
tunity to once again preach, nonconformists were able to provide first-hand
accounts of the sermons they delivered and their experiences during the
outbreak. Religious interpretations, however, could convey a variety of views
depending on their author, serving a number of potential agendas.
Notable conformists brought their own voices to the plight of victims. With
the restoration of the Anglican Church, the state church carried out important
roles in the city during the visitation,14 though it was sharply criticized by
dissenters such as Vincent for the flight of clergy. Humphrey Henchman, the
Bishop of London, fearing in part that dissenting ministers would take up the
empty pulpits, threatened the professional roles of clergymen who remained
absent during the outbreak.15 Though the prospect of a congregation gather-
ing during times of contagion, whether led by the state church or a dissenting
minister, is harrowing in and of itself, this did not stop such gatherings taking
place. Plague services were one of the few gatherings of the public allowed,
with some pulpits occupied by figures filling in for clergy who fled and room
made for certain ejected ministers to take up their pulpits once more.16
Conformists, too, added to the texts that responded to the outbreak, such as
Simon Patrick, the Rector of St. Paul Covent Garden, who remained in
London and published that year A Brief Exhortation to Those Who Are Shut
Up from Our Society, and Deprived at Present of Publique Instruction (1665)
and A Consolatory Discourse, Perswading to a Chearfull Trust in God in These
Times of Trouble and Danger (1665).17 In his autobiography, Patrick noted:
PLAGUE AND NONCONFORMITY 99
About the middle of August I set myself to write a short exhortation to those
who were shut up because of the plague, and just when I had finished it,
heard the melancholy news of my father’s death, on the 16th; upon which I
wrote a letter to comfort my mother, wherewith I much comforted myself;
and on the 24th sent abroad my little exhortation to those who were shut up,
beseeching God that it might do good to all. And on the 30th I thought of
writing a little treatise of comfort in this sad time, which I finished and sent
to my bookseller September the first, praying the blessing of Heaven might
attend upon these my little labours for the good of souls.18
Patrick’s timely use of print to reach a congregation beyond the church’s

walls demonstrates one way in which religious conformists met the popu-
lation’s spiritual needs during the outbreak.
The textual responses to the epidemic produced by nonconformists
made innovative contributions to the literary culture of the outbreak.
Nonconformists who took up pulpits during the outbreak wrote on
plague from a perspective unique to the year. For these marginalized
figures, the epidemic stood as both a horrific event and as an opportunity
to guide Londoners away from sin. Their writing tells a story unique to
the political and religious climate of that period. This chapter extends the
established understanding that there was a decreased proportionate pre-
valence of religious texts in 1665 in contrast to earlier plague years by
considering how aspects of this diminished religious dialogue contribu-
ted to the distinctive and innovative literary culture of the outbreak.
Works composed by nonconformists saw the subgenre of religious pla-
gue writing articulated within the specific historical moment of the 1665
outbreak, when the events of the previous two decades and since the
Restoration provided an entirely new context for religious interpreta-
tions of the disease. The literary tradition motivated by the challenges
facing nonconformists, such as Vincent and Dyer, may be traced to the
Great Plague of London in 1665 in two ways deserving of scholarly
attention. First, the outbreak offered preaching opportunities to non-
conformist and ejected ministers, who took up pulpits when scores,
including Anglican clergy, fled the city during the outbreak or fell victim
to the disease. Secondly, the literary tradition of nonconformity and the
products of that literary culture contextualize pestilence in terms of the
nonconformist plight, interpreting the outbreak in apocalyptic language
and connecting the outbreak to the actions taken in the religious and
political spheres during the Restoration, as is succinctly described by
Vincent in his interpretation of Bartholomew Day in 1662. These min-

isters provide written documentation of the plague conveyed through
the lens of nonconformity. Furthermore, Dyer and Vincent do not
merely write about the epidemic; each minister lived actively through
that time, making a tangible contribution to the pestilence-ridden city. It
was into this tempestuous climate of discrimination, chaos and national
tragedy that each minister cast his writing. While Dyer and Vincent each
express apocalyptic sentiment in their writing, they diverge considerably
in their narrative style.19 Dyer captures the ephemeral spirit of a sermon,
given to a specific audience at a specific place and then packaged for the
reading public. Though Vincent’s writing style speaks to his profession as
a minister, often bearing similarities to a sermon, his work God’s Terrible
Voice in the City is also a history of that time. As infection swathed the
city in paranoia, speculation and fear, two members of the ill-fated
nonconformists were preparing to voice their religious guidance in a
public role. When many escaped London during the outbreak, Dyer
and Vincent did the opposite, remaining to preach at their own risk.
The images of these plague congregations are harrowing, the thought of
the infection passing through the crowds, but each minister’s past experi-
ences and present circumstances meant he felt compelled to stay.
THOMAS VINCENT AND THE BIBLICAL APOCALYPTIC

In describing the height of the visitation in God’s Terrible Voice in the City,
Vincent writes:
Now the grave doth open its mouth without measure. Multitudes! multi-
tudes! in the valley of the shadow of death, thronging daily into eternity; the
Church-yards now are stufft so full with dead corpses, that they are in many
places swell’d two or three foot higher than they were before; and new
ground is broken up to bury the dead.20
In the passage, Vincent incorporates a fragment of Psalm 23-‘Yea, though I

walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou
art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me’—changing the subject
of the psalm from I to the ‘Multitudes’21. In Vincent’s hands, the passage is
combined with the temporal challenges associated with the outbreak—the
question of how to manage the bodies that have passed from life to death.
The swollen earth struggles to accommodate the dead. In this description of
THOMAS VINCENT AND THE BIBLICAL APOCALYPTIC 101
collective death and numerous corpses, the earth is overwhelmed by the

bodies it encompasses. These bodies transgress the limits of the churchyard,
causing the ground to writhe under the pressure of corpse upon corpse. The
grave consumes these bodies, devouring the multitudes of dead until the
churchyard becomes bloated and pregnant under their weight in a
Bakhtinian grotesque body. The churchyards, ‘swell’d two or three foot
higher than they were before’, result in a vision of twisted generation
inextricably connected to death.
Published one year after the fire of London and two years after the
plague, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (1667) was reprinted in sixteen
editions over eight years.22 Vincent’s religious motivations and experi-
ences frequently emerge in God’s Terrible Voice in the City. Vincent
attended Oxford University, ultimately receiving his MA in 1654.23
He was appointed rector of St Mary Magdalen in London in 1657.24
The breakdown of the Protectorate in England when the monarchy
was restored in 1660 left many English Puritans, including Vincent, in
a compromised position. Following his ejection, Vincent continued to
preach when the opportunity arose.25 In God’s Terrible Voice in the
City Vincent grapples with the meaning of these events within the
context of his religious beliefs and the outbreak. Throughout God’s
Terrible Voice in the City, Vincent struggles to resolve the conflict
between temporal and spiritual allegiances. He was not alone in this
struggle; debate over the appropriate medical and religious response to
plague was rife in texts responding to the outbreak. His work, how-
ever, cannot escape the apocalyptic preoccupation of his own Puritan
background or the sense of doom that pervaded London during the
terrible events. Writing in a language charged by apocalyptic imagery
and commenting on the horror experienced during the plague and fire
as it relates to Scripture—with references to Death on his pale horse
and to angels sounding the last trumpet—Vincent creates a narrative
landscape driven alternatively by fear of judgement and hope for
redemption.26 Vincent invokes language suggestive of endings and
indulges at length in issues of death and dying—unsurprising given
his subject matter.27 Written at the social margin, published after the
events to which it responds and as a consistently London-centred text,
Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City demonstrates a situation- and
faith-specific reading of the plague and fire that has consistently
informed subsequent understanding of the historical events he records
and interprets. Vincent contributes a highly specific response to the
literary culture of the outbreak, inextricably tied to his own profes-

sional and spiritual struggles and in turn to the upheaval that accom-
panied the Restoration of the monarchy.
Vincent re-emerged with vigour during the outbreak, taking over the
task of preaching to those London congregations whose religious leaders
had fled to safety with the onset of the epidemic. The flight of citizens
from all parts of London society, including religious figures, meant empty
pulpits beckoned to the ejected minister who in the previous three years
found only infrequent opportunity to preach.28 The choice to practice
professionally came with great risk, as evidenced by Vincent’s descriptions
of the outbreak:
Now there is such a vast concourse of people in the Churches, where

these Ministers are to be found, that they cannot many times come neer
the Pulpit doors for the press, but are forced to climb over the pews to
them: And such a face is now seen in the Assemblies, as seldome was seen
before in London; such eager looks; such open ears, such greedy atten-
tion, as if every word would be eaten, which dropt from the mouths of
the Ministers.29
Large numbers of the poor who remained in the city flocked to hear
Vincent speak, urged on by the seeming imminence of death. He chastised
the population of the city for falling prey to sin. Vincent’s seeming
defiance in the face of the vigorous outbreak has not gone without com-
ment. His willingness to engage with the community and his compelling
delivery of sermons during the plague earned him respect but also demon-
strated what would have been considered extreme behaviour under the
circumstances; remaining in the city in a public role put one at constant
risk of infection or death. Given his decision to stay, Vincent has been
described as a fanatic.30 Those who remained in London during the out-
break and then recorded their observations later, placing themselves at risk
of infection, did so for a variety of reasons. For medical practitioners
working outside of the orthodoxy, such as Helmontians, the choice to
stay had considerable professional implications. In Vincent’s case there
were professional and spiritual implications. Parishioners left in the city
needed spiritual guidance, and Vincent had a renewed opportunity to
preach as restrictions placed on dissenters bent to the pressure of the
outbreak.
For clergymen, plague stood out from other early modern medical
afflictions, inspiring a bulk of religious preaching and writing, the severity
and extent of the illness standing as testament to divine power.31 In 1665,
religious treatises increasingly negotiated a terrain where the natural and
providential collided, and this tension is felt in Vincent’s tract. Andrew
Wear notes, ‘for the few who publicly stated that plague was sent directly
by God rather than by God acting through secondary or natural means,
plague could not be cured by natural means; only prayer and repentance
might avert his anger’.32 In God’s Terrible Voice in the City, Vincent
articulates plague in divine and natural terms. In the section entitled
‘What are those terrible things by which God doth sometimes speak?’,
Vincent details his understanding of the illness, stating:
The Plague is very terrible, in that
1. It is so poysonous a disease; it poysons the blood and spirits, breeds a

strange kind of venom in the body, which breaketh forth sometimes
in Boils, and Blains, and great Carbuncles . . .
2. It is so noysome a disease; it turns the good humors into putrefaction,
which putting forth it self in the issues of running sores, doth give a
most noysome smell . . .
3. It is so infectious a disease; it spreadeth it self worse than the
Leprosie amongst the Iews; it infecteth not only those which are
weak, and infirm in body, and full of ill humors, but also those
which are young, strong, healthful, and of the best temperature;
and that sometimes sooner than others. The Plague is infectious,
and greatly infectious, whole Cities have been depopulated
through its spreading, many whole families have received infection,
and death one from another thereby, which is the third thing that
rendreth the Plague so terrible.33
Finally, he explains, plague kills indiscriminately.34 Vincent’s descriptions

come from the realm of medical commentary, though in early modern
England medical texts also frequently veered into the territory of religion
when describing pestilence. Vincent’s treatise does not ignore the medical
theories that had come to be accepted, and he instead encompasses these
within his religious text. Running alongside his admonition that the people
of London give up their sinful behaviour emerges a secondary narrative
thread that treats plague as an illness, both infectious and deadly, having
the capacity to poison blood and spirit, to corrupt the humors and to spread
indiscriminately.
In the aftermath of the plague and fire, Vincent retreated to the print
realm. Again persecuted and viewed with suspicion, Vincent committed
his understanding of the judgement to print, demonstrating that though
the events resulted in what could be interpreted as apocalyptic signifiers,
there were no simple explanations for the horrors of pestilence and the fire.
As such, God’s Terrible Voice in the City marks a transition from preaching
to writing, from doing to recalling. The work historicizes both the epi-
demic and the nonconformist’s struggles. Written in a retrospective man-
ner, Vincent’s text works toward reconciling the apocalyptic horror of the
events—which by 1667 had not resulted in any final end and instead a
great improvement upon the previous years—with the message that these
disasters were only warnings that must be heeded in preparation for the
coming apocalypse. He argues that the disasters prove the severity of
God’s voice; thus, a final judgement should be anticipated and citizens
must spiritually prepare for the event. Vincent, who not only stayed in
London but seized the opportunity to again install himself in the pulpit
despite an understanding that plague was infectious, emphasizes the spiri-
tual over the temporal in his writing and actions. Within his writing,
London and its immorality lay at the epicentre of an eschatological storm.
God’s Terrible Voice in the City functions as a didactic text, arranged and
narrated in a manner both keeping with the Puritan literary tradition and
with the goal to call the reader to action in amending his or her sinful
behaviour. The title page succinctly lists the contents of the book, a feat
given the length and detail with which Vincent attacks his subject once he
embarks on his treatise. The cover states that God’s Terrible Voice in the
City addresses first:
The sound of the voice, in the Narration of the two late Dreadfull
Judgments of Plague and Fire, inflicted by the Lord upon the City of
London, the former in the year, 1665, the latter in the year 1666.
And second:
The interpretation of the voice, in a Discovery, 1. Of the cause of these

Judgments, where you have a Catalogue of London’s sins. 2. Of the design of
these Judgments; where you have an enumeration of the Duties God calls
for by this terrible voice.35
Vincent’s penchant for lists does not cease with his title page; the structural
device assists the author throughout, defining step by step the judgement
and what had brought these afflictions upon London. Vincent’s methodical
approach to God’s Terrible Voice in the City is consistent throughout the text,
which he organizes into three primary sections: a history of the plague and
fire; a list of the 25 infractions that brought the punishment upon London,
which range from ‘The first sin of London is slighting of the Gospel’ to ‘A
Ninth sin of London is Profaneness, and a loose and frothy spirit, especially in
the Youth and springing generation’ to ‘An eleventh sin of London, is fullness
of Bread, or intemperance in eating’.36 Vincent concludes his treatise with
the 20 lessons that should be gained from the experiences of plague and fire.
The Puritan sermon traditionally first notes doctrine followed by an applica-
tion.37 At the textual level, Vincent employs a similar structure to that seen in
the Puritan sermon, relating contemporary events and actions alongside
their doctrinal equivalent, with quotations of Scripture distinguished by
italics in the book. To illustrate London’s fourth sin, ‘Formality and luke-
warmness in the Worship of God’, Vincent quotes from John 4.24, stating:
‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in
truth’.38 He follows this by applying the quotation to his reader and to
London, in general, asking: ‘But hath his Worship been accordingly in
London? hath there been that spiritual Worship which he requires?’39
Vincent’s rhetorical approach in the substantial text of God’s Terrible Voice
in the City breaks his complex reasoning into persuasive sections that
demonstrate cause, effect and the desirable action for his reader to take.
Vincent draws on his experience living and preaching in London in
God’s Terrible Voice in the City, but the text does not present itself as a
collection of his sermons given at that time, despite the minister structur-
ing aspects of his text in the same manner of a traditional Puritan sermon;
however, a number of editions of the text appear with ‘the Addition of a
Sermon Preached at the Funeral of Mrs. A. J. in Aldermanbury Church
the 18th of September, 1665’.40 Though Vincent makes references to the
content of his preaching in the first edition of God’s Terrible Voice in the
City, the text focuses primarily on looking forward and preparing spiri-
tually, looking only to the past to better serve the Lord in the future.
Vincent reveals anxiety early on in his text over the decision to publish his
treatise at such a distance from the events it describes, writing:
It might have seemed more seasonable unto some, if a work of this nature
had come forth unto view more immediately after the sound of Gods terrible
voice, and execution, at least, of the last dreadfull Judgment of the Fire;
because if a Man strikes whilst the Iron is hot, it is likely to make the more
deep impression, which when it grows cool, growes hard and unmalleable;41
In defence of his decision, Vincent suggests that only once people had
settled after the tremendously challenging 2 years would they be in a
position to seriously contemplate the meaning of the judgement that
had passed. Vincent states: ‘I hope, that the most have attained to some
kinde of settlement . . . and therefore this Book may be more seasonable
unto the most, than if it had been written, and presented to them
immediately after the Fire had burnt them out of their habitations’.42
This retrospective approach, however, complicates a reading of
Revelation in Vincent’s work. Plague aroused apocalyptic sentiment.
Once the threat subsided and the fire that followed in 1666 was extin-
guished, ministers faced the task of taking their explanations of plague
one step further and contextualizing the event as a point in history.
Vincent manages this task by framing plague and fire as warnings of how
terrible the Lord’s voice can be and to motivate Londoners to anticipate
a further judgement:
Friends, It is high time for all of you to retire your selves, and bethink your
selves, and wisely to consider Gods dealings with you, to open your ear, and
labour to understand these speaking Judgments, least if God be provoked,
by your deafness, and incorrigibleness, to speak a third time, it be in your
utter ruin and desolation.43
Vincent understands these afflictions as judgement, but he assures his

reader that were God to strike a third time no one would escape as easily
as they had thus far.
Vincent addresses another conundrum in God’s Terrible Voice in the
City: the reason why God focused his wrath on London. In addition to his
extensive list of London’s sins, Vincent also explains why London courts
Biblical arrows:
these Judgments of Plague and Fire are both of them National judgements.
The judgment of the Plague was National; in as much as London was the
chief City, in as much as the Kings Court was here, and most Countries had
relations here; and all Countries had concernments here . . .
The Judgment of the Fire which burned down only the City, and left
Westminster and the Suburbs standing, and did not reach into the Countreys,
yet was a National judgment, because London was the Metropolis of the Land,
because the Beauty, Riches, Strength, and Glory of the whole Kingdom lay in
London: and it was not the inhabitants of the City who alone did suffer by this
fire, but the whole Land44
While Vincent’s nationalistic sentiment, however negative, may be driven

by the text being destined for the English book marketplace and as one
composed by a London minister who remained in the city during the
plague and fire, his Puritan beliefs also inform how he positions London.
In the tradition of his faith, Vincent applies religious concepts, events
and ideals literally to his own sphere of experience; in this case, arguing
that London rests at the centre of the Lord’s attention, as demonstrated
through the plague and fire, which makes the city’s sins are that much
more meaningful. Vincent further states that ‘the most fearful Instances
of Gods Terrible Voice by Fire are yet to come: Thus God will speak by
Fire unto Spiritual Babylon, which may easily be proved to be Rome’,
drawing upon contemporary Puritan beliefs about Catholicism.45 For
Vincent, more than London existing at the centre of the nation’s experi-
ence of spirituality, the city sits as the Lord’s focus within the greater
world.
Vincent frequently warns against the lure of what Crawford Gribben
describes as ‘temporary faith’, when many turned to religion for solace
during the plague and fire, even those who previously ignored their faith
and who would again disregard religious doctrine once the threats sub-
sided.46 Times of chaos and disaster were fraught with this temporary
faith. Vincent’s entire treatise may reasonably be viewed as an instructional
text on avoiding the next arrow that could strike the city. Vincent
describes how recollection of the horrible events is essential to avoiding
the temptation of temporary faith:
The Plague so great, so lately, should not be forgotten; yet lest the fire more
lately, and propotionably more great, and the amazing fears, which since
have risen within us, should shuffle former thoughts out of our minds, and
rase out the impressions, which by the Plague we had, and should labour to
retain to our dying hour: therefore I shall give a brief narration of this sad
judgment, and some observations of mine own (who was here in the City
from the beginning to the end of it) both to keep alive in my self and others,
the memory of the judgment, that we may be the better prepared for
compliance with Gods designe in sending the Plague amongst us.47
A lack of faith had brought these terrible afflictions upon the city and any
lapse could potentially mean one would be unprepared for the final act and
judgement. Vincent’s use of print, which guarantees both posterity and
the far-reaching dissemination of his treatise, is complicit in his strategy to
save Londoners from the future apocalypse. His ‘narration’ ensures more
Londoners can avoid the vice of temporary faith by keeping alive ‘the
memory of the judgment’.
Though Vincent spends the greater portion of his text narrating a list of
London’s and its citizens’ evils, his text ends on a hopeful sentiment. As
Vincent argues, these judgement were righteous and they gave the city
and its citizens the opportunity to prepare fully, to prepare spiritually, for
the final judgement. The centrality of London to his construction of
religion and its focus within his apocalyptic vision comes through vividly
at the conclusion of the text, where Vincent writes:
And if you yield such Fruits as these, which God expects after his plowing
and harrowing of you; if you open your Ear to the Terrible Voice of the
Lord which hath uttered it self in the City, and with full purpose of heart set
about the practice of the duties he expects and calls for; then you may hope
that he will yet build you up and plant you, that he will close your breaches,
and raise up your ruinous Habitations . . . then the Lord will rejoyce over you
to do you good; and make London like Mount Zion, where he will pitch his
Tent, and take up his Habitation; then he will compass you about with the
Bulwark of Salvation, and prevent those further utterly Desolating
Judgements which you are in danger of; yea the Lord will be as a wall of
fire round about you, and the Glory in the midst of London, from whence his
Praise and your Fame shall sound throughout the whole World.48
Vincent’s conclusion suggests that London’s sinful ways brought the late
judgement upon the city, but if his reader heeds the Lord’s word and
avoids the 25 sins Vincent lists he or she will be saved from the horror of
the final judgement.
Vincent’s fire-and-brimstone writing style and unique encounter with
pestilence and fire, committed to print in God’s Terrible Voice in the City,
have not gone unnoticed by historians and storytellers. The work gained
notoriety as one of the source texts that informed Defoe’s 1722 fictional
account of the plague, A Journal of the Plague Year.49 Through his first-
WILLIAM DYER, FROM HEARING TO READING THE REVELATION 109
person experience with plague and the afflicted via his work as a minister
and in visiting the sick, Vincent preserved rare first-hand knowledge of the
illness, recorded in God’s Terrible Voice in the City as a hybrid of history
and religious treatise. ‘It was in the year of our Lord 1665. that the Plague
began in our City of London’, writes Vincent, beginning a narration of the
events that draws on aspects of medicine, statistics and religion, while
describing his own encounter with the illness.50God’s Terrible Voice in
the City, though very much a religious work, in which ‘sinners begin to be
startled, and those who would have slept at quiet still in their nests, are
unwillingly awakened’, also describes the movement of people, personal
anecdotes from the trying time and the disintegration of trade in the
city.51 Though Vincent sets out to narrate a story of judgement, intro-
duced by the ejection of dissenters, he unwittingly captures one unique
story from 2 terrible years in London’s history.
WILLIAM DYER, FROM HEARING TO READING THE REVELATION

In his second sermon, ‘A Call to Sinners, or, Christ’s Voice to London’,
Dyer deviates from his narrative of sins and redemption in times of trial,
which comprise the bulk of Christs Voice to London, delving instead into
the horror of London struck by plague:
O you of this City! how is the wrath of the Lord kindled against you, that
such multitudes of thousands are fallen within thy borders by the noisom
Pestilence, God’s immediate Sword! O London! how are thy Streets thinned,
thy Widows encreased, and thy burying places filled, thy Inhabitants fled,
thy Trade decayed!52
Dyer’s description here is a harrowing one. Not unlike Vincent’s churchyard,

Dyer’s London is overwhelmed by death. Thousands have died by the plague
and survivors grieve in a city paralyzed by the invisible threat. The description
is not an unusual one, however. The image of the city in the throes of
epidemic as described in the quotation is common to many plague writings
about the outbreak, including Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City. Yet in
a selection of sermons that so rarely delve into the earthly impact of plague and
those challenges faced daily in London’s streets, this is one of the only places
where Dyer describes the day-to-day effect of the disease in his sermons. The
spare hand with which Dyer treats the temporal impact of plague points to an
essential difference between his writing and Vincent’s; Dyer does not
memorialize the history of London’s plague as Vincent does, but memoria-

lizes his own words as a re-emerged preacher spoken at that time. Dyer
situates the guidance he provided at the desperate time of the plague within
a text. His is not a history of the outbreak but a realization of the nonconfor-
mist’s will to be heard in the face of adversity and a reminder of the chance to
once again take up the pulpit when London was in the shadow of judgement.
Dyer compiles writings spoken during the outbreak—sermons delivered to
desperate Londoners present in the city during the visitation. The act of
printing his sermons flouts the Act of Uniformity and Clarendon Code, giving
a voice to Dyer as a nonconformist and allowing him to reach a congregation
of readers over a greater period of time. The impact of the book is consider-
able in contrast to a sermon delivered orally. Furthermore, it is testament to
Dyer’s preaching as a nonconformist; thus, these sermons in print were a
statement of activism.
Dyer’s three sermons lend their own interpretation of the plague to the
literary culture of the time and show how one nonconformist found an
opportunity to preach amidst the horror of the epidemic and then felt driven
to commit words delivered orally in a text. Dyer, who self-consciously exam-
ines his role as an author in the prefacing material to the three sermons,
resurrects the days of the plague through his sermons delivered at that time.
Throughout the work, he addresses the complexities of a sermon which,
though once heard, is now read. The sermons recall the role Dyer could not
freely practice during the years of persecution of nonconformists—that of the
preacher. Christs Voice to London and the Great Day of Gods Wrath comprises
three sermons, two epistles dedicatory and a final ‘Treatise on Death’, fittingly
situated at the conclusion of the work. Dyer makes the transition from an
oral text to a printed text in this collection of sermons, a transition that is
essential to reading him as a nonconformist minister who extends the
small opportunities to preach during the Restoration through the press.
Dyer also constructs himself as an author, editorializing on the transition
to print and asserting authority over the page through statements made
about his previous forays into print and through the inclusion of a
portrait. Finally, Dyer’s reading of the plague within the context of
Revelation and the ‘Treatise on Death’ demonstrate the minister’s
attempt to reconcile sentiments of abjection that accompanied the pro-
spect of death. The opportunities afforded Dyer to preach after the
ejections, according to historical recollection, were few in number.
These printed sermons are tangible reminders of a return to professional
activities that Dyer’s ejection prevented him from engaging in.
What is known of Dyer’s career path points to a past of preaching and a

public spiritual life prior to the ejections. Dyer held two posts as a clergy-
man in Buckinghamshire, first at Chesham as a preacher and later as curate
at Cholesbury in 1660.53 His career behind the pulpit was thwarted when
he was ejected, forcing him from that familiar role to one at the legal
margins of religious practice. According to churchwardens, he returned to
preach ‘the Sunday before last’ on 28 June 1663—a return to the pulpit,
however brief.54 Dyer would come to preach again in London in
Aldersgate, at St. Anne and St. Agnes.55 Dyer did not just write about
the plague in London, he experienced it through his preaching. In the
aftermath of the Act of Uniformity he turned to the printed word to
transmit his thoughts and notably his literary oeuvre is centred in the
time period after the ejections. These titles continued to influence readers
through print runs long past Dyer’s death in 1696. He published two
works in 1663, A Cabinet of Jewels and Christ’s Famous Titles, and in 1666
he added 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 to his published works. He is remembered as a ‘popular wri-
ter’.56 It was in this 1666 publication that Dyer engaged on the page with
pestilence and addressed through sermons the impact of the disease on the
spiritual well-being of his parishioners in London.
Dyer makes the importance he places on the act of preaching evident in his
writing. The manner in which Dyer establishes himself on the page provides
some of the greatest clues to the minister’s past. In The Nonconformist’s
Memorial: Being an Account of the Ministers, Who Were Ejected or Silenced
After the Restoration, Particularly by the Act of Uniformity, Which Took Place
on Bartholomew-day, Aug. 24, 1662 (1775),57 Edmund Calamy writes in the
entry on Dyer: ‘From his writings he appears to have been a man of great piety,
and a serious fervent preacher’.58 Calamy establishes Dyer as more than a
serious preacher, foregrounding the minister’s legacy as an author. The bio-
grapher notes that ‘In the title of one of his books, he stiles himself “late
preacher of the gospel at Chesham and Chouldsbury” ’.59 This is a valuable way
of looking at Dyer. He was a minister who crafted and ‘stiled’ a literary
persona. Through this persona, Dyer shaped his spiritual life after the fateful
events of 1662. The words he wrote not only conveyed the importance of his
sermons, but provided an illustration, ‘self-stiled’, of how Dyer saw himself.
He sought to identify with a greater audience when nonconformists, such as
himself, were impeded after the Restoration. Though the events of the
Restoration prevented Dyer from practicing his art as a preacher, they could
not stop the spread of his religious thought and sermons once these were
committed to the page.
Where Calamy describes ‘silenced ministers’, those ‘forbidden to preach
in public’ and ‘carefully watched in private’, Dyer circumnavigates these
prohibitions via the written word.60 His act of speaking out on the page was
common amongst dissenting ministers.61 Nonconformists were, relative to
their numbers, keen authors. Keeble explains: ‘if nonconformists were more
likely to read than the general populace, they were also more likely to
write’.62 Keeble describes a nonconformist population that, in addition to
being literate, contained eager authors, and of this group of writers a ‘great
majority of the authors were ministers’.63 Dyer increases the audience for
his teachings in this text, taking the opportunity to preach during the
outbreak and giving his teachings a second life on the page. This tactic
was not without its shortfalls. Before entering Dyer’s sermons and reflec-
tions on death, the author leads his reader through the challenges he
encountered in going into print, addressing both the circumstances sur-
rounding his choice to print and how he grapples with the medium.
Dyer wastes no time in establishing his first reading audience by includ-
ing an epistle dedicated to the congregation he preached to during the
outbreak. A precedent existed for nonconformists writing in this vein,
where the work ‘derived from manuscripts and sermons originally pre-
pared by their authors for the people in their ministerial care’.64 These
types of works, though reaching many in print, ‘were often published as a
token of continuing pastoral concern for the particular congregation from
which the author was now separated’.65 This sentiment rings true to
Dyer’s text, especially in that these sermons were delivered at a time of
exceptional stress for the congregation and that Dyer understood his work
as a minister as being essential to his congregation’s spiritual well-being.
In his letter ‘To the Inhabitants of the Parish of St. Ann Aldergate in the
City of London’, the first epistle dedicatory, he starts the collection poign-
antly, returning to the time of suffering and to an early audience that
received these sermons.66 To these parishioners he offers advice on read-
ing the text and establishes the challenges faced when preparing a sermon
for the print realm. In the letter that follows the title page, he describes his
congregation’s desire for these sermons, stating:
Forasmuch as I was desired by some of you, to come & preach publickly

amongst you, without any opposition or imposition; to which I condes-
cended, hoping thereby to bring glory to God, and good to your souls,
without having the leastthought of publishing to the World, what I then

preached to you.67
Though Dyer unites the spoken and written sermons in Christs Voice to
London, in the above passage he sets himself up as an accidental author.
Dyer describes himself as a preacher in an active and public role first. He
appeals to his first reading audience, the parish of St. Ann Aldergate, to
encounter his writing with this caveat in mind. He had not the ‘leastthought
of publishing’ these works. He also makes reference to the troubles facing
nonconformists, stating his desire to preach without ‘opposition or imposi-
tion’. The reader can make no mistake—Dyer values, above all else, the
opportunity to ‘preach publickly’. While it would be unfair to say plague
was an opportunity for Dyer—on the page his thoughts are with his
audience and their spiritual well-being—it is quite correct to say that Dyer
relished the opportunity to speak ‘publickly’ during the outbreak.
Dyer soon reconciles the gap between a sermon spoken and one printed,
revealing that he holds the writing process and transmitting information
through writing in high esteem, a second life for these sermons. He
addresses his congregation as ‘Beloved’ and aligns the act of preaching
sermons with that of printing sermons:
And because these two Sermons were preached publikely amongst you, I
thought it my duty also to dedicate them unto you, that what your ears let
slip in the hearing of them, your eyes may regain by the reading of them.68
Dyer articulates a transition from hearing to seeing—‘what your ears let

slip . . . your eyes may regain’. He captures a fleeting spoken moment and
inscribes it through print, acknowledging that in print his words can
benefit both those who have already heard these sermons and those who
were not present. The Puritan emphasis on the importance of reading and
its connection to godliness is emphasized in Dyer’s sentiment.69 By print-
ing his sermons, his congregation will have an opportunity to study his
words, extending his teaching. In this first epistle, the spoken word
remains supreme, the printed one an afterthought: ‘I hope none that
heard me (or shall read me) will think I spake too much, or too
home’.70 Words given in a sermon, hanging over the crowd, suddenly
committed to the page, unchanging, carry a different charge, an altered
cadence. This insistence on appealing to a reading and listening audience
is present beyond the epistles, and editorial care was taken in Dyer’s
collection to make the appropriate changes for a new reading audience

even in the sermons, an oral form, and not just in the added prefacing
material of two epistles. In the first sermon, Dyer admonishes his audi-
ence as follows:
O thou that hearest or readest this, how canst thou but tremble to think
that thy heart should be thus barr’d, and bolted against Jesus Christ with
Ignorance, with Unbelief, Self-Conceitedness, Earthly-mindedness,
Prejudice and hardness of heart.71
As an author, Dyer prepares an oral text for print. Small inclusions indicate
the editorial process these sermons likely went through in preparation for
the press and reveal Dyer’s thought process when modifying his words for
a reading audience. The sermon’s oral legacy is now paralleled by its
textual legacy, ‘thou that hearest or readest’.
Though Dyer was an accomplished and previously published author,
in writing he expresses anxiety when introducing his sermons in print.
Time could now stand still for sermons that were initially presented with
the appropriate theatrical register from behind the pulpit, delivered to a
crowd desperate for answers during a time of turmoil. To pin those
words down makes Dyer, who was by all accounts an assertive preacher,
an anxious author. The presentation of the sermons in print could be
lacking—‘Dear Friends’, Dyer writes, ‘I hope these Sermons will not be
the less accepted by you, because they come in a plain dress: I confess
there is more of heart in them, than Art’.72 He hopes this can be
forgiven, as ‘the less man appeareth in them, the more God will appear
by them’.73 Continuity from their oral past presented another challenge
—‘Beloved’, Dyer begins, ‘That I have printed these Sermons something
larger than I preached them, by adding some small Editions to them, I
acknowledge; and that which I now desire of you, is, That what you read
in these Lines, you would practise in your Lives’.74 The tone is modest,
anxious, even apologetic. The first epistle, however, plays an important
role in establishing Dyer as a preacher, referencing his commitment to
his parishioners and making the segue from an oral sermon to one
delivered on the page.
Given that Dyer professes to be an accidental author in this first epistle, the
assertive portrait of the author that appears at the beginning of the work could
be perplexing. In a way the portrait (Fig. 4.1) acts as a stamp by the author
prefacing the written material contained in Christs Voice to London. A closer
Fig. 4.1 Frontispiece and title page, William Dyer, Christs Voice to London
(1666). Credit: Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
look at the image and accompanying text, however, allows an alternate read-
ing. Looking heavenward and to the right, toward the title of the work, Dyer,
in the portrait, appears in a dark cloak with white collar. His right hand rests
across his chest, while the left lightly grasps what appears to be a book,
presumably a Bible. Beneath the portrait, in capitals, appears Dyer’s full
name and below this the words ‘Preacher of the Gospell’ with an accompany-
ing date. As will become apparent in the second epistle, Dyer is no stranger to
the role of author, but I would suggest that rather than acting as the hallmark
of an author, this portrait with the accompanying description, ‘Preacher of the
Gospell’, while a commonplace descriptor for puritan writers, merge to fore-
ground Dyer’s preaching. If we take this portrait and description to represent
how Dyer saw himself, then this and the message of the first epistle promote
him as a preacher first.
In his second dedication, ‘The Epistle to the Reader’, Dyer firmly
establishes Christs Voice to London as a commodity in the early modern
print marketplace and himself as someone who has experience navigat-
ing that marketplace.75 More specifically, he establishes himself as
someone who has experienced the treacheries of print. Dyer moves
from the concerns of his first epistle, aimed at his congregants, to a
sphere endowed in the signifiers of print in the second epistle, ‘The
Epistle to the Reader’, addressing a reading audience and not a listen-
ing audience. The distinction is made immediately, and with
‘Courteous Reader’ he begins the letter. The second epistle firmly
moves the text to the print sphere. He prepares his reader to accom-
modate his works on the page and makes his reader aware of the
challenges that printing carries. From the outset of his second epistle,
Dyer establishes his distrust of print, though in the same epistle he also
describes the importance of the spread of beliefs that can only be
fostered through print. His concerns fall in the realm of literary own-
ership and of literary piracy, as he outlines a two-fold attack he has
previously faced in the print marketplace:
I have had little encouragement from the World, to appear any more in this
nature, who have had so many Books taken and kept from me, without any just
Cause, though there was nothing in them, but what was profitable matter for the
Church of God; yet for all this, they are kept from me still. But kind Reader, this is
not all which I have suffered; for, as soon as my Books came forth, several. Men
made a prize of them, by Printing them over divers times without my knowledge,
with many gross mistakes and abuses, which was not a little trouble to me, to see
how the Author and the Buyer were both abused.76
After his initial complaint, Dyer offers his reader a location from which to
obtain his books, ‘thou mayest have them at the Black-spread Eagle, at the
West end of Pauls, truly Printed’.77 The statement attempts to resolve the
previous conflict he has suffered over the process of publishing his work by
guiding the audience and instructing his reader as to where he or she may
seek out his works in their honest form. He locates a geographical space of
textual legitimacy where the ‘truly Printed’ books reside. It is in this
second epistle that Dyer falls comfortably into his role as the author, no
longer the apologetic or accidental writer. Despite the challenges he has
faced in print, his ‘former Treatises were received and embraced by the Lords
People in all parts of this Kingdom, as appears by the many thousands of them
which hath been Printed and sold’.78 Dyer has faced the challenge and
emerged relatively unscathed—the same may not be said of his career as a
preacher during those dark days for nonconformists. In these two dedica-
tory letters, a preface to his text, Dyer establishes the shift from a con-
gregation to a reading audience. Dyer manipulates the reading process by
foregrounding first experience in life and secondly experience on the page.
However, as the body of his sermons show, print was of little importance
in the face of the epidemic and in its aftermath if Londoners did not
change their sinful ways.
By the time Dyer’s sermons were printed, a climax had passed and only
the printed relics of the previous fervour that fuelled the tracts remained.
Whatever horrible end had been anticipated by plague’s hand, it had not
happened by 1666 when the tract was published. While Vincent’s tone is
often retrospective in God’s Terrible Voice in the City, Dyer’s own text draws
his reader back to the moment of crisis through sermons delivered during the
epidemic—the threat described is imminent. His middle sermon, though
largely focused on apocalyptic sentiment, is not amended to reflect the
realities of what had or had not occurred by the time Dyer published in
the aftermath of the epidemic. If the Restoration resulted in a necessary
reappraisal of nonconformist goals, the end of plague had a similar effect on
Dyer. Where he had found a chance to preach during the outbreak, a role
both he and Vincent viewed as valuable to their congregations, the end of
plague meant finding new ways to reach out to and guide an audience.
Dyer’s work is firmly entrenched in an apocalyptic vocabulary and space,
the climax of which is expressed in the second sermon, ‘The Great Day of
His WRATH’.79 The second sermon and the final ‘CONSIDERATIONS of
Death: Containing some few Reasons why men fear it; and opposite Reasons
by way of Answer, why they should not fear it’80 may be read as expressions
of apocalyptic thought. Dyer’s references in Christs Voice to London to
Revelation and to Antichrist place the Great Plague of London in a religious
frame of reference. In the final section on ‘Considerations of Death’, the text
moves through the process of mourning the end of the earth-bound body,
bringing the potential of death from plague to the forefront. Decaying
corpses and locating the response of human senses to death force to reader
to encounter death and specifically the plague cadaver. ‘The power of horror’
in this final ‘Considerations of Death’, to borrow a phrase from Kristeva,
shows how Dyer details plague in a religious context by encountering the
physicality of death in all its brutality and emphasizing the importance of
spiritual elevation beyond the body. Though no dates accompany the three
sermons, they are arranged in such a way that the second sermon stands as a
climax at the centre of this apocalyptic storm that Dyer expresses in Christs
Voice to London. Dyer saw in the visitation a time when the city had angered
the Lord to the point that the epidemic was a judgement for the city’s
wrongdoings and the end was near.
In Christs Voice to London, Dyer attempts to show sinners the folly of
their actions. He establishes the sins that brought on the judgement and
the broad identities of the sinners involved. Such delineations provide
structure to who will and will not survive the day of God’s wrath. Dyer
apostrophizes London in his first sermon. ‘O London!’, he writes, ‘how are
thy Streets thinned, thy Widows encreased, and thy burying places filled,
thy Inhabitants fled, thy Trade decayed’.81 In many of the plague tracts
from the time, London is illustrated as a vibrant character, central to the
story of the visitation. Dyer constructs a city that, like its citizens, has
become a sinner herself:
O London, London! God speaks to thee by his Judgments, and because thou
wouldst not hear the Voice of his Word... O Great City! how hath the
Plague broke in upon thee, because of thy thy [sic] abominations?82
The preacher establishes the all-encompassing nature of the corruption

and sinfulness that has gripped the city, so much so that London
becomes implicated as a suitable recipient of judgments like plague. He
incriminates the city as a sinner and then moves to its population of
sinners and asks: ‘O therefore lay to heart, you that are yet alive, all these
things, and turn from your wicked wayes, that the cry of your prayers
may outcry the cry of your sins.’83 Descriptions of the sins that have
brought on the judgement are located throughout Christs Voice to
London, serving a similar function to the lists and didactic tone of
Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice to the City. In the second sermon, Dyer
uses such a list to describe ‘who they are that will not be able to stand in
the day of Gods wrath’, which reads as follows:
1. The Prophane.
2. The Ignorant.
3. They that side with Antichrist against Christ.
4. The formal professor.
5. The Idle Shepherds and blind Guides.
6. The Hypocrites.
7. And lastly, They that love not the Lord Jesus.84
This list is balanced by another of ‘All those who shall be found having on
their wedding garments, and in the Spirit of the Lamb will be able to stand
in this day’.85 These lists appear throughout the tract. Dyer methodically
establishes the sinners he claims have brought plague on London. These,
he explains, are those who will not survive the day of judgement.
That Dyer sees the plague as leading up to judgement day is evident in
the second sermon, entitled ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’. He prefaces
his first two sermons with epigraphs from Revelation, the Apocalypse of
John, in the first instance with Rev. 3.20 and in the second sermon with
Rev. 6.17, from which he derives the title of the sermon: ‘For the great
day of his Wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand!’86 In this second
sermon, Dyer places the plague outbreak directly in the context of the
Revelation. In addition to providing an epigraph as a source for the
second sermon’s title, Dyer goes further in the body of the sermon to
explain the meaning of ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’. Designating a
number of ‘great Days’, Dyer shows that ‘there are some days greater
then others’.87 His language describes the looming threat, quoting, in
part, from Isaiah 5:20:
O my Brethren, this will be a very dreadfull and terrible day to the wicked
who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for
darkness; and put far from them the evil day, which is now hastening upon
them.88
His tone shifts later in the sermon and takes on an urgent register:
now Gods day is come, and this is the day of his wrath, and wo to the Earth,
and wo to the Sea, and wo to the whore of Babylon; for the hour of her
Judgment is come. O Beloved, Gods wrath will be very terrible to the
wicked.89
Dyer perceives real danger in the message brought by the current plague
devastating London. His message that sinners will soon face judgement
dominates the second sermon. The answer to the impending ‘Great Day
of His Wrath’ is to turn to the Lord. Dyer does not address the natural
causes of plague. He establishes the importance of spiritual purity in the
time of the epidemic. Dyer explains his intent to locate the current plague
in the Book at the outset of the second sermon, writing:
How this book of the Revelations shews us these three things.

1. The State and Condition of the true Church of Christ upon earth;
under the power and reign of Antichrist.
2. The rise, the reign, and rage of Antichrist in the World.
3. The quiet, blessed, and glorious state and condition of the true
Church here below; after the ruine and downfall of Antichrist, the
coming of Christ will be the ruine of Antichrist,90
Antichrist is an important figure in Christs Voice to London, mentioned a

number of times in the second sermon. In Antichrist in Seventeenth-
Century England (1971; rev edn 1990), Christopher Hill discusses the
changing features of Antichrist in England throughout the seventeenth
century, noting a drop in references to Antichrist following the
Restoration due to the resumption of a state church and censorship, and
the absence of connections between Antichrist and monarchy.91 He
further notes that ‘Antichrist’s name was less and less frequently men-
tioned, in print at all events’.92 While Hill describes a drop in references to
Antichrist after 1660, he describes the tendency for the re-emergence of
the term in times of stress, writing: ‘The prominence of Antichrist and the
end of the world are normally associated with social and political crisis’.93
Dyer’s location of Antichrist is vague throughout the sermon, though he
does write: ‘All that cursed brood of Rome, with all the Antichristian crew,
will not be able to stand in this great day of Gods wrath’.94 While his
location of Antichrist is vague, he describes an insidious threat that will be
levelled in the coming days:
all those who have assisted Antichrist against Christ

Against his Government,
Against his Gospel,
Against his Spirit,
Against his Worship,
Against his Ministers,
Against his Members,
And against his Glorious Cause;95
Dyer’s use of the Book of Revelation provides structure for the second
sermon. His language suggests he sees the ‘day of Gods wrath’ as a soon-
anticipated event. The pressure of plague proves sufficient crisis to inspire
concerns about the end of days and the emergence of Antichrist.
Having delineated a timely spiritual response to epidemic in the ephem-
eral form of three sermons, elucidating the apocalyptic nature of the
plague in print for a reading audience, Dyer turns to death at the conclu-
sion of Christs Voice to London. In the first section of ‘Considerations of
Death’, which details ‘some few Reasons why men fear it; and opposite
Reasons by way of Answer, why they should not fear it’, Dyer confronts
the horror of death, question by question, response by response.96 In a
greater text that rarely approaches the epidemic in an earth-bound way—
descriptions of the outbreak as it impacts citizens day to day are few—
these considerations of death represent an about turn, addressing the
physical impact of the plague at hand. As Dyer explains, the most horrific
aspect of the epidemic by far is the increasingly felt possibility of death,
especially for those who have not adequately accepted spiritual guidance.
In the questions or objects Dyer responds to, he attacks the subject of the
infected body that has succumbed to death in an imposing and often
uncomfortable manner. The writing here is increasingly tactile, as Dyer
examines the body in transition from life to death. The tone is in opposi-
tion to the spiritual focus of the earlier sermons. And with this increasing
interest in the temporal, we see Dyer interpret the liminal space occupied
by the plague corpse. Dyer breaks down the boundary between life and
death, forcing his reader to encounter death at its most horrific and
attempting to cleanse his reader of the inevitable response of abjection
that accompanies these encounters.
Dyer singles out the physicality of death in this section. He responds to
twelve questions regarding death, providing corresponding answers in a
spiritual vein. The tone and nature of the writing here is dissimilar to the
other portions of the work, as may be gleaned from the first question and
answer. ‘Tast, Smell, Hearing, Sight, or Feeling’—the sensorial concerns
of Dyer’s first question address the physicality of death:
Obj I. First, Because thereby we are deprived of the exercise of all our
sences; so that whatever Delight either our Tast, Smell, Hearing, Sight, or
Feeling hath afforded us, we shall enjoy the same no more; whilest (perhaps)
many Generations after us shall have the fruition thereof.97
The minister does not pause in pointing out the folly of focusing on the
positive value of these senses, and though he does not say explicitly that he
is referring to the senses assaulted in times of plague, his answer invokes
some of the horrors of an outbreak:
Ans. First, As the exercise of our Sences afford opportunity of Delight, so are
they thereby capable of annoying and grieving us; as, the Tast, by bitterness
and sharpness, &c. the Smell, by noisom pollution, corruption, &c. The
Hearing, by terrible and hideous noise, and evil tidings. The Sight, By
loathsome affrighting, and miserable appearances. The Feeling, by tedious
pains, &c.98
The symptoms of plague fall into this litany of horrors, from the ‘hideous
noise’ of a sufferer in the throes of the disease heard to ‘loathsome
affrighting, and miserable appearances’ seen on streets strewn with
reminders of the illness. Dyer’s tone is one of confrontation. He con-
fronts his reader with the horror of the physical world. He forces his
reader to confront the obstacles established by plague. Moving from
sermons laden with scriptural defences and evidence, Dyer reflects on
the realities of life during an epidemic in the city for his material in
‘Considerations of Death’. Death was everywhere. The overriding mes-
sage the minister sends is that parishioners must overcome their aversion to
death, to the physical manifestation of the corpse, in order to move beyond
temporal preoccupations. Dyer asks his reader to not only accommodate the
idea of death, but to also remove the fear that accompanies the abjection
associated with the corpse, the sick and oozing body, the signifiers ever-
present during the outbreak. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva explains that
the abject is ‘What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-
between, the ambiguous, the composite’.99 The minister is the great nego-
tiator of the transition between life and death for his parishioners. In this
role, he must coax his reader to first confront the natural feeling of abjection
associated with death and dying, so the reader can go forth in the horror of
plague times and enter into death with dignity and grace. These questions
assist in this process. The focus on the horror of death, though in contrast to
the tone of the surrounding writing that focuses on spiritual salvation, is
essential in this confrontation, thus justified in the context of this final
section on death.
Perhaps the most engaging aspect of his ‘Considerations of Death’ is that
Dyer claims to provide a glimpse into the concerns that faced citizens during
plague times. In his discussion of death, he provides examples and ‘some few
Reasons why men fear it’. More than questions generated by the author’s
own interests and concerns, which the surrounding text would suggest are
primarily spiritual in nature, these questions, Dyer suggests, are generated by
his implied reader. Take, for example:
In death a man becomes a lothsome spectacle to all beholders, insomuch

that the sight and smell of the survivers find not more noysome offence
from, and account not more vilely of the most lothsome creatures in the
world, then of a dead and rotten Corps of Mankind; and is not that very
grievious, to become from a delightfull Companion an abhorrence of all
people?100
The fear represented in the question is that of the unenlightened parishi-

oner—the body, here, broken by death. Salvation for the soul is similar to
the act of printing his sermons and saving them from oblivion, as both
speak to the ephemeral being captured. The vehicle Dyer uses for his
encounter with death is paper and print. He inscribes the horror onto
the page, allowing his audience to read and re-read, to share with one
another. The act is one of longevity even if the topic in this section is
horror over the fleeting life of the body. Dyer reminds his reader of the
relief indicated by the loathsome corpse: ‘So that although the thoughts of
such a condition by Death, grieves us whil’st living, yet in that condition it
self, we shall be free from such grief.’101
Dyer’s collected sermons are testament to the preacher’s drive to share
religious insight in the face of oppression. He provides insight into an
apocalypse he sees London descending into and guidance for those pre-
paring for death. His concerns, ranging from the spiritual to the temporal,
are collected to support his parishioners who faced the trauma of epi-
demic. Though the minister faced controversy over the illicit printing
of his work in the past, given the circumstances facing nonconformists
print remains the best way to reach a congregation beyond the few he
could preach to after the Act of Uniformity came into practice. A portrait
prefaces the work, depicting Dyer gazing heavenward, holding a book in
his hand. The reader of the image may at first interpret that book as a
Bible, and the words beneath unequivocally point to Dyer’s role as a
preacher. However, it would not be a far reach to see that same book
grasped in the preacher’s hand as possibly one of his own work—as make
no mistake, Dyer is not just a preacher—he is an author too.
CONCLUSION
Against a backdrop of horror, Vincent and Dyer found a voice for their beliefs
during the plague. That voice was heard at first and then read. From the
horrific event of plague came the need for preachers to offer guidance to
citizens, a service Dyer and Vincent provided. These written accounts not
only memorialize the plague—like so much of the writing surrounding the
epidemic—but further allow each preacher’s chosen livelihood to continue to
live on the page when the strictures placed on the day-to-day lives of non-
conformists typically hampered attempts to carry out such services outside
the context of large-scale upheaval such as that caused by the epidemic. Many
of the similarities linking the two works, however, are not driven by the
situation but by a unique literary culture that is evident in the writings that
emerge from nonconformists. A focus on apocalyptic sentiment, a tendency
to see themselves in the thick of biblical maelstrom, a great literariness and a
desire to print in order to have a voice in the face of adversity—these
tendencies demonstrated by Dyer and Vincent are driven, in part, by the
ties that connect many of the writings produced by nonconformists.
However, from their crisis, writing as nonconformists, emerged innovative
contributions to the literary culture of the outbreak. These texts form part of
the micro-history detailed in this chapter, describing the response of non-
conformist ministers to the event of the outbreak. In these accounts of
plague, what happens in the streets is often trumped by the greater goal of
focusing on a future day of judgement. Plague was, as Vincent assures his
reader, introduced by those actions against the nonconformists.
NOTES
3. N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-
Century England (Leicester University Press, 1987), p. 30. (Keeble 1987)
4. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century
England, p. 31. (Keeble 1987)
England, p. 20 (Keeble 1987). For further details on nonconformists’ writings,
see Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003). (Achinstein 2003)
NOTES 125
7. An additional ‘150 dons and schoolmasters were ejected as dissenters’,

Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714 (London:
Abacus, 1978), p. 211 (Hill 1978); Keeble, however, notes: ‘Baxter
reckoned that “When Bartholomew-day came, about One thousand
eight hundred, or Two thousand Ministers were Silenced and Cast
out”, and his estimate is the one confirmed by subsequent research’.
Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-
Century England, p. 31. (Keeble 1987)
8. Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England,
1580–1720, p. 7. (Cambers 2011)
10. Wallace notes: ‘the main consequences of these events for Puritan spiritual-
ity emerged: concentration on the spiritual life within the small fellowship
and on the individual soul. This was a withdrawal from the more expansive
and world-conquering zeal of an earlier day. Dissenters found themselves
free within their conventicles to shape things as they wished . . . …Thus there
ensued a period of great productivity in the creation of a literature of the
spiritual life’, Dewey D. Wallace, The Spirituality of the Later English
Puritans: An Anthology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987),
pp. xiii–iv. (Wallace 1987)
11. Wallace, The Spirituality of the Later English Puritans: An Anthology, p. 141.
(Wallace 1987)
12. As Slack explains: ‘Twenty-one out of thirty-six publications on plague
between 1625 and 1627 were sermons or devotional tracts, and twelve
out of twenty-two in 1636 and 1637’, Slack, The Impact of Plague in
Tudor and Stuart England, p. 244, 399. (Slack 1985)
13. Slack explains that these texts ‘formed a smaller proportion of total publications’
in 1665, given that ‘at least forty-six publications concerned with plague
appeared in 1665 and 1666’, Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart
England, p. 244, 246. (Slack 1985)
15. Porter, The Great Plague, p. 44. (Porter 2009)
16. ‘By order of the privy council only one type of public gathering was per-
mitted, even encouraged: special plague services at the cathedral, abbey, and
parish churches . . . …Though many rectors had fled to the country, their
assistants or temporary replacements courageously filled many of the gaps.
No one seemed to mind that popular dissenting preachers ejected at the
Restoration were flipping back into their pulpits and exhorting their old
congregations to repent their sins and wait on the Lord’s mercy’, Moote,
The Great Plague, p. 117. (Moote 2004)
17. Bell, The Great Plague of London in 1665, p. 70. (Bell 1994)
18. Symon Patrick, The Works of Symon Patrick, D.D. Sometime Bishop of Ely.
Including his Autobiography, ed. by Alexander Taylor, vol. IX (Oxford: At
the University Press, 1858), p. 444. (Patrick 1858)
19. Apocalyptic sentiment, however, was not relegated only to nonconformist
writers responding to the outbreak in 1665. Henry Plomer has noted, in
both sermons and religious treatises from outbreaks including and prior to
that in 1665, that ‘The Divine Wrath theory was the keynote of them all’, in
Plomer, ‘Literature of the Plague’, p. 216. (Plomer 1981)
21. Elizabeth M. Knowles (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 133.
22. Beth Lynch, ‘Vincent, Thomas (1634–1678)‘, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford University Press: 2004; online edn, 2008)
<oxforddnb.com> [accessed 22 Oct 2012]. (Lynch 2008)
23. Lynch, ‘Vincent, Thomas (1634–1678)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. (Lynch 2008)
27. Warren Johnston notes: ‘Despite criticizing presumptuous conjecture over
the apocalyptic significance of the year 1666 and proposing this as a reason
that London had fallen then instead of papal Babylon, in another work from
1667 Vincent proclaimed that Christ’s second appearance on earth would
“most certainly and very quickly be revealed from Heaven in flaming Fire” ’.
Warren Johnston, Revelation Restored: The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-
Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 100–
101. (Johnston 2011)
28. Bell, The Great Plague of London, p. 228. (Bell 1994)
30. Egerton Brydges portrays Vincent as follows: ‘Thomas Vincent, the author, was
a Minister of the Gospel, whose enthusiasm, or fanaticism, was so great, that he
remained in London during the time of the plague in 1665, and was an eye-
witness of the fire in the following year. He reasons on both these events
puritanically’. Egerton Brydges, Restituta: or, Titles, Extracts, and Characters
of Old Books in English Literature, Revived (London: 1815), pp. 89–90.
(Brydges 1815)
31. Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, p. 277.
(Wear 2000)
32. Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, p. 277.
(Wear 2000)
NOTES 127
33. Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 10–11. (Vincent 1667)
35. Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, title page. (Vincent 1667)
37. Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature & Theology,
1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 114. (Gribben 2000)
40. The addition of the sermon may be found in the sixth edition, positioned as
a paratext to the body of God’s Terrible Voice in the City, following that
text’s concluding page on 197, which finishes with a definitive ‘FINIS. Soli
Deo Gloria’. A second title page for the sermon appears at this point,
complete with the sermon’s title, author’s name and printer, George
Calvert. Here, the gender of the deceased is given as Mr., suggesting an
error on either the book’s or the sermon’s title page; Thomas Vincent, ‘A
Sermon Preached at the Funeral of Mr. Abraham Janeway’, God’s Terrible
Voice in the City, 6th edn (London: 1668), p. 199; This sermon also appears
in a number of other editions of the text.
41. Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. A2. (Vincent 1667)
44. Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 72-73. (Vincent 1667)
46. Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature & Theology, 1550–1682,
p. 116. (Gribben 2000)
49. Bastian, ‘Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered’, p. 162. (Bastian
1965)
52. Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 34. (Dyer 1666)
53. Caroline L. Leachman, ‘Dyer, William (1632–1696)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford University Press: 2004; online edn, 2008)
<oxforddnb.com> [accessed 22 Oct 2012]. (Leachman 2008)
54. Leachman, ‘Dyer, William (1632/3–1696)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography.
Biography; Bell writes: ‘Richard Edwards, rector of St. Anne and St. Agnes,
held also the living of Chislehurst, and was broad-minded enough not to refuse
the help in London of William Dyer, the Nonconformist and Quaker sympathi-
zer’. Bell, The Great Plague of London in 1665, p. 226. (Bell 1994)

Biography. (Leachman 2008)
57. Edmund Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial: Being an Account of the
Ministers, Who Were Ejected or Silenced After the Restoration, Particularly by
the Act of Uniformity, Which Took Place on Bartholomew-day, Aug. 24, 1662,
ed. by Samuel Palmer (London: 1775). (Calamy 1775)
58. Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, p. 235. (Calamy 1975)
59. Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, p. 235. (Calamy 1975)
60. Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, p.54. (Calamy 1975)
61. Achinstein writes: ‘The impact of this culture of publishing and disseminat-
ing their material was greater than their particular cause; indeed, Dissenters
contributed to a fundamental change in political culture in early modern
England. By their repeated appearances in print, Dissenters would simply
not go away; and by their commitments to publicity, openness, and gen-
erative dispute, they wrote for the many, barely literate included, expanding
the culture of political knowledge at a time when there was a general
expansion in the public sphere’, Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, p. 19.
(Achinstein 2003)
66. Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. A3. (Dyer 1668)
67. Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)
68. Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p., A4. (Dyer 1668)
69. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, p. 3; Cambers, Godly Reading: Print,
Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720, p. 7. (Cambers 2011)
71. Dyer, Christs Voice to London, pp. 32–33. (Dyer 1668)
NOTES 129

91. Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England, revised paper-
back edn. (London: Verso, 1990), p. 146. (Hill 1990)
92. Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 148. (Hill 1990)
93. Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 155. (Hill 1990)
96. Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p.127. (Dyer 1666)
99. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. (Kristeva 1982)
CHAPTER 5
Katherine Austen’s Reckoning with Plague

in Book M
Following the death of King James, Anna Ley composed a poem on the
plague outbreak of 1625. The verse, collected with her and her husband’s
writing in the ‘William Andrews Clark Memorial Library MS L6815 M3
C734’,1 weaves a complex tale of causality between the chaos brought on
by pestilence and the death of a king. Describing the grim state of the
plague epidemic and the national hardship of a lost monarch, Ley writes:
Afflicted England how thine ills increase,

and seemes to threaten thine aproching fall,
And to bereave thee of that happie peace
for which all nations doe thee blessed call.
The dreadfull pestilence doth now begin

To shed its vennoum in thy cheifest seat,
Denouncing judgment for thy hanyous sin
except reprentance mercy doe intreat,
And lest this punishment should seeme too small,

behold another stroake doth wound thy head,
Renowned James that was admird of all
for learned skill thy king of peace is dead.2
Plague stands as a judgement in these lines, the poem interpreting the

epidemic in providential terms.3 In the first stanza, England’s ‘peace’ is

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_5
132 5 KATHERINE AUSTEN’S RECKONING WITH PLAGUE IN BOOK M
threatened: ‘And to bereave thee of that happie peace/for which all

nations doe thee blessed call’. Ley, alluding to Luke 1.48, invokes a nation
both pure and virginal—in the corresponding biblical passage, the Virgin
Mary says, ‘For behold, from henceforth: all generations shall call me
blessed’.4 England’s piety is thrust into question in the third stanza,
however, as Ley describes England no longer as the Virgin Mary, but as
the serpent, Satan, receiving the Lord’s judgement, ‘another stroake doth
wound thy head’. In this allusion to the fall, Genesis 3.14–15, the country
shifts from a blessed victim to devious serpent; an England that brought
the Lord’s judgement upon itself. Ley’s interpretation of the nation and its
suffering is ambivalent. The epidemic is not a self-contained catastrophe
but instead interconnected to other aspects of Ley’s world. She compli-
cates a simplistic reading of pestilence through biblical allusions, viewing
the outbreak through a providential lens which assists her in interpreting
the outbreak as a seventeenth-century female reader and poet. Ley’s verse
is specific to the outbreak of 1625, and her manner of interpreting and
recording the event, relating it within a providential context to better
understand the events in her world, demonstrates one way in which a
seventeenth-century female writer responded to plague.
While dialogues on plague increased with the progression of the
seventeenth century, leading to the proliferation of printed plague
texts in 1665 that form the subject of this book, there was a parallel
dialogue appearing in manuscript that offered a perspective on the
outbreak in the form of early modern life writing. Women’s writing
made unique contributions to this body of work but women as plague
writers have been largely neglected by scholars. Katherine Austen’s Book
M (1664–68: ed. edn 2011),5 which responds at length to the 1665
plague epidemic, provides an alternate lens to the largely male-com-
posed discourse on pestilential outbreak. Like Ley, Austen frequently
invokes a providential paradigm through which to interpret the events
in her world. In Book M’s pages, interiority becomes inextricable from
Austen’s interpretation of the outbreak that threatens her, her family
and her country. Plague is written into Book M as a defining factor in
Austen’s life, impacting her and her family following a six-year period in
her life after which she anticipated, for a time, her death. Through an
extended consideration of dreams and portents, Austen accepts plague
as fitting into her path, all the while anticipating, theorizing and debat-
ing with herself as to what the national catastrophe means to her life
and God’s plan for her.
KATHERINE AUSTEN’S RECKONING WITH PLAGUE IN BOOK M 133
Austen’s extraordinary legacy exists because of her prodigious recording

in Book M. Book M documents the history of the period and also Austen’s
struggles, successes and experiences as a widow, mother and citizen living
through an epidemic. The quarto manuscript, with its modern binding of
brown cloth and leather, is pan-generic, encompassing occasional medita-
tions, paraphrases of others’ writing, lyrics, as well as autobiographical details
and entries about her family and its struggles.6 The manuscript is housed in
the British Library, Add MS 4454. Though written in her hand, Austen’s text
is a patchwork of intertextuality, pointing to memorial reconstruction, to
other manuscripts likely available to her and to printed works. She weaves
these elements together into a contemporary understanding of her world.
There are many moments of looking forward and attempting to foretell
future events, but also a textual and material manner of looking back,
which are of particular interest to this chapter. Margaret J. M. Ezell notes
that in a manuscript ‘blank pages permitted the rewriting of the past at any
time’, and this phenomenon is evident in Book M, helping to shape and
narrate her story on plague.7 These additions are evidenced by changes in
handwriting, ink, spacing of the material or the inclusion of a date that marks
the break in chronology.8 Adding to the entries expressed in words, in both
prose and verse, the organization of writing on the page and the breaking of
chronology in Book M come to have a direct impact on how Austen relates her
understanding of plague. While many times self-representation has been a
revealing area of discovery in this book, with authors often giving away much
of themselves and their motivations at the paratextual periphery and at the
borders of their writings, in Austen’s Book M she is both author and often
subject of her text as is the case in works of life writing. As she proclaims in its
early pages (fol. 4v):
Whoso euer shal look in these papers and shal take notice of these personal
occurrences: wil easily discerne it concerned none but my self: and was a
private exercise directed to my self. The singularity of these conceptions
doth not aduantaige any.9
Austen proclaims her writing in Book M ‘concerned none but my self’ and
is ‘directed to my self’. While this statement of privacy is arguably not as
simplistic as it first appears, her relationship with wider events, including
the epidemic, demonstrates the extent to which that conception of self
relates to external circumstances and how these, in turn, are encompassed
in her narrative of self in Book M.10
Life writing about plague piqued curiosity and interest long after the
major English outbreaks of the seventeenth century remained as but
horrible memories in the nation’s collective mind. Into the eighteenth-
century, Defoe demonstrated the continuing appetite for first-person
and highly personal accounts of plague outbreaks by publishing A
Journal of the Plague Year, writing the work as England anticipated the
threat of a foreign plague outbreak breaching the nation’s border and
reviving the memory of those seventeenth-century outbreaks. Though
some of the best-known works of life writing or fictional life writing
about plague—Samuel Pepys’ diary from 1665,11 Austen’s Book M and
Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year—are by all accounts a world apart,
the experiences of the disease they describe form the private aspect of a
plague discourse defined in the public realm through printed pamphlets,
tomes, sermons and instructive texts on the disease. An author’s con-
struction of a life-writing persona in relation to the outbreak and the
ongoing mode of composition represented in some life writing capture
the immediate and progressing pressures confronted during an epidemic.
Women’s life writing from the early modern period, specifically, devel-
oped along evolving methods of cultural production and with the reli-
gious conventions and beliefs that emerged in the seventeenth century.
In Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (2007),
Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A Eckerle note that in the early modern
period in England:
Historical developments . . . including the spread of Protestant doctrines

about introspection and unmediated relationships with the divine, the poli-
tical and religious upheavals of the Civil Wars, and the development of
experimental science, helped to produce a cultural environment that privi-
leged both self-reflection and an ideologically nuanced approach to indivi-
duality that set the stage for women’s unprecedented production and
publication of life writings.12
Early modern female authors sought to establish selfhood through accepted

forms,13 and as Austen’s life writing and its broad generic range demonstrate
this could be established textually in varied ways. In the instance of Book M,
the text broadly functions as a spiritual diary—a literary space that emerged
in the seventeenth century and which adhered to the suggestions and direc-
tions offered by a group of texts and devotional manuals that sought to
instruct on the ‘self-examination’ encouraged by Protestantism.14 Though
KATHERINE AUSTEN’S RECKONING WITH PLAGUE IN BOOK M 135
these manuals did not direct their students to produce literary offerings
like Austen’s Book M, spiritual diaries emerged as an acceptable mode of
writing for early modern women.15 Unlike the medical pamphlets, religious
writings and poetic reflections that frequently made their way into print, life
writing reflects different motivations in relation to the pressure of epidemic
and the desire to record that event. The satisfaction offered by such works
when they address plague is captured by Sarah C. E. Ross, who points to the
broader impact of Austen’s writings: ‘Volumes of meditations such as
Katherine Austen’s do give a very vivid sense of writing as a daily—or at
least regular—response to lived experience’.16 Occasional meditation is the
Protestant method of capturing a passing point in time through contempla-
tion and reflection of a spiritual nature, and ‘The accumulation of occasional
meditations is an accumulation of parcels of time which form a proof of
the individual’s spiritual service’.17 Many of Austen’s entries would be
described as occasional meditations. Austen’s writing on the disease is cap-
tured in ongoing entries and meditations, and this concept of the ‘accumu-
lation of parcels of time’ is particularly useful for appreciating the presence of
plague and epidemic in Book M. Austen’s understanding of the disease is
constantly varying and shifting in the text, caught in moments here and
there. When occasional meditation and plague come together in Book M, the
result is an ever-changing view of the disease. The impression of ‘lived
experience’ being played out on the page makes Austen’s account contrast
a printed text, with the way in which pages were filled and backfilled adding
dimension to how the story of plague develops. Austen’s Book M has
attracted greater scholarly attention in recent years. My work places her
within the context of other early modern plague writers who responded to
the outbreak, providing one woman’s representation of the visitation.
The following chapter examines three aspects of Austen’s Book M.
Firstly, the medium through which Austen conveys her own life and
how this mediates the story of plague that Austen tells. What becomes
apparent in Book M is that the manuscript medium is an essential player in
how the story of plague develops, providing a contrast to the print docu-
ments described in this book. Manuscript composition lends itself to
‘open-ended narratives’ in which writing may be re-examined and revised
over time.18 Where a printed work on the disease results in a static copy,
until later editions, reader usage or the process of myth-making about
plague result in the text’s evolution, Austen’s Book M is written in a
dynamic way where the ‘writing process’ becomes essential to how the
disease is articulated. Austen re-enters Book M, making later additions to
the words initially recorded. She emphasizes words and phrases as she
writes. Thus, the reader can chart the changing meaning of the epidemic
to the author through these fluctuations in her text. This chapter further
addresses how the author relates to death and disease in Book M outside of
and before the outbreak enters the text, considering the impact of plague
in comparison to these other encounters with illness and mortality. Finally,
this chapter asks how Austen addresses public mortality through statistics
of plague deaths, drawing comparisons to Defoe’s use of mortality statis-
tics in A Journal of the Plague Year. While fewer female voices from plague
times have emerged over the past centuries as compared to male, Austen’s
Book M provides insight into how one woman expressed the threat of
plague on the page and how she, alongside male counterparts, interacted
with the vast printed dialogue on the subject in 1665.
KATHERINE AUSTEN’S LIFE AND BOOK M

Katherine Austen came from a family with means. Her father, Robert Wilson,
belonged to the Drapers’ Company and left her mother, Katherine, a number
of properties when he died in 1639.19 Her mother remarried after his death,
this time to John Highlord, who secured their financial comfort further.20
When Book M’s author married Thomas Austen in July 1645, a payment of
£2,478 was made to her husband.21 Thomas Austen, who attended Oxford
University and later gained entrance to Lincoln’s Inn, was from ‘an upwardly-
mobile gentry family’ and he himself had landholdings.22 Austen would
receive additional funds upon her mother’s death in 1648, when she was
granted £2,000 to be paid in £100 installments each year throughout her
marriage.23 Austen had impressive and far-reaching financial and property
dealings, with interests ranging from extensive real-estate involvement to
investments in the East India Company.24 Despite her relative financial acuity
and comfort, Austen grapples with the various properties and the threat of
them being seized throughout the pages of Book M. Furthermore, she
expresses anxiety over her social standing and an ongoing desire to improve
her social rank. Her marriage and early life demonstrate her material comfort,
but as Austen details in Book M, these aspects of her life and the provisions she
intended for her children were frequently threatened.
In the years following Austen’s husband’s death, she found herself
embroiled in numerous battles to assert her and her children’s entitlement
to the properties left to her family. Wrangling over property and the continued
sense of grief over the loss of her husband are frequent topics in Book M, which
DEATH AND DISEASE IN AUSTEN’S BOOK M 137
was composed primarily between 1664 and 1666, a number of years

after his death. She begins the work with the statement, ‘My Husband
was born Sunday the 11 August 1622/He died 31 October 1658 being
36 yeares and 2 mo[n]ths 21 daies’, followed by ‘Katherine Austen
1664:/Appriel:/Ma defence consiste, assouoir endurir’.25 At the time
of his death, the stage was set for the obstacles and battles that would
become recurring worries in the pages of Book M. Named ‘executrix
and guardian’ in his will, Austen is concerned throughout Book M with
protecting her son Thomas’s inheritance of two properties, one
described as Highbury manor and the other the Red Lion estate in
Fleet Street.26 The Highbury property, first acquired by Austen’s
father-in-law in 1632, proved troublesome during Austen’s composi-
tion of Book M. Obtained under complex circumstances, ownership of
the property was a source of great consternation due to debts owed
creditors by its previous owner, Sir Allen Apsley.27 The second, the Red
Lion, saw Austen fighting over the rightful heir to the property with her
sister-in-law, Susanna. Thomas Austen’s brother, John, intended for his
properties to go to his wife until a specified date and then passed to his
daughter.28 In the event of his daughter’s death, which occurred when
she was an infant and is recorded in Book M, the property was intended
to go to Austen’s son.29 Legal battles between the widows resulted
from vying interests in the property. In Book M, these personal battles
are mirrored by, contrasted to and compared with the larger public
struggle with the plague epidemic of 1665 through prose, contempla-
tion and verse. Austen lived in Hoxton, Middlesex, but at the peak of
the epidemic left the city for Essex.30 Austen’s Book M so frequently
addresses biographical events that these become intrinsic, in so much as
they may be established, to her text.
DEATH AND DISEASE IN AUSTEN’S BOOK M

Austen’s manuscript is alive with fluctuations, revisions and additions.
From different inks to slight variances in her script, as a florid signature
contrasts diminutive handwriting beckoning from the periphery of a
page—moderations in the textual presentation of Book M form a meta-
narrative to Austen’s words and ask to be interpreted alongside her text.
These fluctuations in the material delivery of Book M give the sense of a
life lived, with events recorded in a manner that draws frequent attention
to her writing being revised and added to over weeks, months and years.
Yet while Book M is in many ways a meticulous record of Austen’s life, its
pages are often preoccupied with death. Throughout Book M, Austen
refers to a symbolic seven-year period following her husband’s death. For
a time, she anticipates her own demise when she reaches, to the day, the
age at which her husband passed away, which would occur in the sixth
year following his death. She revises this morbid prediction and the death
she foretells for herself, however, in ‘Observation on my Dream. of
Monition’ (fol. 21r), and, quoting Psalm 118:17, writes: ‘And yet in
this certainty I have found a contradiction: that I shal not dye but live.
and declare the workes of the Lord’.31 Her evolving understanding of
this seven-year period sees her identify, in turn, with Hezekiah, Job and
the Psalmist David.32 The subject of mortality preoccupies her frequently
during the manuscript’s composition on account of her understanding of
the afflictions she will endure during this seven-year period. Yet it is not
only in this providential anticipation of her own death that mortality
comes to bear on Book M. Following a poem on the death of her young
niece (fol. 53v), Austen laments (fol. 54r), ‘How many Young persons
are dead since I had my Dreame gave me intimation of mine’.33 Austen
follows this complaint with the names and descriptions of those who
have been taken from her by death, though this list is made long before
plague enters her text. As the names of those dead and their connection
to Austen spill forth, from her grandmother to cousins to acquaintances,
the extent of loss in Austen’s life is remarkable. Small pox and various
unnamed infirmities are amongst those contributing to the deaths that
pester the author throughout the text. When plague later enters Book M,
it will form another facet of these reflections on mortality. These con-
frontations with death and its precursor disease become textually
entangled in Austen’s seven years of mourning and are inextricable
from her self-figuration in Book M’s pages. Furthermore, as Austen’s
own understanding of her fortunes evolves, so, too, does her under-
standing of the role mortality and disease play in her life.
Long before mention is made of plague in Book M, Austen frames the
work in death’s winding sheet. Mortality is not simply a recurring
theme in the text; there is intentionality in how death is imposed on
the manuscript. Austen upsets the order of the otherwise chronologi-
cally arranged composition with entries on the fleeting nature of life.
The first verse that appears in Book M, entitled ‘On the Birds Singing in
my Garden’ (fols. 4v-5r), meditates on the transience of nature in a
pastoral lyric:
But, what’s this Nature, which such order keepes,

That every plant, in its due season peepes,
Tis from ‘theternal order which imprintes
Their Anual virtue, And then gives their Stintes.
When they haue flourisht, then for to decline,
Such is the Nature, God has made to mine,
I haue my flourish too, And I must fade,
I must returne to an Etternal shade.34
Written in a different ink from the surrounding text and unnumbered in

contrast to the surrounding entries, these lines were evidently added at a later
date.35 In a later poem, ‘Meditation on my death’ (fols. 46v–47r), which
shares the same ink as that seen in ‘On the Birds Singing in my Garden’36 and
is also unnumbered, Austen writes:
Tis he hath paid the Ransome of my sin,

Elce I, deplored I, had ever bin,
Condemned to the prison of dispaire
Nor been released by my effectes of praier.
In Vaine my verse, in vaine what cou’d envoke,
Could ever give me the least Dram of hope,
But in the vnion of that Ransome pade,
My Bleeding soul, to Ioyes shal be Convaide
Here rest my heart, in this assured Balme
My God holds forth, all Miseries to Calme
Th’empetious Tempests here I find to beate,
Shal everlastingly find their retreate,
O fit me Lord, And me prepaire to come
Where Mercy’il be vnfolded in a sume
A sume that brings perfection, brings repose,
Soe Make it Lord, When this dark light shal Close.37
Death comes barrelling into Austen’s life writing through these two
poems, each imposed on the landscape of her manuscript and likely
added after her initial words were recorded. Though divided by many
pages in Book M, they nonetheless express shared sentiments. Austen’s
reader enters the text with mortality in sight in ‘On the Birds Singing in my
Garden’. The cycle of life is reflected in this pastoral lyric; the ‘decline’ of
Nature’s plants paralleling Austen’s own understanding of God’s plan, in
which her earthly self ‘must fade’. Austen views the ebb and flow of life as
directly connected to an afterlife. In ‘Meditation on my death’, Austen
claims the insufficiency of her verse in the face of death: ‘In Vaine my
verse, in vaine what cou’d envoke,/Could ever give me the least Dram of
hope’. While many authors cite the importance of their role in plague
times and the preservative power of the written word, Austen denounces
and surrenders the power of her verse. Given the role her frequent writing
plays in her salvation and spiritual growth, these admonitions are likely
expressions of modesty appropriate to a spiritual diary. Though death is
inevitable in these lines, Austen’s providential perspective provides her
great comfort. Death will bring ‘perfection’, bring ‘repose’. The two
verses, distinguished from the surrounding text, interrupt and mediate
the story told in Book M. Through them, Austen grafts onto her text
reflections on death, drawing the reader’s attention to the fleeting nature
of life and imminent mortality. These meditations on death are crucial to
Austen’s understanding of God’s expectations for her life.
Property concerns and their connection to disease are frequently revisited
in Austen’s text. Austen’s fixation on death and its concomitant disease is
not simply a function of a society in which sickness could easily lead to death
and a time when life expectancy was low—each of these elements are
relentlessly interpreted and reinterpreted by Austen within her sphere of
experience. Austen writes in the meditation ‘Vpon Gods giveing me health’
(fol. 74r): ‘for when we consider the waight of sicknes, tis the greatest
affliction of Nature’.38 Mounting personal and family infirmity parallels
the adversity surrounding Austen’s estate battles, making an unusual but
recurring association in the text that will be reasserted once plague enters
Book M’s pages. This connection is felt in entries that detail her activities in
defending her property, where sickness becomes a quicksand that hampers
Austen’s efforts to represent her son’s rights. She writes (fol. 61r):
It proved a very troublesome time for me. For I was sicke of an exceeding
cold in my head maded me to be allmost Deafe and dumbe. and goeing to
Westminster about 6 times. I was exceeding ill. and more vnfit to contest
with such a busines then ever I had been before.39
Austen’s son’s ill health, too, becomes thematically entangled in her

property battles in the text, and at one point she describes him as ‘very
ill’, explaining: ‘This day that I have feares of the Lose of my Son. of the
lose of my his Land’.40 The connection she draws between two of the
most prominent topics in Book M, disease and property, will be further
exposed once the epidemic enters her text.
Austen was not alone in narrating the connection between her prop-
erty struggles and illness. Elizabeth Freke would voice similar concerns in
her life writing a number of years later. Amongst Freke’s surviving
writings are two commonplace books, BL, Add. MS. 45718 and BL,
Add. MS. 45719, which reflect on the struggles in her life, with each
book sharing a variation on the note, ‘Some few remembrances of my
misfortuns have attended me in my unhappy life since I were marryed,
which was November the i4, i671’.41 In her writing, she interweaves
entries that address property, finances and sickness. An entry dated
15 September 1673 captures these shared concerns, as Freke relates
property and financial worries in a passage that goes on to describe
instances of miscarriage:
Thus was three of my unhappy years spentt in London in a marryed life, and
I never had, as I remember, the command of five pounds of my fortune.
Wher I miscarried twice and had very little of my husbands company, which
was no small grife to me, I being only governed by my affecttions in this my
marrying and withoutt the consentt of any of my frinds; and fearing all my
fortune would be spentt, resolved with Mr Frek to goe for Ireland to his
estat and try our fortuns there.42
While the diarist expresses a ‘secular and materialistic individualism’ in contrast

to Austen’s providential interpretation of her world, Freke nonetheless cap-
tures concerns that parallel some of those found in Austen’s account.43 Each
woman provides extended ruminations on her finances and property in a life
writing text that reflects in close proximity on death and infirmity.
The anonymity of plague impinges on Austen’s narrative of personal
struggles with death and disease. The epidemic falls in the seventh year of
Austen’s mourning and takes on great personal significance for the author.
Austen contrasts her private understanding of death and illness in this
seven-year period to that suffering felt by the nation at the hand of
pestilence, writing (fol. 100v):
By the delieverances I have received from my most gracious God. My Faith.

My hope, does promise his Future Mercy for my eternal good. And my God
is able to deliever me in this dreadful seaventh year a yeare where the Angel
of his displeasure convayes darts of speedy death.44
What emerges in Book M is a dichotomy between public and private

suffering, which Austen goes to lengths to reconcile. The public suffering
associated with pestilence is distinct from the deaths and sicknesses Austen
experiences in her personal life, such as a challenging head cold or the
death of her husband. Plague’s earliest appearances in Book M see it quickly
encompassed in a discursive space that is consistent with Austen’s view of
the world, as a type of private suffering. In the verse meditation ‘On the
sickenes.’, Austen’s earliest chronological encounter with plague in Book
M,45 pestilence is both an extension of her personal suffering and of her
written legacy (fol. 86r):
O let me fly to thee, vnto thee still,
A Rocke. of shelter in approaching ill
Such have I found thee, my great God supreame
In seaven Long winters thy light was my beame
To guide my way, and poize me in my straight
Paphed in obscurity, a ponderous waight
Still was thy glory such a staf of rest
As every accident became the best
I cannot be dismaed when have thy guard
Itis a Convoy in what seemeth hard.
Itis a ship, tho rolling on the waves
Steeres to a harbour and avoides its graves.
My part on providence to Anchor still
Nor can these billowes of this world be ill.46
Austen looks for comfort in biblical allusions when faced with strife. She
refers to Psalm 107, verses 23–30, which describe the Lord’s deliverance
of sailors from a storm. The construction of the verse is reminiscent of a
common motif in early modern writing, described by Margaret Healy in
Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics
(2001):
A recurring motif from medieval and early modern writings is the human
body as a fortified (materially and/or spiritually) yet vulnerable enclosure—
castle, ship, city or temple—threatened constantly by ‘enimie’ incursions
which can only be averted through sound and vigilant regimen.47
Austen focuses on spiritual deliverance in the lines, figuring herself and

the Lord’s mercy as a ship, looking to the Lord to steer her to a
harbour. Her safety, as this ‘fortified’ but ‘vulnerable enclosure’, is threa-
tened by plague, as indicated in the title of the work, ‘On the sickenes.’
Austen seeks solace not through a medical regimen but instead through a
rigorous spiritual regimen. In this early textual encounter with the disease
Austen encompasses the experience of plague within the personal space of
her writing, within the context of her own suffering and as a threat to her
safety. She seeks personal salvation in the face of illness. Plague is not defined
as a public epidemic but instead as another ‘problem’ to be overcome with
the help of ‘God supreame’. It is tightly encompassed in the providential
language consistent throughout much of Book M and fitting of occasional
meditation.48 Austen writes, ‘In seaven Long winters thy light was my
beame’, and with these words the epidemic becomes an extension of this
period.
Plague is allotted shifting narrative space and meaning in Book M. This is
consistent with how Book M was composed, in an ongoing manner. Austen
does not have a centrally focused understanding of plague in her manuscript,
as Book M is written in a fluid way, not retrospectively composed. Her writing
reflects the ‘decentered’ construction of self that is a feature of women’s life
writing, if the construction of a self is not lacking entirely.49 Austen’s voice,
too, is shifting and changing throughout Book M, as is her understanding of
the affliction of plague. A printed work on the disease, published at the
height of the epidemic, cannot anticipate the full extent of the visitation,
while another account published in its aftermath can create a tidy narrative
path for the disease. In contrast, Austen’s encounter with plague and her
record of that experience is entirely dynamic in Book M, creating a ‘decen-
tered’ recollection of the disease and its impact. Plague becomes part of her
personal composition, despite the fact that the only evidence to be found in
Book M that someone close to Austen fell victim to the outbreak is the death
of a potential suitor, possibly due to the disease.50 The manuscript medium
and Austen’s ongoing manner of composition in Book M mean that any
attempt made to pin down the meaning of the epidemic or disease in this
text, by either the reader or author, is impossible until Book M’s pages are
read in their totality.
Austen connects the suffering associated with plague to her personal
property struggles over the Highbury estate, a private situation of strife
countered by the very public catastrophe of plague. These parallels are
similar to those she draws earlier in Book M between her property struggles
and the personal sicknesses of a head cold and her son’s illness. For
example, she entitles one entry (fol. 99v) ‘Meditations on the Sickenes
and of Highbury’, following this with a meditation that describes her
seven years of struggle and then a list of financial losses, which are
eventually countered by the statement, ‘At this time is arrived the most
bountious blessing of Highbury. which I hope will well wade me through.

the residue of my expencive buildings. and disappointment of rents: from a
genneral. cause’.51 In a later entry entitled ‘On that day Highbury came
out of Lease. Michaelmas 1665’, Austen again describes the epidemic and
Highbury in conjunction with one another, this time through language
evocative of plague mortality (fol. 103v):
Am I the person am to reap the first fruites of that long expectation, and
enter into those pleasant feeldes of a faire inheritance. And that it should be
appointed for my Children. Tis a blessing I know not how to receive. Yet let
me and mine ever remember, That we receive our prosperity, and enter into
a Lardge revenue through the Iawes of death, and by the heapes of
Mortality. That we may be instructed allwayes to be ready to part from it,
as readily as we doe receive it. And not to set up a rest in a Earthly Paradice. I
and let the name bear the same rememberance. Highbury: To bury those
that are mounted never so high in this World.52
Austen does not name plague directly in the passage, but her reference to
‘heapes of Mortality’ uses precisely the same phraseology that she invokes
when looking back at the outbreak at a later date, which I discuss in the
Conclusion to this chapter. Her personal narrative becomes infected by
the language of the outbreak and by the death that surrounds her. Her
family’s prosperity is countered by these ‘heapes of Mortality’, the threat
of the abject breaking through. The death associated with plague is con-
trary to her family’s good fortunes in the lines of verse that follow: ‘We
exalted and made high/Others in their Anguish lye/We accessiones of this
world/They in pennury are hurld’.53 She makes familiar plague-time links
between poverty and pestilence in the lines by underscoring her family’s
good fortunes, contrasting the suffering around her with her family’s
recent inheritance. To receive this inheritance is to be living, unlike
those unnamed bodies comprised in the ‘heapes of Mortality’. Austen
goes so far as to play on the estate’s title ‘Highbury’, ‘To bury those that
are mounted never so high in this World’. In this construction, not only is
Highbury a constant reminder of plague’s toll but also an answer, at the
most basic level, to the problem of what to do with the dead as they are
symbolically consumed and buried in her turn of phrase, ‘bury those that
are mounted never so high’. The connections between Highbury and
plague are brought to their climax in the country-house poem ‘On the
Situation of Highbury’ (fol. 104r):
So fairely mounted in a fertile Soile

Affordes the dweller plesure, without Toile
Th’adjacent prospects gives so sweet^rareâ sight
That Nature did resolue to frame delight
On this faire Hill, and with a bountious load
Produce rich Burthens, makeing the aboad
As full of joy, as where fat vallies smile
And greater far, here Sickenes doth exhile.
Tis an vnhappy fate to paint that place
By my vnpollishet Lines, with so bad grace
Amidst its beauty, if a streame did rise
To clear my mudy braine and misty eyes
And find a Hellicon t’enlarge my muse
Then I noe better place then this wud choose
In such a Laver and on this bright Hill
I wish parnassus to adorne my quill.54
The poem, which sees Austen bending some of the conventions of the
genre,55 deserves consideration for its seventh and eighth lines, where
Austen states, ‘As full of joy, as where fat vallies smile/And greater far,
here Sickenes doth exhile’.56 Though Austen banishes ‘Sickenes’ from her
country-house, it is nonetheless present in her lines. Her wishing it away
makes its attendance here all the more conspicuous. Invoking plague again
in this poem about the Highbury estate emphasizes the threat felt by
disease and Austen’s desire to write it into Book M in order to write away
its power. Her paradise is Highbury, ‘full of joy’, where the soil is ‘fertile’.
Her lines of verse are not a stated cure here, unlike other authors’ poetic or
authorial attempts to banish plague. In fact, her lines are described as
‘vnpollishet’, conveying the same calculated modesty seen in ‘Meditation
on my death’ (fols. 46v-47r). However Austen protests the power of her
lines, they have demonstrably exiled plague from Highbury. Where the
two, pestilence and Highbury, have been connected on the page explicitly
and implicitly in earlier places, in ‘On the Situation of Highbury’ Austen
asserts the differences between the two, disallowing them to mingle on the
page past line eight.
Illness and death are frequent visitors to Austen’s narrative. Writing
during the summer months of the outbreak, Austen states, ‘May not the
thoughtes of Death dismay me’ (fol. 90r).57 As with many plague writers
who came before her, Austen must come to terms with death. The
‘thoughtes of Death’, which during a plague outbreak were no doubt
harrowing and gruesome, must be contended with in Book M, but what

was horrible in life is a small moment in time compared to the ‘etternal
inheritances’ to come.58 The work’s earliest poetic encounters see
Austen reflecting on the fleeting nature of life, likely adding these lines
of verse at a later date, suggesting their inclusion in Book M creates a
framing device within the manuscript. When plague enters her narrative
space, Austen finds herself forced to fit this public state of suffering into
her personal account. It becomes part of her seven years of strife and
entwined in her private struggles over the rightful ownership and recov-
ery of the Highbury estate. What has been described as one of Austen’s
most accomplished writings in Book M, ‘On the Situation of Highbury’,
sees the author both write plague into her personal struggles and in turn
banish it from Book M, from the protective theoretical space of the
Highbury estate.
STABILIZING AND DESTABILIZING ‘PRIVATE’ NARRATIVES:

MORTALITY STATISTICS IN AUSTEN AND DEFOE
References to mortality statistics routinely appear in plague writing from
1665. The numbers slice their way through narratives written in prose and
verse, providing a statistical figuring of the disease to offset words that seek
to describe and understand the illness. These figures are, in and of them-
selves, a type of life writing, providing a numerical narrative on lives lived
and lost. In prologues and religious pamphlets, on broadsides and in
popular medical works, these figures enhance, corroborate and sometimes
provide a counterpoint to the words that tell the story of plague, whether
in documents produced at the height of an outbreak or in those that
followed its resolution. Mortality statistics have a distinguished presence
in life writing works, as the numbers of dead were published and collected
in an ongoing process not unlike the manner of composition seen in a text
like Book M, Pepys’ diary or Defoe’s fictional life writing in A Journal of the
Plague Year. The appearance of mortality statistics often parallels, stabi-
lizes or upsets the flow of life-writing narratives. These statistics draw
the reader’s attention to those features that distinguish life writing
from other literary forms, as the collection of information for mortality
statistics took place repeatedly throughout an outbreak and the numbers
changed weekly. In this way, these statistics parallel the ongoing en-
tries and writing that occur in a life writing document, with both the
STABILIZING AND DESTABILIZING ‘PRIVATE’ NARRATIVES . . . 147
text and mortality figures revealing to the reader how the author inter-
prets and understands the illness over time—not at a single point in the
outbreak or retrospectively. Though divided by gender, genre and
time, Austen and Defoe make use of mortality statistics in the course
of their plague narratives in remarkably similar ways. Their use of
mortality statistics easily transgresses borders of experience when
describing the outbreak. These numbers creep onto the page, their
presence in stark contrast to descriptions of lives lived, with the figures
offset from the main writing, an expression of public mortality in
personal texts.
The bills of mortality were arguably the most-consumed and up-to-
date printed works on plague produced during outbreaks, and as a result
they play some role in many plague tracts, pamphlets and in the life
writing produced during an outbreak. Though plague placed immense
stress on society, mortality statistics were recorded throughout the out-
break in 1665. Figures were collected, collated and printed weekly in a
bill, The Diseases and Casualties This Week.59 Thus, the bills were essen-
tial to information sharing about plague in early modern England,
articulating the horrific facts of an outbreak in an easily comprehensible
form. The connection between life writing and the collection of mortal-
ity figures has been noted by Adam Smyth in Autobiography in Early
Modern England (2010).60 He explains that the pressure felt by cities
and people under attack from a plague visitation resulted in visual and
informational increases in parish registers and in mortality figures. The
descriptions of those who died expanded under the pressure of the
disease.61 As well, the visual impact of mounting plague deaths shows
how in plague times, ‘Death becomes a process, through time’.62 While
Smyth’s examination of plague and life writing focuses on parish records,
many of his conclusions may be applied to other areas of plague life
writing. His description of death as ‘a process, through time’ is keenly
felt in the narratives I discuss in this section. These works, described by
their authors as personal reflections, are forced to encompass nearly
incomprehensible mortality in their pages when they engage with the
bills of mortality. Gilman notes that Pepys considers his growing wealth
in conjunction with the growing plague fatalities from the bills, and
Gilman suggests ‘God would appear to redeposit with Pepys what he
withdraws from the accounts of others less fortunate’.63 Pepys ties these
stories of public death, told through these mortality figures, into his own
story. This is often the essence of life writing, after all, conveying one’s
own story and encompassing in that text the events that occur over the
period of composition.
Structurally, the statistics from the bills play an important role in life
writing. Ongoing changes and fluctuations in the bills correspond to the
way in which life writing works are structured around chronological entries,
each entry or passage presenting a view of the world at a specific moment. As
Defoe and Austen each produce texts with frequent reflection and entry—not
mere summary after a long period or through irregular composition—their
daily and weekly composition can reflect on the immediacy of plague’s threat
at a specific time by referencing these statistics. Defoe exploits the bills of
mortality throughout A Journal of the Plague Year to give his work a sense of
veracity and to provide the impression of progression fitting of a life-writing
narrative. Austen’s recall of public mortality takes different forms at different
times in Book M, including references to contemporary mortality in the bills,
to biblical plague mortality and finally to vast mortality in the aftermath of the
outbreak. In a printed work, only a subsequent edition or the addition of
marginalia would allow for a reconsideration of events. A manuscript provides
the author a space to go back, reconsider, reflect and, in Austen’s case, re-
enter the text at a later date to amend and revise her understanding of public
suffering during the epidemic.
As legacies of the thriving print culture available to citizens in 1665, the
bills of mortality have proven effective in engaging audiences when con-
veying the horrors of the outbreak. Defoe grasped this value; he structures
A Journal of the Plague Year around these statistics. Using the printed
artifacts available to him from 1665, Defoe was able to compose a remark-
ably realistic ‘history’ of the London outbreak in his fictional life writing.
Defoe writes A Journal as if taken from notes composed during the out-
break and then prepared at a later date for print. He captures the anxieties
of a seventeenth-century city in the throes of a plague epidemic. Interiority
is brought to light in the frame of life writing and in how the narrator
relates himself to the outbreak. The circumstances that motivated the
composition of A Journal were the threat from a plague epidemic that
struck Marseilles, France, in the 1720s.64 Defoe’s engagement with print
on the page may support an eighteenth-century agenda, but the author
invokes the challenges and fears that dominated discussions in 1665. To
convey a personal account of the outbreak from 1665, recalling the horror
for citizens, Defoe shaped an authorial persona, writing under the name
H.F. He accounts for his excellent recall of events that occurred years
earlier as follows:
Terrified by those frightful Objects, I would retire Home sometimes and

resolve to go out no more, and perhaps, I would keep those Resolutions for
three or four Days, which Time I spent in the most serious Thankfulness for
my Preservation, and the Preservation of my Family, and the constant
Confession of my Sins, giving my self up to God every Day, and applying
to him with Fasting, Humiliation, and Meditation: Such intervals as I had, I
employed in reading Books, and in writing down my Memorandums of
what occurred to me every Day, and out of which, afterwards, I [took] most
of this Work as it relates to my Observations without Doors: What I wrote of
my private Meditations I reserve for private Use, and desire it may not be
made publick on any Account whatever.65
While the reader is not privy to the complete manuscripts from which A
Journal is taken, Defoe invokes a hand-written document, composed, as
his narrator H.F. explains, ‘of what occurred to me every Day’. Defoe
depicts a private document, to which the reader is not privy, that mirrors
the ‘private’ thoughts that Austen herself presents in Book M. Part of the
frequent recording and the narrator’s organization of his story into A
Journal is the inclusion of statistics from the bills of mortality. These
figures are given often, beginning early in A Journal, with the first plague
statistics offset from the text and stating, ‘Plague 2. Parishes infected 1’.66
The figures are frequently questioned by the author, in keeping with much
of what was written about plague mortality in 1665, when distrust of the
figures and the belief that they underreported the extent of plague deaths
were common. They also impede on the story—a visual sign that all
capacity to decide on one’s own life is ceded to the power of disease
during a plague outbreak. On the page, these statistics interrupt and
moderate the meaning of the story and the activity of the story being
told. By offsetting these figures from the surrounding text, Defoe’s A
Journal captures the alien nature of these mortality statistics, infiltrating
the book and imposing themselves on the page. While the figures can be
questioned, they are essentially unchanging. A gaping chasm opens
between print and the truth in A Journal. The presence of mortality
statistics in the work, offset from the text, identifies them as an inescapable
reality of the plague—the element that authors, whether composing 57
years later or at the height of the outbreak, cannot avoid. Their inclusion
in A Journal gives the work a feeling of truth not only as a document from
the outbreak in 1665 but also as a realistic life-writing text, derived
from the scrawled notes of a citizen surviving a plague outbreak and
recording how life followed and defied that outbreak. Yet while Defoe’s
story mimics life writing, his narrator still attests to composing A Journal
purposefully for print. Furthermore, he collects a story from his notes,
imposing order on past events.
No such imposed order, grafted onto a work, can be argued about
Austen’s engagements with public mortality in Book M. Plague desta-
bilizes Austen’s writing. In one of her earliest reflections on the out-
break in Book M (fol. 89r), composed in July 1665, Austen invokes a
biblical plague, writing: ‘we shall be delieverd either temporally. but
most surely from eternal destruction: David composed this 91 Salme
when 70000 died in 3: daies’.67 Austen provides a biblical plague
‘statistic’, invoking a tradition of plague writing from biblical times.
Before this figure, she paraphrases Psalm 91, verses 14–15, writing
(fols. 88v–89r):
My God set thy love upon us. and then thou hast promisd to deliever us: If
we know thy name: know thy all powerful Majesty: know God our
Redeemer Know the holy Spirit the comforter in our Sorrowes: And know
to call upon thee: and then shal we find thy ready answer to us. To be with
us in trouble.68
In keeping with the providential tone of the work, she relates her early
horror over the 1665 epidemic to this biblical plague, providing the
overwhelming figure of 70,000. She finds solace in the psalm and in
David’s struggles, and she seeks spiritual comfort from the terror of the
outbreak. The figure of those dead from this biblical plague would far
exceed the number of victims from the current epidemic when this entry
was made in Book M. As Austen’s writing on plague continues in Book M,
however, the magnitude of the current epidemic will be shared through
reflection on contemporary mortality statistics, which, as they mount,
create an alarming picture to counter this biblical outbreak.
When Austen reflects on mortality statistics later in Book M (fol. 94r),
her thoughts turn to their immediate impact on her life. The statistics here
create a visual display of plague encroaching on the page and follow several
pages containing letters to her children. The textual landscape of the page
shows the bottom half divided into two sections of text. Closest to the
centre, in a place of prominence on the page, is the author’s name,
‘Katherine Austen’, offset from the surrounding text by its larger size
and decorative script. It sits in a textual no-man’s land on the page, neither
definitively an ending to these earlier letters nor a title for the verse that
follows.69 To the bottom-left side of her name is a note: ‘Aug 28th 1665:
on goeing to Essex the 28th Aug: the day before I went there there was
dead that week. before I went. 7400’.70 Austen was not alone in recogniz-
ing the horror of the week. In Nathaniel Hodges’ Loimologia: Or, an
Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665: With Precautionary
Directions Against the Like Contagion (trans. by John Quincy, 1720), he
wrote of the time:
In the months of August and September, the Contagion chang’d its former
flow and languid Pace, and having as it were got Master of all, made a most
terrible Slaughter, so that three, four, or five Thousand died in a Week, and
once eight Thousand; who can express the Calamities of such Times? The
whole British Nation wept for the Miseries of her Metropolis. In some
Houses Carcases lay waiting for Burial, and in others, Persons in their last
Agonies; in one Room might be heard dying Groans, in another the Ravings
of a Delirium, and not far off Relations and Friends bewailing both their
Loss, and the dismal Prospect of their own sudden Departure;71
The figure Austen gives is consistent with the bill of mortality for the
week, which states 7496 died, and of those 6102 died of plague ‘From the
22 of August to the 29’.72 Austen writes the following lines of verse next
to the number of dead and beneath her name:
Heavens Goodnes was my ready stay.

May not that Kindnes goe away.
Thy Former Conduct now appeare
In this mournfull Dying yeare.
Alas my Lord thy Direfull hand
What potentate that can withstand
And whether can I goe or fly.
But thy Severity is nigh
Tis neare me Lord Yet I have found.
Th’effectes of mercy to abound
Those now I supplicate may attend
To the last periode of my end./73
In the face of this mortality, which has encroached on Book M and taken
from Austen the words she normally uses, replacing them with numbers,
the page counters despair with two elements—a poem and a signature.
The signature is affirmative of her life, however frail. It is conclusive and
bold on the page in contrast to the tiny script used to describe the
mortality figures. In the lines of verse that conclude this jumble of life
and death on the page, Austen affirms that while death may be near she
can still ask for mercy. Ross contends that:
It is only in reading Book M as a complete text that it can be understood, not

as a series of discrete fragments, but as a complete piece of life-writing in
which Austen writes herself in and through numerous modes of discourse
that are available to her, including the biblical, devotional, maternal, legal,
social, and literary; the textual forms she employs include meditation,
prayer, advice piece, letter, and poem.74
I would add to this list that Austen also ‘writes herself’ into and writes
around mortality statistics, biblical and contemporary. She responds to
figures from the bills of mortality. These plague statistics and the inter-
textuality they bring to Book M become inextricable from her understand-
ing of the world she writes herself into.
CONCLUSION
Austen was shown mercy, with the text that begins in Book M continuing
after the outbreak had surged and passed. In the aftermath of the
epidemic, Austen re-enters Book M and reconsiders the death visited on
the city. The author impinges on her story, looking back and modifying
earlier reflections through the lens of an outbreak harrowed by herself
and others. The effect offers summary on the whole of the event, as
opposed to the fluidity of daily and weekly writings or the listing of
mortality statistics that is so prominent in Defoe’s A Journal. Austen
notes the tunnel vision brought about by her daily recording in Book M
when she writes:
This 30th of Apriel 1666: in the recital of the dangers this year. I may well
ade and apply to that obseruation of the last year: For the cassaualties I
haue pased in this is a clear demonstration to me That it was not possible
to foretel what might be, or to preuent the dangers depending on us.
O God we cannot: It belonges to the glory of thy prouidence our
delieuerance is wrought by thee . . . We haue bin rescued from the raging
pestilence that deuoured thousands. We are suruiveing Mounuments of
Heauens perticular Loue.
CONCLUSION 153
Let me and mine make it a birth day to us all. Growing in Obediance,

growing in thankfulnes. Or if we doe not those heapes of Mortality wil rise
up and be our condemnation.75
This meditation on her 38th birthday, appearing on folio 78r and continuing
on folio 79r, is positioned in the midst of Austen’s reflections on her birthday
a year earlier to the day, 30 April 1665, which runs in Book M from folios 77r
to 78r. Austen appears to meditate each year on her birthday.76 Given this
tradition of birthday meditation, these entries have particular importance to
the author. The above text is inserted into her reflections from her 37th
birthday:
This on my 37th Apriel 30th 1665: being Sabbath day:

God Allmighty hath bin pleased to ade another year to my life. and made my
36 now thiurty seaven. years.77
Beginning her birthday meditation in 1665 with a comment on her seven

years of strife, Austen sees her 37th birthday as one that has against the odds
defied her anticipated death, with God adding another year to her life.
Austen is positive about the possibilities of this added time:
O that the high praises of my God ever be in my mouth, that hath lent me
another year, Ending upon his day of praise. Nor dus it onely finish up this
last yeare. This day which my redeemer hath celebrated for his praise. This
day is the commencement of a new year to me. which as it represents my
birth. my comeing into this world. so let this new beginning, incite my
liveing well, and vsefully in the world.78
By imposing statements about the epidemic onto her birthday meditation

from 1665 and emphasizing the morbidity of the time, Austen conveys
that these ‘heapes of Mortality’ have caused her to reconsider everything
she anticipated on her birthday a year earlier. She does not echo the figures
from the bills of mortality here, but instead reflects on collective figures.
Here statistics are tied up in large statements of reflection. The figures
have united in the statement ‘heapes of Mortality’, both a probable threat
in the context of the phrase and also a summation of the previous year’s
struggle. Her words echo back to the earlier meditation ‘On that day
Highbury came out of Lease. Michaelmas 1665’ (fol. 103v), in which she
describes, ‘Yet let me and mine ever remember, That we receive our
prosperity, and enter into a Lardge revenue through the Iawes of death,
and by the heapes of Mortality’. In her birthday meditation in 1666, she
acknowledges the barriers to her vision, noting ‘That it was not possible
to foretel what might be, or to preuent the dangers depending on us’.
From her place of understanding, only God can know and direct which
way mortality figures will go. The placement of these later reflections
within Book M means that they form the reader’s first encounter with
plague when the manuscript is read cover to cover, despite being added
after the outbreak ended. There is no need at this stage to reference a
single week in the bills. There is no longer a need, either, to invoke
a biblical plague. The ‘heapes of Mortality’ stand on their own as a
placeholder for the horrors of the epidemic. A year on, Austen textually
visits her former self and banishes ignorant positivity, making the record
clear and correct. Austen celebrates her birthday and her life in 1666 by
reflecting on the masses of death that came with the epidemic and
by giving thanks, writing: ‘My perticular delieueranc from apparent
death. and from Contagious plague. Let us Remember how emenintly
thy fauour hath bin our hiding place’.79 While she has been shown mercy
in the face of the outbreak, ‘apparent death’ and ‘Contagious plague’ still
leave their mark on her manuscript.
When the plague outbreak is expressed in manuscript in a woman’s
literary voice, with the story of the affliction told over a long period
and not in a single sitting, many of the rules that could be counted
upon in a printed text addressing the same issue no longer apply.
Revision is not silent in Austen’s manuscript, and in those times
when the author revisits her text the reader has a sense of how her
understanding of the sickness is evolving, with the manuscript provid-
ing visual clues as to how this evolution took place. Mortality statistics,
too, come to play a key role in how Austen sees herself and the
visitation playing out in Book M. These figures become emblematic of
mass human suffering. While Defoe’s A Journal stresses the impor-
tance of these figures, and they in turn lend his work authenticity as a
type of life writing, in Austen’s Book M, written day by day or week by
week, the figures take on a more complex relationship to the author.
Plague joins Austen’s meditations on many of the greatest occurrences
in her life during the work’s composition—contributing a new facet to
her seven years of afflictions, becoming textually entwined in her battle
for the Highbury estate and finally forming a key aspect of her yearly
NOTES 155
birthday meditation. By the end of Book M, whether she intended or

wanted to, Austen had established herself as a plague writer.
NOTES
1. The manuscript, ‘a quarto of 262 folios’, is described as ‘a fair copy, with a
number of corrections’. Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Anna Ley’s Posthumously
Collected Writings: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library MS L6815
M3 C734’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry, ed. by Jill Seal
Millman, Gillian Wright, Victoria E. Burke and Marie-Louise Coolahan
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 77–86 (p. 77).
(Coolahan 2005)
2. Anna Ley, ‘Anna Ley’s Posthumously Collected Writings: William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library MS L6815 M3 C734’, in Early Modern Women’s
Manuscript Poetry, ed. by Jill Seal Millman, Gillian Wright, Victoria E.
Burke and Marie-Louise Coolahan (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2005), p. 82. (Ley 2005)
3. For further discussion of providence and the providentialist mindset in early
modern England, please see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
4. The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. by Brian
Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 252. (The Book of
Common Prayer 2011)
5. 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)
6. Sarah C. E. Ross provides the following physical details: ‘It is a small quarto
volume of 116 leaves that has been rebound in a modern brown cloth and
leather binding, the covers measuring 210 x 205 mm . . . The manuscript is
in a single hand throughout, a legible italic that I presume to be Austen’s
own’. Sarah C. E. Ross, ‘Textual Introduction’, in 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),
pp. 41–47 (p. 41). (Ross 2011)
7. Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early
Modern Women’s Life Writing’, in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in
Early Modern England: Re-Imagining Forms of Selfhood, ed. by Michelle M.
Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp.33–48 (p.46).
(Ezell 2007)
8. Ross, ‘Textual Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 42. (Ross 2011)
9. Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 53. (Austen 2011)
10. For an extended discussion of the relative merits of this statement of privacy
and the likelihood that some parts of Book M were written for a selected
readership, see Sarah Ross, ‘“And Trophes of his praises make”: Providence
and Poetry in Katherine Austen’s Book M, 1664–1668’, in Early Modern
Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent
Colloquium, ed. by Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2004), pp. 181–204. (Ross 2004)
11. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William
Matthews, 10 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California
Press, 2000). (Pepys 2000)
12. Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, ‘Introduction’, in Genre and Women’s
Life Writing in Early Modern England: Re-Imagining Forms of Selfhood, ed. by
Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007),
pp. 1–13 (p. 1). (Dowd and Eckerle 2007)
13. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox, ‘Introduction’, in Betraying
Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. by
Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox (Basingstoke, Hampshire:
Macmillan Press, 2000), pp. 1–13 (p. 5). (Dragstra et al. 2000)
14. Effie Botonaki, ‘Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Spiritual Diaries: Self-
Examination, Covenanting, and Account Keeping’, The Sixteenth Century
Journal, 30.1 (1999), 3–21, p. 3. (Botonaki 1999)
15. Botonaki, ‘Seventeenth-Century English Women’s Spiritual Diaries’, p. 4.
(Botonaki 1999)
16. Ross, ‘Textual Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 43. (Ross 2011)
17. Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Redeeming Parcels of Time: Aesthetics and
Practice of Occasional Meditation’, The Seventeenth Century, 22.1
(2007), 124–43, p. 125.
18. Ezell, ‘Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life
Writing’, in Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England: Re-
Imagining Forms of Selfhood, p. 46. (Ezell 2007)
19. Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 6. (Ross 2011)
22. Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 8, 9. (Ross 2011)
24. Barbara J. Todd, ‘Property and a Woman’s Place in Restoration London’,
Women’s History Review, 19.2 (2010), 181–200, p. 182, 186.
25. Ross writes of the French translation ‘“My defence consists of/in suffering
patiently,” or perhaps, with a slightly different emphasis, “I defend myself,
that is by suffering patiently”’. Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 51;
Pamela S. Hammons provides two possibilities, ‘My defense consists of
NOTES 157
knowing how to endure/to suffer’. Hamons provides what she notes is a less
convincing translation in, ‘My defense consists of surfeiting on suffering’.
Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings, ed. by Pamela S. Hammons
(Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013), p. 41
(note 3). (Austen 2013)
30. Raymond A. Anselment states that ‘During the months the plague threa-
tened London and forced Austen to flee to Essex...’. Raymond A.
Anselment, ‘Katherine Austen and the Widow’s Might’, Journal for Early
Modern Cultural Studies, 5.1 (2005), 5–25, p. 12 (Anselment 2005); Ross
interprets the same travel differently, writing that ‘Austen also writes into
the manuscript a trio of advice pieces or wills addressed to each of her
children when she takes a journey to Essex at the height of the 1665 plague’.
Ross, ‘And Trophes of his praises make’: Providence and Poetry in Katherine
Austen’s Book M, 1664–1668’, p. 196; Sarah Ross, ‘Austen, Katherine
(b. 1629, d. in or before 1683)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Online edition, Jan 2008
<www.oxforddnb.com> [accessed 22 Oct 2016].
31. Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 67; Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine
Austen’s Book M, p. 26. (Ross 2011)
34. Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, pp. 53–54. (Austen 2011)
35. Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 53. (Ross 2011)
37. Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 90. (Ross 2011)
40. Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 107. (Ross 2011)
41. Elizabeth Freke, The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671–1714, ed. by
Raymond A. Anselment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
p. 37.
42. Freke, The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671–1714, p. 39. For further
information on Freke, maternity and her reflections on her surviving chil-
dren, see, Avra Kouffman, ‘Maternity and Child Loss in Stuart Women’s
Diaries’, in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, ed. by Kathryn
M. Moncrief and Kathryn Read McPherson (Aldershot, UK; Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 171–182 (pp. 178–179) (Kouffman 2007).
43. Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Introduction’, in The Remembrances of Elizabeth

Freke, 1671–1714, ed. by Raymond A. Anselment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), pp. 1–36 (p. 1).
45. Due to Austen’s revisions and refilling of pages in Book M, plague appears
earlier in her text when read cover to cover than it does in her chronologi-
cally ordered entries.
47. Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies,
Plagues and Politics (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave,
2001), p. 18. (Healy 2001)
48. Ross notes: ‘the occasional meditation is intertwined with a providential
view of the world, in which the autobiographical event is the manifestation
of God’s special or peculiar providences towards the subject’. Sarah C. E.
Ross, ‘“Like Penelope, always employed”: Reading, Life-Writing, and the
Early Modern Self in Katherine Austen’s Book M’, Literature Compass, 9.4
(2012), 306–316, p. 309.
49. Shari Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical,’ in Women,
Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
(Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 145–156
(p. 151).
50. Barbara J. Todd, ‘A Young Widow of London’, in Women & History: Voices
of Early Modern England, ed. by Valerie Frith (Toronto: Coach House
Press, 1995), pp. 207–214 (p. 210). (Todd 1995)
52. Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 156, 158. (Austen 2011)
55. Pamela Hammons, ‘Katherine Austen’s Country-House Innovations’,
Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 40.1 (2000), 123–137, p. 124.
(Hammons 2000)
59. Richelle Munkhoff, ‘Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of
Mortality in Early Modern London’, in Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and
Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. by Jennifer C. Vaught
(Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 119–134 (pp. 119–120). (Munkhoff
2010)
60. Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010)
NOTES 159

63. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England, p. 225 (Gilman 2009);
The construction seen in Pepys’ diary is not dissimilar to one Susan Wiseman
notes in Book M in the section ‘Meditations on the Sickenes and of
Highbury’ (fol. 99v), which sees Austen follow a providential reflection on
death with bookkeeping that elucidates the author’s financial losses over the
previous months. Wiseman explains: ‘Accounting to Michaelmas 1665,
then, Austen’s spiritually inflected economic vocabulary makes Highbury a
“bounteous blessing” (F100r), to be assayed in spiritual scales’, Susan
Wiseman, ‘The Contemplative Woman’s Recreation? Katherine Austen
and the Estate Poem’, in Early Modern Women and the Poem, ed. by
Susan Wiseman (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press,
2013), pp. 220–243 (p. 225). (Wiseman 2013)
64. Charles F. Mullett, ‘The English Plague Scare of 1720–23’, Osiris, 2
(1936), 484–516. (Mullett 1936)
69. Ross notes that the signature bears a resemblance to the inscription on folio 2r,
where Austen also writes her name. Ross, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 146.
(Ross 2011)
71. Nathaniel Hodges, Loimologia: Or, An Historical Account of the Plague in
London in 1665: With Precautionary Directions Against the Like Contagion,
trans. by John Quincy (London: 1720), p. 16. (Hodges 1720)
72. Corporation of London, London’s Dreadful Visitation: Or, a Collection of
All the Bills of Mortality for This Present Year: Beginning the 20th of December
1664 Ending the 19th of December Following (London: 1665), p. 36. (John
1665)
75. Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M, p. 128,129. (Austen 2011)
CHAPTER 6
Pestilence and War
The impending war between the English and Dutch saw a catastrophe
preceding and then playing out in tandem with the outbreak of plague
that swept London in 1665. While largely separate tragedies, war and
pestilence became a meeting point between two early modern diarists,
Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Amidst the dual challenges posed by these
calamities, the famous diarists, who each described life in Restoration
England, took up a mutual correspondence. In these letters, they navigate
an ever-changing nation, finding common ground in their connected pro-
fessional challenges due to the war. It is impossible to predict the enduring
friendship that would develop between Evelyn and Pepys upon reading their
initial correspondence, the first letters of which may be traced to April 1665.
As a Sick and Hurt Commissioner, Evelyn was charged with caring for sick
seamen and prisoners of war. In 1653 and in response to the First Anglo
Dutch War, the Sick and Wounded Board was instituted to oversee the
care of the sick and wounded and to manage care for prisoners of war.1
These measures were called up again with the impending Second Anglo
Dutch War. Evelyn was appointed to the Board in October of 1664, with an
accompanying yearly salary of £300, alongside three other Commissioners.2
He was tasked with overseeing the coastal area of Kent and Sussex.3 As a
Commissioner for the Board, Evelyn had extensive official duties, ranging
from hiring medical personnel to organizing basic necessities for the men,
such as food.4 Pepys’ role as Clerk of the Acts in the Navy Office made
him an important point of contact for Evelyn. The 1665 letters range

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_6
162 6 PESTILENCE AND WAR
from perfunctory to pleading, with Evelyn making increasingly desperate

bids of Pepys for assistance to complete his work. On 23 September 1665,
Evelyn laments his dire need for money to perform his work for the sick and
hurt, stating in a letter to Pepys, ‘I am almost in despair, so you will pardon
the passion of Sir’.5 The extent of Evelyn’s job remit gives insight into his
tone of concern in the letters to Pepys, as he tries to effectively advocate for
the sick and hurt seamen and prisoners of war despite limited financial
assistance. Without adequate finances to execute his job, Evelyn and the
other Commissioners were providing substantial support to complete their
tasks from their personal funds.6 Pepys’ tone in his letters to Evelyn is fairly
reserved during this period, whereas Evelyn conveys passion and urgency.
This urgency escalated between April and December, as Evelyn attempted to
organize the logistics of his agenda, including managing the various figures
involved in caring for the sick—surgeons and physicians amongst them—
with limited financial support: ‘Sir, I have at this moment Chelsey College,
two Hospitals in London and Nine other townes, besides Villages, where I
have Deputys, Physitians, Chyrurgeons, and Martials, who employ me with
buisinesse sufficient to take up any one persons time’.7 In tandem with the
complications of war, plague began to seep into the men’s writing as the year
progressed—first in their diaries and then into their correspondence.
The diaries Evelyn and Pepys kept provide an additional vantage point
from which to explore how pestilence was textually constructed in relation
to conflict. This triumvirate of texts—two diaries and their shared letters—
captures a complex view of the outbreak as it reached its gruesome climax
in England against a backdrop of war. Portraits of the ailing seamen and
prisoners provide a parallel image of suffering to those of the plague
victims. Evelyn describes men who are mentally and physically falling
apart. They are driven to desperation by the situation, the prisoners ema-
ciated with hunger, for ‘we have no bread to relieve the dying Creatures’,
and other men’s bodies broken by their injuries and sickness, ‘dissabl’d by
ulcerate sores of inveterate Malignity’.8 This chapter explores the writing
that emerged from Evelyn and Pepys in their diaries and in their correspon-
dence, as well as correspondence that the two exchanged with others,
addressing how plague fit into the landscape of a country at war. The
connection between war, pestilence and famine had long been made in a
biblical context and in plague writing. This chapter addresses how these
afflictions were framed in Evelyn’s and Pepys’ writing, when real-life events
brought this connection to life. Furthermore, bodies encountered in the
epidemic and from the war become textually intertwined. In Evelyn’s sphere,
THE DIARISTS, THE DIARIES AND CORRESPONDENCE 163
the sick and wounded were numerous. Long before plague had reached its
most treacherous heights in the city, he was closely involved with men
suffering from horrific war injuries, including those having lost limbs in
battle.9 This chapter concludes with an examination of the fragmentation
rife in war and plague times—individual’s bodies divided and broken by
plague and war, bodies of people separated during the outbreak and the
moments of fracture that emanated from these events.
THE DIARISTS, THE DIARIES AND CORRESPONDENCE

Despite their vastly differing beginnings—Pepys was born to a tailor while
Evelyn’s family were accepted members of the gentry by the time the
diarist was born—the two men would establish a long friendship, captured
in their correspondence over five decades. Evelyn received a local educa-
tion at a free school, rejecting his father’s bid to have his son taught at
Eton College.10 He attended Balliol College, Oxford, but did not gain a
degree ‘Like many of his rank’.11 He went on to travel extensively. After
the Restoration, his work as a Hurt and Sick Commissioner consumed a
great deal of his energy. Evelyn’s desperation in his early letters to Pepys
provides a compelling and emotional counterpoint to his diary entries
from the same period, which are more objectively delivered. In contrast
to Evelyn’s privileged beginnings, Pepys was born in London in 1633 to
an immediate family of modest means. His extended family’s valuable
connections opened a number of doors for him, particularly his father’s
aunt’s marriage to Sir Sydney Montagu of Hinchingbrooke.12 Pepys
would owe much of his later opportunities and success to support from
Montagu’s son, Edward Mountagu.13 Pepys studied at St. Paul’s school in
London and later attended University of Cambridge. Opportunities swiftly
unfolded following Mountagu’s appointment as the Earl of Sandwich and
the Garter on 2 June 1660, and Pepys was soon thereafter posted as Clerk of
the Acts at the Navy Board, building on some small experience gained on
earlier voyages serving as secretary to Mountagu at sea.14
Pepys and Evelyn gained recognition as diarists, whose two works of life
writing recorded essential details of the time around Restoration England,
including the Great Plague of London; however, neither diary was
penned in the linear fashion that the frequent dates and corresponding
entries at first suggest. Evelyn began recording the notes that would become
the basis for his diary at 11 years of age.15 The year 1665 is contained in a
work entitled Kalendarium (BL Add. MSS 78323–78325), which addresses
the years 1620 to 1697.16 The portion of Kalendarium describing 1665 was
composed after December 1680.17 In his edition of Pepys and Evelyn’s
correspondence, Guy de la Bédoyère provides an apt description of the
diary: ‘Evelyn was writing for an audience, and on more than one occasion
indicates that he expected it to be read’.18 The diary vacillates between
‘personal reflections’ and what has been described as ‘news reporting’.19
The non-linear path of the writing process is written into the diary, which
includes ‘forward references’, which describe events that occurred later than
the diary entries are labelled.20 The section of the diary describing the 1665
plague outbreak is derived from what may be described as ‘full and systematic
notes’ that are ‘occasionally expanded by explanatory and memoir-like pas-
sages’.21 Pepys’ diary also reveals the practice of returning after periods of time
to compose his entries, which Pepys himself notes in its pages. The script, ink
and tidy nature of the composition indicate the diary was a ‘fair copy’; how-
ever, some additions were inserted into the work at a later date, as evidenced
by changes in the script.22 As such, some material was first recorded in notes
and in other places the material appears to have derived from a previous draft
of the text.23 From the work that has been completed on reconstructing how
Pepys and Evelyn composed the diaries that we read today, it becomes clear
that each diary was fashioned through a process that provided opportunities
for background revision, emendation and addition over time.
The letters passed between the two men during the outbreak leave little
room for the type of reflection over weeks or years that is evident in the
diaries. Their inherent urgency conveys circumstances that were rapidly
developing and that required quick-fire responses, particularly on Evelyn’s
part in his letters to Pepys, given the magnitude of the tasks he faced. Even
in the letters, however, the final copy sent to a recipient only reflects one
part of a process of composition, transcription and copying that a single
letter could represent. Letters may have existed in drafts or copies, or as
the version ultimately conveyed to its recipient, the ‘letter-sent’.24
Evelyn’s own letter-writing habits indicate he first completed a draft and
then worked on what would become the letter-sent, sometimes leaving a
gap between composing a draft and sending a final letter.25 The care taken
with composing drafts, tracking and copying correspondence—Evelyn
copied out a series of letters he sent years after the correspondence was
initially exchanged—explains the extent of their correspondence that
survives.26 Similarly, Pepys also recorded drafts of letters, composing these
in shorthand at times.27 He chronologically recorded copies of certain
letters he sent, and even some of those he received, into letterbooks.28
WAR, PESTILENCE AND FAMINE 165
Together, the letters and the diaries reveal a great deal about how plague
was understood against a context of war.
WAR, PESTILENCE AND FAMINE

Pestilence: Why, I slay forty thousand in one battle,
Full of blue wounds, whose cold clay bodies look Like speckled marble.
As for lame persons, and maim’d soldiers
There I outstrip thee too. How many swarms of bruisèd and cracked people
did I leave,
Their groins sore pierced with pestilential shot,
Their armpits digged with blains and ulcerous sores
Lurking like poisoned bullets in their flesh?29
When Pestilence boasts to War in Thomas Middleton’s plague pamphlet The

Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, ‘Why, I slay forty thousand in one battle,/
Full of blue wounds’, in a battle of wits between the two afflictions, the
suffering she inflicts occupies a literary space shared by the spectres of War
and Famine. In this verse dialogue, the three afflictions are joined in a literary
world, cloaked in black humour. Pestilence asserts her dominance by noting
her ability to mark the skin and to do so indiscriminately: ‘There I outstrip thee
too. How many swarms/Of bruisèd and cracked people did I leave . . . Their
armpits digged with blains, and ulcerous sores/Lurking like poisoned bullets
in their flesh?’ The dialogue sees an impossible rhetorical argument be-
ing fought between these personified characters. To kill indiscriminately, to
inflict plague’s bullet to the flesh, not unlike a festering war wound—while
Pestilence attempts to claim her superiority, she concurrently demonstrates
ways in which the wounds that plague and war inflict align. The connection
between the three afflictions had been long established, with 2 Samuel 24:13
referring to plague, war and famine in tandem, as Gad asks David which of the
three punishments he would receive from God for his sin. The three miseries
were invoked in sixteenth-century plague texts, constructed as the torments
that punished citizens’ sins.30 Furthermore, the language of war was a com-
mon feature of early modern plague writing, with plague represented as an
invader in the body.31 These fabled foes of life—plague, war and famine—
gained a new foothold during the crises facing London in 1665, when circum-
stances saw the three afflictions culminate in a harrowing year in English
history. In Pepys’ and Evelyn’s correspondence and diaries, the three afflictions
become puppeteers, dictating how the two diarists negotiate the tricky chaos
that emerges with a plague visitation in the midst of the Second Anglo Dutch
War. War is present as a subject before plague is reported in the diaries or
letters, and pestilence must be accommodated within the context of the
conflict between the English and the Dutch. The hunger associated with
famine emerges, too, with Evelyn frequently worrying that he cannot feed
the men under his care. In the earliest days of 1665, and indeed prior to this,
the threat of war was the subject of gossip and debate, as aggressions and
conflicts were reported with fervour. Given Pepys’ and Evelyn’s professional
lives, the war and its early manifestations were of direct consequence to their
work. Never in Middleton’s verse does the pamphleteer and dramatist attempt
to reconcile the debate between Pestilence and War except by way of framing
his narrative of a plague outbreak with the dialogue. In contrast, during the
tense late summer and autumn months of 1665, when war and plague and
even hunger amongst those under Evelyn’s care flared up in England, the
afflictions seemed to work concurrently to flummox Pepys and Evelyn.
Taking stock of his growing finances, his family and his relationships in
his diary entry at the end of 1664, Pepys marvelled at his good fortune.
Toward the close of this entry, however, he touched on his growing
concern over the conflict with the Dutch:
Public matters are all in a hurry about a Dutch Warr. Our preparations are
great. Our provocations against them great; and after all our presumption,
we are now afeared as much of them as we lately contemned them.32
This foreboding statement amidst positive reflections foreshadows the offi-

cial beginning of the conflict England would face in 1665. Despite impend-
ing war, the New Year made a quiet entry for each diarist. Pepys reported
lingering in bed on 1 January 1665, then spending a lengthy day at
the office, reviewing his accounts. Evelyn launched a writing project at
the beginning of January, recording the publication of The Mysterie of
Jesuitisme—‘translat(e)d & collected by me, though without name’—in his
diary.33 The literary pursuit did not go unnoticed, and on 26 January 1665,
Evelyn noted: ‘his Majestie came to me standing in the Withdrawing roome,
& gave me thanks for publishing the Mysterie of Jesuitisme, which he said he
had carried 2 days in his pocket, read it, & encouragd me’.34 Contrary to
these quietly positive diary entries, Pepys and Evelyn faced imminent chal-
lenges. Public worry and festering fear over impending war foreshadowed
the horrors that would encompass England in 1665. On the third of January,
Pepys described buzzing talk about the Dutch at the coffee-house, as gossip
surrounding recent events captures the diarist’s attention, with ‘certain news
that the Dutch have taken some of our Colliers to the north—some say four,
some say seven’.35 The coffee-house served as a space where news and gossip
could be shared and collected. Kate Loveman has traced the importance of
Pepys’ coffee-house visits in relation to his understanding of the war: “He
often went to coffee-houses as part of his research into naval affairs and to
gather information in the run-up to the Second Dutch War, which was
officially declared in London in March 1665, although hostilities had
begun months before”.36 Evelyn, too, found himself preoccupied with
naval affairs at the beginning of the year, countering space the diarist
allocated to more enjoyable literary pursuits. On the fourth of January, he
detailed his efforts ‘to settle Physitians, Chirurgeons, Agents, Martials &
other offices in all the SeaPorts, to take Care of such as should be set on
shore, Wounded, sick or Prisoner &c in pursuance of our Commission’.37
Early hostilities led to casualties, whom Evelyn would manage well before
war being officially declared. War was anticipated before its official beginning
and several months before plague became a public concern.
Pepys noted in his diary that despite ending April ‘in great content as to
my estate’, the roiling troubles of the war and plague were playing on his
mind: ‘The fleet, with about 106 ships, upon the coast of Holland, in sight
of the Dutch within the Texell. Great fears of the Sickenesse here in the
City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God
preserve us all’.38 War is one topic amongst many amidst the day-to-day
entries in the diaries, in which war and associated references only form a
portion of the activities, conversations and business interactions that
occupy Pepys and Evelyn. The same may not be said of the letters that
passed between the two men. In these, war becomes the primary subject,
other topics forming a white noise secondary to this primary concern.
Based on the surviving letters, it was at the end of April that, amidst
growing worries over caring for the sick from war, Evelyn and Pepys
took up correspondence with one another. The first surviving letters
passed between the men focused on the professional concerns that natu-
rally followed Pepys as Clerk of the Acts in the Navy Office and Evelyn in
his role as a Commissioner for the Sick and Wounded.39 The first known
letter, from Pepys, enquires of Evelyn after a conflict with ‘a Hollander’ off
the Irish coast that resulted in wounded men, and how or if they might
receive care in Ireland. Evelyn responds that provisions are not organized
for the sick or wounded in Ireland—‘there is neither in our Commission,
or Instructions the least mention made of any provision for Sick and
Wounded-men in Ireland’.40 The early letters exchanged were largely

perfunctory, but as the war took hold and pestilence began to enter the
public consciousness, Evelyn’s tone would change dramatically.
Following a visit to a coffee house on 24 May, Pepys notes that the
subject of the Dutch is joined by pressing worries over the disease encom-
passing the city: ‘Thence to the coffee-house with Creed, where I have not
been a great while—where all the news is of the Dutch being gone out—
and of the plague growing upon us in this town and of remedies against it;
some saying one thing, some another’.41 Plague appeared in the diaries
before any mention in the letters. By September of 1665, when the
contagion reached great heights, it, too, began to infect their correspon-
dence with one another. Evelyn wrote to Pepys on 30 September 1665,
noting: ‘One of my men, this afternoone, desiring to be dismissd in regu
[ar]d of the Contagion’.42 Evelyn reveals the anxieties of those men under
his care, already victims of war. The correspondence gestures to the extent
to which this fear infects those he is attempting to manage.
The descriptions of sick and injured seamen, victims of the Second
Anglo Dutch War, precede the outbreak and then provide a parallel
story to the illness encroaching on the city of London. The connections
between plague and the sick seamen ran more than parallel at times,
colliding in such a way at the height of the epidemic that they would
become entwined; in turn, the two diarists and letter writers also
became directly implicated in the outbreak, more so than as uninfected
observers living amidst contagion. The victims of plague were not the
only sick bodies that emerged in 1665. Evelyn’s and Pepys’ letters in
1665 dealt primarily with their involvement with the sick seamen. As
plague spread through the city, it necessarily altered how each carried
out his professional obligations. Plague had wider implications for naval
matters and was perceived as a real threat to the navy’s ambitions,
having the potential to shape the navy’s activities.43 Ships were long
seen as a point of contact between nations and the disease they might
harbour, creating fear over the potential for contagion to pass from one
nation to another when a ship landed. Quarantining ships was estab-
lished practice by 1665 to prevent contagion.44 Quarantine measures
had been invoked, for example, only two years earlier in 1663 to
manage the threat of infection from Amsterdam and Hamburg, with
a comprehensive series of precautions established, including navy
patrols, health certificates and quarantine, to manage vessels from
these infected areas.45 The fear of plague from other nations breaching
British soil, however, was not the only way in which sea life was
implicated in a plague outbreak. Work at sea could also provide a
protective barrier from infection, and for those fighting, their distance
from the epidemic provided protection as ‘plague never reached the
fleet’.46 Any protective barrier was trumped in the aftermath of conflict,
however, and the ‘fighting season was relatively short’.47 The plague
meant greater scrutiny of the men in case they spread the disease and
additional challenges securing them accommodation, with some of
them becoming homeless.48 The separation of those on land from
those at sea and the potential for contamination when these worlds
collided became central points of concern in the letters, particularly
once the enormity of the outbreak became evident. Plague was not just
a potential threat to Evelyn’s charges. By the time the outbreak took
hold, Evelyn was not only managing sick and wounded seamen who
had been injured in duties relating to war, but he was also dealing with
the insidious threat of plague amongst his men.
When the contagion reached its greatest heights during the epi-
demic, it, too, began to infect Pepys and Evelyn’s correspondence
with one another and others, while maintaining its ongoing presence
in the diaries. Writing to his wife, Mary, in August, Evelyn lamented,
‘the contagion being sadly broaken in amongst my sick-men I must
settle pest ships before I stirr and allay some disorders at Chelsey’.49
He corroborates these worries about the welfare of the men and
plague, writing in his diary in September:
Came home, there perishing now neere ten-thousand poore Creatures

weekely: however I went all along the Citty & suburbs from Kent streete
to St. James’s, a dismal passage & dangerous, to see so many Cofines exposd
in the streetes & the streete thin of people, the shops shut up, & all in
mourne-full silence, as not knowing whose turne might be next: I went to
the D: ofAlbemarle for a Pest-ship, to waite on our infected men, who were
not a few:50
The number of dead, 10,000, stands in mocking contrast to the streets, ‘thin
of people’. Sick citizens had to be managed. At first describing the suffering
around him on land as an observer, ‘dangerous to see so many coffins
exposed in the streets’, Evelyn then becomes an active participant in the
outbreak when he describes his own role in managing the sick seamen, using
language that merges with the perils of the outbreak in the city, where the
sick might be sent to a pest-house instead of a pest-ship. Pest-ship is defined

as ‘a ship for the reception of those suffering from a plague’ or ‘a ship having
any infectious disease on board’.51 He refers to this search for a pest-ship a
number of times in his correspondence with Pepys and others. In a letter to
Pepys dated 13 October 1665, Evelyn wrote: ‘There is likewise another
Calamity on me, from the negligence of others; therefore (though the
occasion be very instant, as to those Vessells for our pestiferous men) I
must defer the kissing of your hands til to morrow’.52 In these texts—the
letters exchanged and in the diary entries—ships are constructed as spaces
where plague and war collide. This search for a pest-ship places plague within
the confines of the war already being fought.
Evelyn interprets the twin sicknesses that emerged first from war and then
from the outbreak quantitatively, writing these into his letters as a way to
comprehend and convey the magnitude of the crises he faced. His corre-
spondence reveals a numbering and figuring of not only the dead but also the
financial burden he faced, in contrast to the morbid accounting Gilman notes
in Pepys’ diary, in which Pepys sees his fortune grow as the death toll from
plague rises.53 Letters sent at the height of the plague outbreak reveal a type
of numerical figuring that could as easily be applied to the sick individuals
under his care as to the victims of plague.54 In the month of September, as
the outbreak reached unspeakable heights, Evelyn reflected on mortality
statistics and their inadequacy. Writing to Henry Hyde, Catherine of
Braganza’s private secretary who would be made her lord chamberlain in
1665, Evelyn described his concerns over the spread of plague:
After 6978 (and possible halfe as many more conceil’d) which the Pestilence has
mow’d downe in London this Weeke: neere 30 houses visited in this miserable
Village, whereoff one has beene the very neerest to my dwelling; after a servante
of mine now sick of a swelling (whom we have all frequented, before our
suspicion was considerable pregnant) and which we know not where will deter-
mine; behold me a living monument of God-Almightys protection and mercy:55
He quotes two statistics in the passage in relation to the plague outbreak.

First, he notes the number of dead, expressing scepticism over the figure
and speculating that ‘possible halfe as many more conceil’d’. He notes a
second statistic, commenting that 30 houses have been visited ‘in this
miserable Village’ and an accompanying fear that plague is encroaching on
him, ‘one has beene very neerest to my dwelling’. Statistical interpretation
of sickness was not relegated to plague. As the letter progresses, Evelyn
begins to list numbers related instead to the burden of managing the sick
under his care, ‘these poore Creatures, the Sick and Wounded Sea-men
under mine Inspection through all the Ports of my district’, writing: ‘The
Prisoners of Warr, our Infirmitories, and the Languishing in 12 other
places; the charge of Sallaries to Physitians, Chyrurgeons, Officers,
Medicaments, and Quarters, require speedy, and considerable supplies;
lesse then £2000 a Weeke will hardly support us’.56 Evelyn quantifies his
own sense of helplessness. The epidemic is encroaching and far from seeing
the end of its spread, Evelyn supposes it to be worse than what has been
stated. Providing for those under his care proves impossible given the
corresponding cost of payments to employ the required personnel. The
timing of the outbreak resulted in the visitation and the conflict becoming
textually connected tragedies within the context of the letters and diaries.
Even as the visitation began to recede, the textual and real connections
between war and the outbreak continued. The relationship between the
two, however, was not always negative in nature. As with so many citizens
who remained in London during the outbreak, from religious figures to
medical practitioners, the plague outbreak brought with it certain oppor-
tunities. These were frequently dark in nature, but it cannot be denied that
the disease made room for a nonconformist to take up preaching again and
for a Helmontian physician to increase iatrochemical understanding of the
disease. In a letter penned 7 December 1665, when the colder months saw
the epidemic abate, Evelyn approached Pepys for further advice on the sick
and wounded seamen, writing:
There are likewise more then 50, who being Old-Men, tabid, inveteratly
Ulcer’d and universaly infirme, will never be render’d serviceable to his
Majestie but have layne at prodigious expenses for Cure: As many as I
have been able to convey, I have removed into the London Hospitals
(since the abating of the Contagion amongst them has again opned their
doores)57
As plague recedes the hospitals are now prepared to take patients, a new
space where Evelyn’s sick men may seek the care they require. The two
worlds of the plague outbreak and war, which seem both parallel but
separate for much of the letters passed between Pepys and Evelyn, become
a meeting point for discussions about the sick men. The sick men are no
longer simply the victims of war but their fortunes are now tied to the
thousands of victims of the outbreak.
FRAGMENTING THE BODY

The process of breaking down the body into its composite parts through
dissection gained traction during the early modern period.58 The growth
of print culture in early modern Europe contributed, in part, to increased
individualism.59 As greater emphasis was placed on the individual a corre-
sponding interest emerged in the composite parts of the body, leading to
the ‘rise of anatomy’.60 One of the most iconic images that survives from
the plague outbreak of 1665 was the frontispiece of the Helmontian
physician George Thomson’s plague tract Loimotomia, which depicts the
dissection of a plague victim. Rapt audiences observed dissections in early
modern anatomy theatres, with knowledge of the body’s inner workings
increasing as dissected corpses were broken down by each cut, the anato-
mical gaze furthering physiological insight. These increasingly detailed
glimpses beneath the surface of the skin led to unprecedented advances
in anatomical and medical understanding. Plague times were rife with an
analogous fragmentation of the self, of bodies of people and of geogra-
phical spaces. Dissection, defined as ‘The action or process of cutting
asunder or in pieces; division by cutting’, is not unlike the sharp cuts
that ran through a country and society during a plague outbreak.61
From shutting plague victims in their homes, cut off from society, to the
flight of the wealthy from the city, fragmentation was central to how
plague was officially and unofficially managed. In a particularly stark
retelling of the plague-time dissection of society, Pepys recounts the
story of a family cut apart by plague, dismembered person by person:
Among other stories, one was very passionate methought – of a com-

plaint brought against a man in the town for taking a child from
London from an infected house. Alderman Hooker told us it was the
child of a very able citizen in Gracious-street, a saddler, who had
buried all the rest of his children of the plague; and himself and wife
now being shut up, and in despair of escaping, did desire only to save
the life of this little child; and so prevailed to have it received stark-
naked into the arms of a friend, who brought it (having put it in to
new fresh clothes) to Grenwich;62
The cuts Pepys describes were morally ambiguous. Fracture could be seen
as a positive or a negative in plague times. Quarantining measures that
dictated shutting people in their homes, in an effort to thwart the spread
of disease, were enacted to save others from infection but became a death
FRAGMENTING THE BODY 173
sentence for those sequestered in this way. Pepys agrees with the saddler’s
actions to move his only surviving child from infection, possibly risking
spreading the infection further. However, when contact with potential
infection threatened the diarist, Pepys’ perception could just as easily shift
to concerns of self-protection. Plague caused societal breaks to form,
deftly dividing the whole in the name of survival but concurrently result-
ing in further suffering. In this climate of fracture, increasing attention was
paid to how the plague body could be separated and split, either through a
process of dissection to gain greater knowledge, as in Thomson’s plague
dissection, or as a result of being broken down or subverted by the disease
itself. The symptoms of a plague infection saw parts of the body divided
from itself, with bleeding from the mouth and vomiting, the insides of the
body displaced. If a patient sought treatment from a Galenic physician,
purgatives and blood-letting could potentially be used to treat the victim,
with bodily separations sought after for therapeutic ends. Tissue can
become blackened and unrecognizable in a plague infection, and in
twenty-first century instances of the disease digits have been amputated
in order for recovery to begin. Under the complications of plague, the
Mayo Clinic lists gangrene, with amputation noted as a potential treat-
ment: ‘Blood clots in the tiny blood vessels of your fingers and toes can
disrupt the flow of blood and cause that tissue to die. The portions of your
fingers and toes that have died may need to be amputated’.63 A healthy
and complete functioning body was the exception during a plague visita-
tion, both for the individual sufferer but also for the city under siege.
The fragmentation of bodies and of society was not relegated to the
disease in 1665. Instances of fracture, too, extended to the treatment of
the sick seamen under Evelyn’s care. Evelyn describes men who are at
points not allowed to leave the water over plague fears. Relegated to their
vessels of suffering, these men seem broken off from existence on land.
Evelyn also describes men whose bodies have been dismembered in war,
where fragmentation is visible in their compromised physicality. While
plague was a muffled backdrop in much of the correspondence between
Evelyn and Pepys, the war in which each of the men was professionally
invested created a second space of bodily deterioration in 1665 England.
In the early modern period, taking stock of the individual sections of the
body, its fragmented self, was deemed a valuable method of increasing
understanding of the whole. By fracturing and fragmenting the body,
greater insight could be gained into its workings. The anatomy theatres
of the early modern period saw bodies broken down as understanding of
their inner workings was built up. In other instances, such as during a war
or a plague outbreak, dismemberment and fragmentation of the body, of
the individual and of the nation, did not build up knowledge but instead
broke down meaning.
In his diary, Pepys describes negotiating the invisible fractures that
emerged in plague times and the subsequent threat of those divisions
being breached. At times, he reflects on plague victims from a distance,
seeming cut-off from the horrors he describes. He demarcates a division
between his personal space in contrast to the outside spaces he encounters.
The result is a sense that Pepys is separate from and watching a theatrical
presentation take place just out of reach: ‘So to dinner—to London to
pack up more things thence; and there I looked into the street and saw
Fires burning in the street, as it is through the whole City by the Lord
Mayors order’.64 He occupies the place of an observer in the passage,
looking out at the signifiers of an infected city, fires burning to cleanse the
air of disease. Reflecting on the brutality of these cuts in society, Pepys
describes sympathetically the situation of people kept against their will
during the outbreak:
But it troubled me to pass by Come Farme, where about 21 people have

died of the plague—and three or four days since I saw a dead corpse in a
Coffin lie in the close unburyed—and a watch is constantly kept there, night
and day, to keep the people in—the plague making us cruel as dogs one to
another.65
In contrast to his sympathetic tone, in the same lines he is disturbed when

passing the infected space, ‘it troubled me to pass by Come Farme’. The
coffin he sees, ‘in the close unburyed’, narrated alongside the number who
have died there, 21, elicits a complex, if expected, reaction of fear and
empathy from the diarist. The sense of safety that Pepys achieves through
the surveillance of the fracture between healthy and corrupted spaces
could easily break down, however, threatening order. When the division
between Pepys and others who are potential hosts for the disease is
dissolved the result is singular fear:
I did wonder to see the Change so full, I believe 200 people; but not a man
or merchant of any fashion, but plain men all. And Lord, to see how I did
endeavour all I could to talk with as few as I could, there being now no
observation of shutting up of houses infected, that to be sure we do converse

and meet with people that have the plague upon them.66
Pepys describes the breakdown of official rules that navigate the division
between health and illness. When the official measures for managing the
outbreak dissolve alongside the capacity to patrol one’s healthy personal
space, as in the ‘Change so full’, the resulting fear of infection sees the real
tainted by the imagined. Pepys does not describe seeing plague’s visible
marks on the bodies of those he meets, but with the dissolution of official
dictates that surveilled the divide between health and sickness, came an
understanding that plague could no longer be controlled. Fractures in
society, both upheld through official orders and established by an indivi-
dual in the name of self-preservation, were fraught. These borders repre-
sented a constant tension in plague times. From a distance, breaching
these divisions seems humane and right, such as with the sadler’s child, but
when confronted with the real threat of disease—‘we do converse and
meet with people that have the plague upon them’—fear of transgressing
these invisible fractures is not only palpable but a matter of survival.
The divisions and cuts that emerged during an outbreak were not only
societal but also bodily. Once the self was divided into parts, the result
could be unsettling and disturbing. On 18 September, Pepys recounts that
Lord Sandwich had feared him dead when the two had no communication
for some time: ‘I hear by everybody how much my poor Lord of Sandwich
was concerned for me during my silence awhile, lest I had been dead of the
plague in this sickly time’.67 Ever vigilant about maintaining the boundary
between himself and the sickness—what seems to the diarist to be a
fracture of survival in plague times—the quotation sees Pepys given abso-
lutely to infection until death, at least in rumour. Pepys becomes a plague
victim in this unusual anecdote that lives in the realm of gossip and
speculation, his body imagined succumbing to the disease. Pepys loses
control of the invisible divisions he erects and surveils in plague times. In a
second example of the self being cut and divided during the outbreak,
Pepys describes the simple processes of grooming and dressing oneself and
the corresponding undoing of the body, writing on 3 September:
Up, and put on my colourd silk suit, very fine, and my new periwigg, bought
a good while since, but darst not wear it because the plague was in
Westminster when I bought it. And it is a wonder what will be the fashion
after the plague is done as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire
for fear of the infection—that it had been cut off of the heads of people dead
of the plague.68
The hypothetical plague victim’s body has been fragmented after death
from the disease, broken apart for the sake of commerce. Hair separated
from its original body becomes a perceived potential source of infection. It
inspires foreboding when reunited with a new body in the context of an
outbreak. The fragmentation that can be charted in Pepys’ and Evelyn’s
writings goes beyond the unsettling notion of a wig providing a vehicle for
the disease. The bodily and societal divisions that were so closely mon-
itored revealed breaches to their integrity. Some of these were for a greater
moral cause, but for the most part this breakdown represents a descent
into chaos.
Descriptions of the men under Evelyn’s care often veer into fragmented
territory, where one part is divided from the rest and the remaining parts
do not match up, not unlike Pepys’ morbid musings about the original
owner of the hair used in his periwigg. The peripheral existence of the
seamen, neither here nor there, waiting for their fate to be decided by the
financial whims and bureaucracy that Evelyn wades through in his letters
portrays them as separate from society. While their position when separate
from land and fighting has been described as a saving grace in relation to
the outbreak, attempting to resolve the problem of their purgatory
becomes a central focus in Evelyn’s letters, and is even referred to by
Pepys, once they are back on English shores. On 30 September, Pepys
recorded in his diary:
The great burden we have upon us at this time at the office is the providing
for prisoners and sick men that are recovered, they lying before our office-
doors all night and all day, poor wretches. Having been on shore, the
Captains won’t receive them on board, and other ships we have not to put
them on, nor money to pay them off or provide for them. God remove this
difficulty.69
There is nowhere for these men. Once away from conflict, they are at the
whims of a political system in which their plight is lost in bureaucracy and
they are portrayed as having very little opportunity for recourse. Plague
further added to their despair. They exist in a no-man’s land, their service
unacknowledged once they return to their own shores. The struggle in
negotiating the divide between land and sea is further complicated by the
plague outbreak. On 3 October, Evelyn wrote to Pepys, describing these

challenging negotiations: ‘Sir, I have had earnest intreaties from Severall of
the Commanders (riding before Woolwich) to dispose of their Sick- and
wounded-men on shore, but the Clearke of the Cheque there repoches
our Chyrurgeon, and obstructs the effect of the Warrant I sent to the
Connestable, upon a pretence, of bringing the Contagion amongst
them’.70 Evelyn laments in the same letter, ‘what I shall do with these
miserable Creatures, who are not able to move?’.71 The separation of the
men leaves them incapable of moving across established divides and stuck
in their unfavourable conditions.
Most strikingly, Evelyn describes instances of men who bodies have been
fragmented by war. War reaped shocking dislocations and amongst the most
horrific of these were amputations. In a gruesome description from the Third
Dutch War on 14 March 1672, Evelyn describes witnessing an amputation:
I din’d with Mr. Commissioner Cox having seene that morning my Chirurgeon
cut off a poore creaturs Leg, a little under the knee, first cutting the living &
untainted flesh above the Gangreene with a sharp knife, and then sawing off
the bone in an instant; then with searing & stoopes stanching the blood,
which issued aboundantly; the stout & gallant man, enduring it with incred-
ible patience, & that without being bound to his chaire, as is usual in such
painefull operations, or hardly making a face [or crying oh]: I had hardly
courage enough to be present, nor could I endure to se any more such cruel
operations.: The leg was so rotten & gangreen’d, that one might have run a
straw through it; but neither did this the cure, for it not being amputated
high-enough, the gangreene prevaild upon the knee, & so a second amputa-
tion of the Thigh, cost the poore Creature his life, to my very greate sorrow:72
War-time fragmentation comes in two forms—dismemberment or

instances where the exterior of the body has been broken by sores,
described in terms that could as easily be descriptions of the tokens and
buboes of a plague victim on the brink of death. In these images, the
men’s bodies have been broken down and rendered no longer useful
within their professional sphere. On 4 November, Evelyn writes to
Pepys: ‘I have six or seaven men who have spent us a greate deale of
mony, and care at Deale, who are likely never to be cured, having some
of them been dissmembrd, others dissabl’d by ulcerate sores of inveterate
malignity, totaly unfit for service’.73 The men’s appearance has been for-
ever altered by their wounds. These images that divide the body into its
parts are brutal and shocking. Evelyn does not describe the process
through which the men have been dismembered, but amputations to
treat war wounds no doubt occurred. These comments on fragmentation
also give us insight into a society divided by plague and war. The fine
balance between partitioned entities and the whole they seek to join or
reject become fixations in war and in a visitation.
CONCLUSION
When war, hunger and pestilence collided in England’s last major plague
epidemic, these united textual afflictions became tangible concerns for
Pepys and Evelyn. Evelyn, in particular, found himself at a loss to deal
with the hunger and sickness plaguing those he was responsible for, with
the visitation hampering his efforts to provide and organize adequate care
for the sick seamen and prisoners of war. As the two diarists navigated the
shared challenges posed by contagion and war, the foundation of a future
friendship was laid in the correspondence and professional concerns they
shared. The similarities between the afflictions they describe in 1665, war
and pestilence, create a striking literary space in the diaries and correspon-
dence where the connections between these crises could be explored.
Furthermore, their writing about the outbreak in reference to the conflict
meant these texts carve out an additional space in which to explore the
unique ways of describing plague that became possible within the histor-
ical context of Restoration England.
NOTES
1. Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman 1200–1860: A Social Survey
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1970), p. 96.
2. Gillian Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2006), p. 192. (Darley 2006)
3. Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity, p. 192. (Darley 2006)
4. Lloyd, The British Seaman, p. 96; Gillian Darley notes: “The commissioners
were expected to be superhuman”. Darley, John Evelyn: Living for
Ingenuity, p. 193. (Darley 2006)
5. John Evelyn, Particular Friends, ed. by Guy de la Bédoyère (Woodbridge,
UK: The Boydell Press, 1997), p. 33. (Evelyn 1997)
6. Beatrice Saunders, John Evelyn and His Times (Oxford: Pergamon Press,
1970), p. 75. (Saunders 1970)
7. In the margin: ‘which belongs to all 4 Commissioners and not to my care
alone’, Evelyn, Particular Friends, p. 39. (Evelyn 1997)
NOTES 179
8. Evelyn, Particular Friends, p. 46 (Evelyn 1997); The Letterbooks of John

Evelyn, ed. by Douglas C. Chambers and David Galbraith, vol. 1 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2014), p. 391. (Evelyn 2014)
9. Saunders, John Evelyn and His Times, p. 72. (Saunders 1970)
10. Chambers, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Chambers 2004)
12. C. S. Knighton, ‘Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703)’, Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept
2015 [www.oxforddnb.com] <accessed 15 March 2016>. (Knighton 2004)
13. Knighton, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Knighton 2004)
14. Knighton, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Knighton 2004)
17. Esmond Samuel de Beer, ‘The Diary: Purpose and Character’, in The Diary
of John Evelyn, ed. by Esmond Samuel de Beer, p. F73. (de Beer 1955)
18. Guy de la Bédoyère, ‘Introduction’, in Particular Friends, ed. by Guy de la
Bédoyère (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 7–16 (p. 11).
(Bédoyère 1997)
20. Esmond Samuel de Beer, ‘Introduction’, in The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by
Esmond Samuel de Beer, vol. I (1955), p. F71. (de Beer 1955)
21. De Beer, ‘Introduction’, p. F75. (de Beer 1955)
22. ‘Introduction’, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and
William Matthews, vol. 1, pp. xvii-cxxxvii (p. xcvii, c). (Pepys 2000)
23. ‘Introduction’, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 1, p xcviii. (Pepys 2000)
24. Bédoyère, ‘Introduction’, p. 18 (including text from footnote). (Bédoyère
1997)
25. Bédoyère, ‘Introduction’, p. 18. (Bédoyère 1997)
26. Bédoyère, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12, 18-19. (Bédoyère 1997)
27. Guy de la Bédoyère, ‘A Note About the Texts’, in Particular Friends, ed. by
Guy de la Bédoyère (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 1997),
pp. 17–25 (p. 20). (Bédoyère 1997)
28. Bédoyère, ‘A Note About the Texts’, p. 20. (Bédoyère 1997)
30. Healy points out that Henoch Clapham called upon the book of Samuel in his
1603 plague tract, An Epistle Discoursing Upon the Pestilence (1603), sig. B2v.,
describing ‘famine, sword and pestilence, are a trinitie of punishments prepared
of the Lord, for consuming a people that have sinned against him’. Margaret
Healy, ‘Discourses of the Plague in Early Modern England’, in Epidemic Disease
in London, ed. by J. A. I. Champion (London: Centre for Metropolitan History
Working Papers Series: 1993), pp. 19–34 (p. 20).
31. Rebecca Totaro, ‘Introduction’, Representing the Plague in Early Modern

England, ed. by Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman (New York:
Routledge: 2011), pp. 1–33 (p. 6).
32. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 5 (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 2000), p. 360. (Pepys 2000)
33. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 394. (Evelyn 1955)
35. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, pp. 3 (Pepys 2000).
36. Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys and his Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and
Sociability, 1660–1703 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 92. (Loveman
2015)
38. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, p. 93. (Pepys 2000)
39. Bédoyère, Particular Friends, p. 29. (Bédoyère 1997)
40. Evelyn, Particular Friends, p. 31. (Evelyn 1997)
43. Kevin Brown, Poxed and Scurvied: The Story of Sickness and Health at Sea
(Barnsley, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2011), p. 54. (Brown 2011)
44. Brown, Poxed and Scurvied, p. 54. (Brown 2011)
45. Porter, The Great Plague, p. 116. (Porter 2009)
46. Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2003), p. 166.
49. BL Add Ms 78431, John Evelyn to Mary Evelyn. The letter is quoted in,
Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity, p. 194. (Darley 2006)
51. “pest-ship, n.” OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2016) <oed.com>
[accessed 16 March 2016].
53. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England, p. 219-29 (Gilman 2009).
54. In ‘Style and Rhetoric in John Evelyn’s Letters’, Michael G. Ketcham
explains that ‘The letters while he served as Commissioner for the Sick
and Wounded, in particular, show the frustrations of the realm of waste
over which he has no control. Evelyn describes the wretched state of the
hospitals, yet, because he has no control over allocating money for them, he
must subordinate himself to those who do have some degree of power’.
Michael G. Ketcham, ‘Style and Rhetoric in John Evelyn’s Letters: A Study
in Seventeenth-Century Correspondence’, Papers on Language and
Literature, 19.3 (1983), 249–262 (p. 253).
NOTES 181
55. John Evelyn, The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, ed. by Douglas C. Chambers
and David Galbraith, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014),
p. 383. (Evelyn 2014)
56. Evelyn, The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, vol. 1, p. 383. (Evelyn 2014)
58. For a comprehensive examination of dissection in Renaissance England, see,
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 75.
(Sawday 1995)
59. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, ‘Introduction’, in The Body in Parts:
Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Hillman
and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. xi–xxix (p. xiii).
(Hillman and Mazzio 1997)
60. Hillman and Mazzio, ‘Introduction’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of
Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, p. xiii. (Hillman and Mazzio 1997)
61. “dissection, n.” OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2016) <oed.com>
[accessed 16 March 2016].
62. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, pp. 211–12. (Pepys 2000)
63. Mayo Clinic Staff, ‘Plague: Symptoms and Causes’ <www.mayoclinic.org/
diseases-conditions/plague/symptoms-causes/dxc-20196766> [accessed 8
September 2015]. (Mayo Clinic Staff 2016)
CHAPTER 7
Pestilential Poesies
Long are the years, Sir Critic, long,

Since you your galaxy of song
Set with such pomp and proud intent
Fair in the Muse’s firmament!
We can but smile at your acclaim,
Or be it praise, or be it blame;
-Whether at Milton’s fame you flout,
Cry how his candle is snuffed out,
And glory, in judicial ease,
O’er his poetic obsequies;
‘William Winstanley, Critic (1687)’ By Clinton Scollard
There remain few poetic responses to the Great Plague of London (1665).
Dwelling on the horrors of the year did not prove fertile for the writer’s
imagination. Against this backdrop of relative silence, two authors captured
the enormity of the outbreak in the small pages of a book and in lines of verse:
William Winstanley, at the height of the plague, in The Christians Refuge: Or
Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague in This Time of Generall Contagion. To
Which Is Added the Charitable Physician (1665)1 and William Austin, after
the threat of the disease had subsided, in Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the
Clinton Scollard, ‘William Winstanley, Critic (1687)’, in Lyrics from a Library

(New York: G. W. Browning, 1913), p. 27. (Scollard 1913)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_7
184 7 PESTILENTIAL POESIES
Pestilence (1666).2 Each author embraces verse, either in part as in

Winstanley’s case or in whole as in Austin’s text, to narrate the story of the
plague, challenging the dominant narratives of practicality that prevailed
during the outbreak. This chapter argues that Winstanley and Austin engage
with the moment of transformation in print culture that emerged during the
outbreak, Winstanley by harnessing the methods of conveying information
on plague made possible through the prevalence of the medium and Austin
by retrospectively interrogating the value and vagaries of this varied print
marketplace and the quality of the information it peddled. Authorship, para-
text and intertextuality mediate how Winstanley and Austin express their
views of the horrible year through the print medium and in lines of verse.
At the height of the plague, a physically diminutive book was made
available to the reading public, The Christians Refuge. Figure 7.1 Signed
only by the initials W. W., rendered in duodecimo and available for 8 d.,
The Christians Refuge exemplifies print production during England’s final
major plague outbreak. The timely text, a well-thumbed copy of which
may be found in the Wellcome Library, London, tackles plague as its
subject with gripping immediacy. The work is broken into four sections:
Fig. 7.1 Frontispiece and title page, W. W., The Christians Refuge (1665).
Credit: Wellcome Library, London
PESTILENTIAL POESIES 185
‘Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague’, ‘Meditations of the Miseries of

Mans Life’, ‘Meditations of Death’ and ‘Receits Against the Plague’. The
quotation prefacing this chapter describes William Winstanley, who I
argue composed The Christians Refuge.3 The frequency of plague in
early modern England allowed Winstanley to veer from his better known
roles as arbiter of success and failure in his works of biography, as
described in this epigraph, and as a humour author under the pseudonym
Poor Robin, and to instead engage with his reading audience as a plague
writer. From its extensive paratexts, including a table of mortality statistics
and woodcut of king death, to its temporal and providential interpretation
of the disease between the covers of a single text, The Christians Refuge is a
compendium of contemporary understanding of plague. The Christians
Refuge is an expression of London’s print marketplace in a moment of
transformation precipitated by the epidemic. This chapter considers the
paratextual elements in The Christians Refuge that engage with the pre-
siding norms in plague writing and publishing in 1665 and also explores
how Winstanley’s authorship is expressed in the work. Winstanley has long
been seen as a biographer or as a humour writer; attributing The Christians
Refuge extends and challenges previous perceptions of his work.
In the aftermath of the epidemic, Austin addressed the visitation in a
separate text. In his epic poem Epiloimia, Austin relates his story of the
outbreak while interrogating two aspects of print culture: firstly, print’s
capacity to convey truth and humanity during the stressful event of plague
and secondly the medium’s meaning to a seventeenth-century English
author. In Epiloimia, Austin embraces print for the sake of posterity.
The poem was composed for the medium to preserve in history the horror
of England’s final major plague epidemic. Though Austin intended to
print Epiloimia, he struggles throughout the poem with his perception of
print as an easily compromised medium. He questions the same medium
he uses for the sake of posterity, revealing the insufficiency of print during
an epidemic, when information spread through London, unchecked in
terms of value and circulation. Epiloimia focuses not only on the horrors
of the disease but also on the experience of living in a society responding
to a vast outbreak and with access to the far-reaching dissemination of
information that print offered, with seemingly few limits placed on what
was published. Meanwhile, his text, as a post-epidemic work, bears the
markers of the print marketplace it is destined for. Despite his qualms with
the medium, in Epiloimia Austin joins those he despises for the sake of the
memorialization he feels the devastation deserves.
These two books joined the myriad print responses to London’s final
plague epidemic, as two of but a few literary works about the outbreak, as
factual and practical works dominated the proliferation of print on the 1665
epidemic. Winstanley and Austin are plague writers, containing the disease
within their poetry and reflecting on its significance in literature. Winstanley
uses verse to amplify his message and Austin brings the subject of plague to
the elevated literary realm. Authorship, paratext and intertextuality come
together in each work to not only present the subject of plague but also
each author’s motivation in dealing with the topic. That Winstanley and
Austin wrote in verse is not exceptional. Austin was known for his poetry
and Winstanley composed a significant portion of his writing in verse. What
is notable is how each delivers the story of plague, engages with contem-
porary fears, and navigates and negotiates the print marketplace.
WINSTANLEY’S PESTILENTIAL POESIES

While the initials W. W. on the cover of The Christians Refuge gesture to
Winstanley’s authorship of the work, the author identifies himself through
references to his other writing in the body of the text. In a sidebar of the
section ‘Meditations of the Miseries of Mans Life’, Winstanley instructs his
reader as follows: ‘See my Book of Englands Worthies in the Life of Richard
Nevil, Earl of Warwick’.4 Published five years prior to The Christians Refuge,
the collection of biographies entitled England’s vvorthies. Select Lives of the
Most Eminent Persons from Constantine the Great, to the Death of Oliver
Cromwel Late Protector (1660) bears the author’s complete name followed
by ‘Gent’.5 A later note in The Christians Refuge directs the reader to a
separate text: ‘See my Book of Englands Triumphs’.6 The note likely refers to
Englands Triumph. A More Exact History of His Majesties Escape After the
Battle of Worcester, with a Chronologicall Discourse of His Straits and
Dangerous Adventures into France, and His Removes from Place to Place Till
His Return into England, with the Most Remarkable Memorials Since (1660),
which is thought to have possibly been authored by Winstanley.7 Based on this
textual evidence, I suggest that Winstanley authored The Christians Refuge.
Winstanley has not previously been thought of as a plague writer. In Plague
Writing in Early Modern England, however, Gilman proposes that we ‘con-
sider all literary texts written during plague times as plague texts’, and qualifies
this statement by suggesting that ‘all such texts may be seen to respond more
or less directly to the constant threat of epidemic meltdown in which their
authors lived’.8 In this context, literary writers who practiced their trade
WINSTANLEY’S PESTILENTIAL POESIES 187
during England’s early modern period were plague authors due to the enor-
mous impact of the disease. What remains unclear is why Winstanley chose to
write under only his initials in a work that, once read, unequivocally identifies
him as the author. Winstanley obscures his identity in The Christians Refuge.
Winstanley’s other literary efforts suggest he did not fear self-promotion,
further complicating an understanding of why the poet chose to compose The
Christians Refuge only under his initials; however, the author often manipu-
lated authorship. Known as a biographer and a poet, Winstanley published his
work extensively, and chose at different times and under different circum-
stances to publish under his name, a pseudonym or his initials. Winstanley’s
first foray into print culture was a collection of poems entitled The Muses
Cabinet, Stored with Variety of Poems, Both Pleasant and Profitable (1655),
published 10 years prior to his treatise on the plague.9 Winstanley also turned
his pen to the work of compiling biographies and asserting his opinion of the
various characters in English history, both political and literary. His compila-
tions of biographies, England’s vvorthies, The Loyall Martyrology and The Lives
of the Most Famous English Poets, clearly name Winstanley as author.
Alternatively, his adaptation of the character Poor Robin as a pseudonym
and applied to the very-popular almanacs Winstanley composed shows flex-
ibility in his approach to authorship, depending on the forum. William E.
Burns notes: ‘Although the works Winstanley published under his own name
were clearly much more erudite than the Poor Robin material, there was traffic
back and forth between the two personae’.10 Burns points to one example of
Winstanley writing anonymously in The Path-Way to Knowledge (1663), where
‘This traffic was . . . suppressed’, but provides no hypothesis for Winstanley’s
anonymity in the work.11 The same suppression Burns describes with regard to
The Path-Way to Knowledge is also evident in The Christians Refuge—at least
for the reader without access to the other two works referenced in the book.
Winstanley includes creative prose to appeal to his reader, at one point
using a medical metaphor that may be traced to the 1636 plague broadside
Lord Haue Mercy Vpon Vs A Speciall Remedy for the Plague (1636), with
somewhat different wording.12 The Bute Broadsides collection includes a
page from the 1665 visitation, entitled An Unparalel’d Antidote Against
the Plague: Or, a Special Remedy for a Sick Soul; Whereby a Sinner May
Recover Himself from the Vale of Teares to the Hill of Ioy, with another
version of the same receipt.13 As Winstanley’s primary concern is with
spiritual healing in The Christians Refuge, a sentiment at odds with the
medicines at the end of the text, this advice for mending the soul may be
found in the section ‘Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague’:
let me advise thee to use this medicine.

Take a quart of true Repentance, mixed with fasting and prayer and put
thereto four handfulls of faith in the blood of Christ to which ad as much
hope and Charity as you can procure: let a clean Conscience be the vessell to
receive all these, this done, boile it on the fire of love till such time as by the
eyes of faith you may perceive the darke scum of the love of this world to be
obnoxious to your stomach; then with the spoon of fervent prayer make all
clear and having added to it the powder of patience strain it altogether in the
Cloath of Christs innocency, and drink it for thy morning and Enemings
draught;14
He introduces the receipt as a medicine. In The Christians Refuge, the

medicinal metaphor clarifies the folly of focusing only on the body at
the expense of eternity. The language gains impact from its similarity to
the plague cures that found their way into much of the printed material
addressing the disease and which often appeared alongside prayers to
save the soul. Unlike receipts that combine a multitude of ingredients to
cure the body of plague, ‘Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague’
appeals to divine healing. In his earlier collection of poetry, The Muses
Cabinet, he includes a similar turn of phrase in ‘Contempt’, instructing
the reader to ‘Turn ore the leaves of famous Poets, swallow/Whole
Streames of Aganippe’.15 And again in The New Help to Discourse: Or,
Wit, Mirth, and Jollity Intermixt with More Serious Matters Consisting of
Pleasant Astrological, Astronomical, Philosophical, Grammatical, Physical,
Chyrurgical, Historical, Moral, and Poetical Questions and Answers
(1696; 2nd edn 1672), Winstanley describes his writing as having
medicinal qualities:
If thou art melancholly here are rare fancies to make the merry; so that with
what disease so ever thou art troubled with, here i[ . . . ] a Medicine for thy
Malady.
No Mountebank that thou on staged canst find
Can heal the body, as these will the minde.16
A precedent exists for Winstanley’s use of medicines for the soul and
insistence on the power of reading. In The Nature of the Book: Print and
Knowledge in the Making (1998), Adrian Johns describes the
Renaissance belief in the physiological impact of reading: ‘the powerful
effects of reading . . . were not only widely attested, but supported by
contemporary knowledge about human beings and the physical world

they inhabited’.17 Furthermore, Protestant beliefs demonstrated the
importance of reading to further religious study and practice. The
medicine instructs the reader to ready the soul through the act of
reading and to engage with the text to a spiritual end. Other plague-
time writings offered elixirs focused on redemption of the spirit and not
on saving the body. In 1604, a work by James Godskall entitled 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 was published, featuring a similar recipe, ‘THE KINGS
MEDIcine for this present yeere, against the Plague of the soule and
the effect thereof.’ that instructed the reader to:
TAke the hearbe of vertue, (the doing of good. Psal. 34.14, and the
hearbe of patience (otherwise called a waiting vpon the Lorde. Psal.
37.7.) wherewith possesse your soules. Luc. 21.19 Insteede of Hearb-
grace, take another, called Christs grace: and in the place of Elder-leaues,
Elders examples, following and imitating the Elders of Israel. 1. Chro. 21.
prostrating your selues before the Maiestie of God. Let not two things
be the ingredients of this Spirituall Kings medicine, which are in the
corporall, the Bramble & the Wormewood. Leaue out the proude bram-
ble, and his leaues, for he would exalt himselfe aboue the other trees.
Iudg. 9.15. Secondly, leaue out also the bitter worme-wood of hate,
anger, and enuy: and according to the counsel of God (the best
Physition) deu. 29.18: Let there not be among you any roote of bit-
ternes and worme wood.18
Versions of the chapbook were also published in 1636 and in 1665, with
these later copies attributed to the Royal College of Physicians, though
this attribution is inconsistent with the content of the text, which focuses
primarily on religious interpretations of plague.19 Winstanley’s version of
this plague antidote for the soul spoke both to beliefs in the value of
reading and writing, and also to plague-time expressions of the disease
within the textual sphere, in which medical forms were appropriated for
spiritual and moral purposes.
The aspects of a literary composition that reside at its periphery—
titles, advertisements and letters to the reader—go far to establishing the
work as a commodity. Many of these elements, which are described as
‘paratexts’ by Gérard Genette, speak to the text’s afterlife as an object

that may be bought and sold in the print marketplace. Paratexts convey
the text’s meaning and intentions to a readership, and include ‘titles and
subtitles, pseudonyms, forewords, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, inter-
titles, notes, epilogues, and afterwords’.20 The paratexts contextualizing
The Christians Refuge capture elements central to London’s print culture
during this final epidemic. These paratexts challenge and corroborate
statements made in the body of the text composed by Winstanley and
others. Commencing with a frontispiece that features a strikingly ren-
dered woodcut of king death decked in an ermine robe and concluding
with a section detailing receipts to cure or avoid infection, the book’s
message is frequently interrupted and mediated by paratextual material.
Between the covers, secular and religious interpretations of the disease
collide. More than composed by a single author and imparted to the
audience in an unaltered, text-centred state, The Christians Refuge
instead presents the reader with a multitude of voices and messages,
conveyed through statistics, imagery, prose, poetry and medicines. The
complexity of the information in these paratexts parallels the chaos of the
outbreak, reflecting how print matter expressed and responded to the
crisis. The table of statistics, collection of receipts at the conclusion of the
book and image of death that introduces the work identify The Christians
Refuge as the product of a very specific print culture that emerged with
the outbreak of plague. The paratexts framing Winstanley’s The
Christians Refuge transform an otherwise typical text on the disease
into a defining plague text.
A stark frontispiece prefaces The Christians Refuge. The phrase ‘Lord have
Mercy upon us’ introduces an image of death, crowned and cloaked in fur,
worms crawling over his bones. Beneath the gruesome visual are four lines:
Death triumphant cloath’d in Ermine

’Bout whole bones do crawl the Vermine
Doth denote that each condit[i]on
To his power must yeeld submission21
The effect is determinedly bleak; the phrase ‘Lord have mercy upon us’
was plague’s calling card, emblazoned on the doors of those houses
believed to harbour the illness.22 The Orders Conceived and Published by
the Lord Major and Aldermen of the City of London, Concerning the
Infection of the Plague (1665) instructed: ‘That every House visited, be
marked with a Red Cross of a foot long, in the middle of the door, evident
to be seen, and with these usual Printed words, that is to say, Lord have
mercy upon us, to be set close over the same Cross’.23 The phrase further
appears on the inexpensive broadsides entitled Lord Have Mercy Upon Us
that were printed during outbreaks.24 Featuring images of death, receipts,
prayers and statistics from the bills of mortality, these broadsides are the
abbreviated equivalent of The Christians Refuge. The frontispiece, with its
image of death and bleak verse, functions as a memento mori, prefacing the
book with a reminder of death. A. Lloyd and Dorothy C. Moote point to
the regal signifiers adorning the image of death—sceptre, crown, ermine
cloak—and interpret the image as showing that plague kills indiscriminately,
making no distinction between the poor and royalty.25 While such morbid
imagery was common during plague outbreaks, a second consideration of
this image of death reveals its complexity. Though an image of death, the
viewer cannot help but imagine this skeleton writhing with the worms that
crawl amongst its bones. Its mouth is spread in what could be interpreted as
a wide grin, smirking at the reader, and its legs are positioned as if dancing or
moving to and fro. This woodcut of a skeleton is deeply ambivalent, neither
entirely alive nor entirely dead. The reader finds solace from the grotesque
image on the facing page, however, in the title of the work, The Christians
Refuge. Preparing the soul for eternity was one response to the prospect of
‘triumphant’ death forcing Londoners to ‘yeeld submission’. The word
‘refuge’ suggests a space where the reader could escape the danger of
plague—though only if he or she accepted the likelihood that the body
would not survive this struggle, as exemplified in the woodcut. The compet-
ing messages of death for the body and salvation for the soul encapsulate the
spiritual and temporal concerns facing citizens during plague times—the
same concerns that occupy the pages of The Christians Refuge.
A separate paratextual element with visual impact appears in The
Christians Refuge: a table of mortality statistics. The ubiquitous weekly
bills of mortality in conjunction with John Graunt’s Natural and Political
Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made Upon the Bills of
Mortality (1662), a text that examines, in part, the impact of plague on
public health through analysis of the bills, meant statistical analysis of
mortality figures was well-established by 1665.26 Tables comparing cur-
rent plague deaths with those from previous epidemics found their way
into numerous texts, such as the Lord Have Mercy Upon Us broadsides.
This reliance on statistical analysis features in The Christians Refuge, which
includes a comparison of plague deaths, described as: ‘A table comparing
the increase of the Plague betwixt the year 1625 and this present year
1665’.27 A table lists the plague deaths from each year, followed by the
total number of deaths in each year: ‘There were buried in the year 1625
of the Plague 25428 in this present year 1665 to the 11 of July 1830’.28
The figures from the bills of mortality amplify a message otherwise con-
veyed in the book through prose or poetry. The page presents the figures
in a factual manner, but within the context of The Christians Refuge these
numbers give credence to the warning of encroaching death. The table
is flanked by the sections ‘Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague’ and
‘Meditations of The Miseries of Mans Life’, existing in a textual purgatory
between hope for an antidote and reflections on the wretchedness of life
and death. The last figures in the chart for 1665 are dated ‘11 of July’,
when only a fraction of deaths had occurred as compared to those in 1625.
The table fails to anticipate the staggering impact of the epidemic once it
had run its course.
The most complex paratext to interpret in The Christians Refuge con-
cludes the text. The body of the work clearly composed by Winstanley
ends on page 156 with the unequivocal statement made by ‘FINIS’.29 At
this point, the section of receipts is introduced, prefaced by a letter that
reconciles a text that features divine and earthly interpretations of plague:
Having thus by holy meditation prepared thy soul, thou mayest next pro-
ceed to use some of these medicines for thy body, which we have collected
out of most approved Authours, yet trust not so much in the Physick as in
the blessing of God, without which all physick is uneffectuall;30
This introduction acts as a transition in a book otherwise comprised of

reflections on saving the soul and meditations on the miseries of life and
death, though Winstanley does comment on the value of the receipts in
‘Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague’.31 The preface bridges a gap that
challenged those narrating the story of plague even during the final out-
break. With plague’s natural causes, practical cures and statistical under-
standing of the disease emerging as the primary areas of interest in 1665,
writers increasingly negotiated tricky terrain where the natural and provi-
dential collided—and natural interpretations ultimately prevailed. Slack
explains that ‘despite the obvious temptation to point to the role of provi-
dence, most writers, even divines, were more cautious in their conclusions
than they had been in the past’.32 The products of the print marketplace
focused on the natural causes of plague can be traced through to The
Christians Refuge. A remedy collected in W. J.’s 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), ‘proved in Venice in the year 1504’, which
recommends drinking a concoction of treacle, aquavite and human urine
for three consecutive mornings,33 also appears in the receipt collection at
the end of The Christians Refuge, amongst others.34 For the reader, The
Christians Refuge offers both medical and spiritual expertise.
Though the work’s title suggests a righteously religious text, verging on
sermon, The Christians Refuge is written in prose interrupted by verse
breaks. Many of these breaks feature another author’s work, where that
author’s name is referenced or the verse is introduced with a phrase such as
‘’Tis good counsel that the Poet gives’.35 These interruptions emphasize
or amplify Winstanley’s prose, creating layers of intertextuality within the
body of the text and forcing the reader to reckon with the work as literary.
An example of this intertextuality occurs in the section ‘Meditations of
Death’; Winstanley recalls an epitaph:
the latter part of an ancient Epitaph I have read might prove this, yet because
the whole is short, I have presum’d to give it you all as follows:
Ho, stay, who lies here?
I the good Earl of Devon-shire;
And Maud’ my wife, who lov’d full
dear,
We liv’d together forty five year.
What we spent, we had,
What we gave, we have,
What we left, we lost.36
The lines literally address two corpses, invoking the voice of the dead. Like
a warning from the grave, the epitaph points to the levelling effect of
death. Introduced as an ‘ancient Epitaph’, the short verse is granted
authority; however, Winstanley’s use of the word ‘ancient’ is misleading
given that the epitaph is thought to refer to Edward de Courtenay (d.
1419). Winstanley later incorporates the same epitaph in The New Help to
Discourse.37 Winstanley also names poets outright, as he does with Francis
Bacon in the section ‘Meditations of the Miseries of Mans Life’. A com-
plete transcription of Bacon’s ‘The World-Bubble’ is notable due to the
significant amount of space it occupies in the text and for its position at the
conclusion of the section. Winstanley introduces the verse, commenting

on its placement in the text: ‘I shall sum up all with some verses on this
subject, made by that Learned Ornament of the Nation, the Right
Honorable Sir Francis Bacon Viscount of St.Albans’.38 The work expresses
a pathos fitting with the sentiment of The Christians Refuge. In a reeling
description of the inability to find comfort, which finally concludes that
neither death nor life can provide respite, the poem has the effect of
creating a purgatory within itself. In particular, the lines, ‘And where’s a
city/From all vice so free?/But may be term’d/The worst of all the three?’,
invoke the intolerable state of London during the plague—a city which
had brought strife upon itself due to an excess of sin, according to
Winstanley.39 Bacon ends the poem with the lines: ‘What then
remains?/But that we still should cry,/Not to be born,/Or being born, to
dye’.40 Much as with the epitaph, the inevitability of death is foregrounded
along with the insufficiency of life’s pleasures.
PRINTING PESTILENCE: WILLIAM AUSTIN’S EPILOIMIA

In Austin’s Epiloimia, the author goes to great lengths to establish in his
earliest lines an atmosphere of quiet and lonely composition. However, once
packaged for the print marketplace with the appropriate paratexts—letter
from the printer, title page and advertisements—the story that is told by
Epiloimia is not just that of the author, as these appendages speak vividly to
the work’s transition from quiet composition to commodity. In contrast to
the ample evidence that shows Winstanley primarily published in print and
was well-versed in the medium, Austin describes a complex relationship with
print publication. A poet who spent his career at Gray’s Inn, Austin dabbled
in authorial pursuits. Over the course of his life he produced four poems that
may be traced.41 Two of these, A Joyous Welcome to the Most Serene, and Most
Illustrious Queen of Brides Catherin, the Royal Spouse and Consort of Charles
the Second (1662)42 and Triumphus Hymenaeus. Londons Solemn Jubile, for
the Most Auspicious Nuptialls of Their Great Soveraign Charles the Second
(1662),43 commemorate the marriage between Charles II and Catherine of
Braganza. Each poem, though appearing in print, bears the hallmarks of a
second existence. Austin prefaces each with a lengthy title, framing the
poem’s royal connections and referencing its earlier existence with an exclu-
sive public. In the title A Joyous Welcome, Austin describes presenting the
poem to the couple as they travelled on the Thames. The construction plays
on the ideals of scribal publication, with the work destined for a specifically
PRINTING PESTILENCE: WILLIAM AUSTIN’S EPILOIMIA 195
selected and managed public. The text, in turn, would have connections to
the event of their union. Austin conjures up the moment when the poem was
presented, writing:
A Joyous Welcome To the most Serene, and most Illustrious Queen of

Brides Catherin, The Royal Spouse and Consort of Charles the Second
King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland: Presented to Her Majesty
Upon the River Thames, At Her first coming with the King to the City of
London, August the 23, 1662.44
He creates the impression of a select audience for the verse. Through this
description worked into the title, Austin grafts his ties to the sovereign
onto the text. Austin translates a private moment for a larger readership
with the addition of ‘Presented to Her Majesty Upon the River Thames’.
Austin manipulates a work presented to the couple so it can alternatively
function as verse available to anyone, adorned with descriptions of royalty
due to its other life. The other poem written for the occasion, Triumphus
Hymenaeus, achieves the same end with the words ‘As it was Presented to
Both Their Majesties’ inscribed just above the author’s name on the title
page. In these efforts at verse, Austin demonstrates a strong curiosity for
how a single work could be conveyed to different audiences. Austin later
published Atlas Under Olympus: An Heroick Poem (1664),45 dedicating
the poem to George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, and Charles II. In
Epiloimia, however, Austin narrates the story of the plague in solemn
and objective verse as compared to these former works, which have been
remembered as rife with ‘bombastic eulogy’ and ‘classical allusions’.46 He
published Epiloimia for an unknown readership and without a verbose
dedication to a lofty public figure, doing away with the ostentatious
writing style that previously defined his verse. Austin chose in Epiloimia
to write on a public affliction for a wide, unknown readership. In
Epiloimia, Austin describes the obstacles inherent to the print marketplace
and the unethical characters it courts, but his poem cannot escape its own
realization in the medium. Print is essential to the posterity Epiloimia
achieves.
By capturing the enormity of plague in verse, Austin makes the out-
break knowable within the confines of a book. In this context, plague
could be considered at length and then tucked away for later reading if
Austin’s lines proved too horrific or the memory of the year’s miseries too
recent. Thus, the lack of personal control associated with living through
the chaos of an epidemic was overcome in a text. Though composed for

the same print marketplace he questions, Austin begins Epiloimia by
stating: ‘DRawing a Map of this sad place, my quill/Seems in the frightful
hand that writes a Will’.47 These beginning lines invoke a space of quiet
contemplation, far from the horrors of the outbreak or bustling market-
place in which his work would be peddled. These beginning lines further-
more allow the reader to enter the text with death in mind, ‘Seems in the
frightful hand that writes a Will’. A will, ‘A person’s formal declaration of
his intention as to the disposal of his property or other matters to be
performed after his death, most usually made in writing’, is a piece of
writing unlike the poem that Austin actually composes.48Epiloimia will be
read long before the author’s death and is written in an effort to remember
the epidemic. In contrast, a will is a text read after one’s death—its
author’s demise is essential to a will becoming an active and relevant
piece of writing to those living. To write a will, as Austin describes, is to
plan the disposal of one’s property and to prepare for death. In this way,
Epiloimia’s author writes himself into the story that he tells. His early lines
point to a private and heartbreaking composition, in which he envisages
the disposal perhaps not of his possessions but of his own life and
London’s, meditating on the inevitability of death. Austin further con-
siders his position in Epiloimia’s early pages, creating important connec-
tions between the act of writing and the blessing of life, having harrowed
the outbreak:
Then, whilest I write Lifes hasty post, grim Death,

Hold not my pen, nor come to stop my breath.
One fully resolute no where to ramble,
Now life so doubtful is, needs no preamble.
Fancy -
But stay, lest this offence may give,
We should ask leave to write, as well as live.49
In these lines, Austin negotiates with ‘grim Death’ to write uninhibited as

Epiloimia’s author. Permission to write must be sought from a force that
could unequivocally silence the author at this early stage of composition, in
the first few lines of his poem. Andrew Wear explains in ‘Puritan Perceptions
of Illness in Seventeenth Century England’ (1985) that ‘As death was often
the expected consequence of illness in the seventeenth century, people’s
attitudes to it had a close relationship to their perceptions of illness’.50 Plague
becomes a co-author in these lines, allowing some works to be written and
silencing others. Austin acknowledges that his ability to write is directly

contingent on him being shown mercy by this co-author and its attendant
death, unlike the thousands who were not as lucky in their negotiations with
pestilence. As evidenced by Epiloimia’s existence, Austin is allowed to com-
pose his poem on the outbreak; the act of writing becomes a testament to life.
The author’s role is life-affirming, though plague is a constant companion and
co-author in these lines, and could easily snuff out Austin’s life and his writing
as the author sits there, quill in hand. In the third part of the poem, Austin
continues to reflect on the author’s role in plague times, writing:
TIs not enough when life must fade away,

Its glass being run, to see old Time make hay:
To stand o’re heart-sick neighbour as he lies,
And wash his rancid ulcers with our eyes:
Behold the sword of wrathful Providence,
And read his venger in the present tense.
Tis not enough when Time ha’s made escape,
To turn our heads and view his naked nape:
To stare into obscure expanded jaws
Of Pestilence to know it in its cause.
The point’s how we should be hereafter. Time
Present and past should into future climb.51
Austin describes the impotence felt in plague times. As plague was an

incurable disease in the early modern period, the infection played out before
citizens’ eyes on a ghastly stage. The fear was, of course, that at any moment
one could go from spectator to player in this horrific drama, and with a flea’s
bite get dragged into the sickly spotlight. The author creates a scene in which
he observes the horror inflicted on his neighbour from a distance. Within this
construction the only recourse against infection is to ‘wash his rancid ulcers
with our eyes’. However, he argues, to be a spectator to the tragedy playing
out is not enough. One should not reflect on these horrific happenings as
distant memories, when ‘Time ha’s made escape/To turn our heads and
view his naked nape’. Remembering the plague in the ‘present tense’ is the
only way in which it may be sufficiently memorialized. As Epiloimia’s author,
Austin’s work becomes pivotal to creating the posterity essential to bringing
plague into the future.
Austin attempts to distinguish Epiloimia from the reams of texts pub-
lished during the plague, but he cannot escape the additions to his poem
that necessarily accompany its transformation into a printed book. While
Austin emphasizes the private aspects of composition, once Epiloimia was

sent to the printers he lost much of his control over the work. His
emphasis on the private is compromised as Epiloimia makes its transition
into a commodity. Before engaging with Austin’s writing, the reader must
wade through the paratexts appended to Epiloimia during this transition,
ranging from a letter, ‘The Printer to the Reader’, to a lengthy title that
gives an extensive account of what the reader can expect to find inside.
Three pages of advertisements for the printer’s other offerings, following
Austin’s authoritative ‘FINIS’, make a strong final statement about
Epiloimia’s position within a specific print culture.
Epiloimia’s printer, Nathaniel Brook, firmly positions the text as a
commodity in the marketplace, making the necessary additions to allow
it to compete with the other print offerings available to London’s citizens.
An active figure in the print marketplace in the second half of the seven-
teenth century, Brook was involved in at least 150 publishing ventures
between 1651 and 1677. Thus, he had considerable experience packaging
a work for the print marketplace and for a reading audience. In Brook’s
letter to the reader, he remarks on some of his influence over the work’s
transition to a printed document, writing:
I Have no suspition or thought at all, that after a considerate and thorough

perusal of this little Book you will repent of your pains, or remain unsatisfied:
and therefore forbear to court your approbation. All I have to say might well
have been put in the Title, were it not for giving it an unfashionable length. I
shall onely tell you, that this Poem was written at the earnest request of some
very worthy persons into the Countrey, at that time of the Sickness, when the
Mortality in London was so great, that (waving what was generally believed,
that they, not to scare the City from its self, were afraid to own and publish
half the number of the dead) according to the account of the usual Bills,
there dyed seven or eight thousand a Week, with some hundreds over and
above.
An Affliction never to be forgotten, and a Subject worthy to be dedicated to

eternall Posterity.
While Austin’s quill-written lines from the beginning of the poem invoke
quiet and relatively private composition, Brook expresses no qualms over
situating Epiloimia as a commodity in the print marketplace. He assures
his reader that Epiloimia ‘was written at the earnest request of some very
worthy persons into the Countrey’, establishing anonymous but ‘worthy’
support for the composition. Brook implies that he has considerable

influence over the work’s title, stating, ‘All I have to say might well have
been put in the Title, were it not for giving it an unfashionable length’.
Austin’s control over the title of his work, over the way that it will first
be presented to the reader, is diminished with Brook’s words. Instead,
Brook determines what is included or excluded on Epiloimia’s title
page, having a final say on the work’s initial presentation to the reader.
Reviewing the title page, the reader cannot fail to notice that immedi-
ately beneath Austin’s name are the following lines: ‘Printed for Nath.
Brooke, at the Angel in Cornhill, 1666’. While none of these inclusions
in the prefacing material to Epiloimia are extraordinary within the
context of when and where they were produced, they create a palpable
rift between the atmosphere the author creates of quill-written lines and
the realities of a work destined to be bought and sold in a marketplace.
The interplay between official printed statistics from the bills of mor-
tality and ‘what was generally believed’ in the letter from the printer to
the reader creates further conflict on the page. Brook freely acknowl-
edges the opinion that the bills of mortality grossly underreport the
number of deaths, a widespread and well-voiced belief, but refers to the
figures regardless. The capacity for these printed statistics to convey a
sense of posterity for the event is of greater importance to Brook than
their precision in relating the number of dead.
The weekly figures contained in the bills of mortality became a bench-
mark in charting the course of the epidemic. The ebb and flow of plague
deaths, as stated in the bills of mortality, impacted how citizens responded
to the illness. As Thomas Vincent describes in his harrowing account of
plague, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (1667):
It was in the moneth of May that the Plague was first taken notice of; our Bill
of Mortality did let us know but of three which died of the disease in the
whole year before; but in the beginning of May the bill tels us of nine, which
fell by the Plague . . . fear quickly begins to creep upon peoples hearts; great
thoughts and discourse there is in Town about the Plague, and they cast in
their minds whether they should go if the Plague should increase.52
When the bills related a decrease in plague deaths, ‘discourse’ on plague

cooled and ‘fears’ were assuaged, whereas rising deaths attributed to
plague meant the bills took on immense value, literally dictating the
movement of citizens. And as contemporaries knew, the movement of
people threatened to spread the disease to other parishes and towns. With
regard to information sharing during plague, these bills became essential
to the city’s response to the disease, defining whether people would carry
on normally or make alternate plans to cope with its spread. The bills of
mortality and their statistics, however, created discord for Londoners.
While greatly informative, their figures could not be trusted without
question either then or now.53 Accurate figures for the bills of mortality
relied on the collection of large amounts of data on a daily basis and under
the most horrific conditions. Women searchers, a group defined by illit-
eracy, agedness and lack of medical training, managed the horrendous
task.54 The figures in the bills were representative of trends upon which
the most important decisions fell. Thus the bills of mortality became a
paradox, stating seemingly authoritative figures on the page but com-
monly held to be fallacious.
To quash any remaining doubt about Epiloimia’s commodification in
book form, Brook includes a list of advertisements for his other works,
‘sold at his shop at the Angel in Cornhill’.55 Each available book appears
with an accompanying price in a separate column, with texts for sale that
range from a quarto entitled Edlin on the Conjunction of Saturn and
Jupiter, 1663. Declaring the Ground of the Late Contagion at a cost of
1 s. 6 d. to an octavo-sized work on cookery called Mr. Robert May’s
Accomplish’d Cook, Shewing the Expert and Ready Wayes for Dressing All
Manner of Fish, Flesh, or Fowl, &c. and the Manner to Make All Kindes of
Sauces, Explained with Above 200 Cuts for Benefit and Adorning of All
Sorts of Made Dishes and available for 5 s.56 In print, Austin shares the same
pages as cooks, chemical physicians and midwives. The final pages of the
book destroy any illusion that Austin’s poem is unique amongst the multi-
tude of other works emerging at the same moment in London and under
the same publisher.
In Austin’s Epiloimia, intertextuality creates historicity in the poem and
gives the author leave to interrogate print endeavours that responded to
the plague. Austin also draws upon his knowledge as a classical scholar,
placing plague within a classical and scholarly paradigm to assist his reader
in understanding the outbreak. Austin punctuates Epiloimia’s literary
landscape with intertextuality. He gestures to other texts through refer-
ences to classical works, medical theories, by blasting the plague orders
and in his scathing assessment of those publishing during the plague. In a
quotation concluding the first section of Epiloimia, Austin invokes the

concept of miasma through a classical reference: ‘Tali spiramine Nesis/E
mittit stygium nebulosis aëra saxis/ Antraque letiferi rabiem Typhonis
anhelant’.57 These lines from poet Lucan’s Civil War (Pharsalia) translate
as: ‘With such an exhalation/Nesis emits the Stygian air from foggy
rocks/and her caverns breathe out deadly Typhon’s madness’.58 The
quotation makes reference to the poisonous vapours of Nisita, an island
off the coast of Campania, and follows a description in Civil War of the
famine and pestilence that befell Pompey’s army.59 The reference to
Nesis’s ‘Stygian air’ aligns with the concept of miasma, infectious gases
understood to be a possible route of transmission for plague and consis-
tent with Galenic views of pestilence. Austin confirms his knowledge of the
medical theories associated with plague in the second section of the poem.
Here, he makes references to Galen and the literary tradition associated
with the writer:
Galen asserts, as ev’ry one may † read,

That mad man doing out of mouth his need,
Exquisite poison cast, that made a Turk,
To murther one he hated, play the shirk.
Such perfect bane his humors were, he cou’d
Not longer keep them from the common good.
Infectious humors that for death contest,
Title themselves the partisans to pest.
Thus judge of all those things Physician calls
(For being abus’d, li es foes) non-naturals.
Plague’s made by mot s to tyrannize i’th ’air.60
Suggesting he has read Galen, whose writings ‘ev’ry one may read’, Austin
describes the humors and miasma of Galenic medical theory. These two
medical concepts are transformed into the pest’s henchmen in these lines,
assisting pestilence in tyrannizing the air. Austin extends readers’ knowl-
edge of plague by drawing their attention to classical and medical paradigms
that might help them better comprehend the outbreak and its causes.
Outside of his classical references and invocations of classical verse, Austin’s
use of intertextuality in Epiloimia extends to interrogating the various publish-
ing ventures that flourished in plague-ridden London. Austin’s knowledge of
medical publishing extends beyond Galen’s learned tomes, and he disdainfully
notes the presence of unsavoury medical writers receiving attention in the

print marketplace. He points to medical writing that infiltrated the print
marketplace, and specifically that attributed to the quack:
He’s very humble, you must understand,

Taking his fees by others underhand.
Whether his calling lawful be’nt or be,
H’ ha’s luck to finde a lawful deputy.
Some Bookseller or Pothecary, these
Till he fare better, finde him bread and cheese.
These two, while he at tick-tack, p[ . . . ]ssage, [ . . . ]u[ . . . ],
Is diligent, make money of his stuff,
While he consults to make his golden calves,
As Iero[ . . . ]oam did, they go his halves.
You’ve seen an highway gelding turn to jade,
So does his doctors science turn to trade.
Of these he learns to set himself out bigger,
And binde his phrase in form, if not in figure.
They for his credit will not let him lack
Hard words would break a plowmans teeth to crack.
To trim him up they are his looking-glass;
Or serv[ . . . ] as scowring sand to bright his brass.61
Austin distances himself from the unsavoury characters compromising the

print marketplace in plague times. Peter Isaac, in ‘Pills and Print’ (1998),
explains that in the late seventeenth century the book trade was essential to
the distribution of proprietary medicines.62 When quacks went into print,
the medium’s very morality came under scrutiny. The bookseller will
‘binde’ the quack’s ‘phrase’, print eclipsing truth and perpetuating, in
this instance, deception. In league together, quacks and booksellers pro-
duce ‘golden calves’, sullying the book trade. Though the bookseller is
essential to Austin’s success as an author entering the print marketplace—
Austin’s bookseller even addresses the poet’s readership at the beginning
of Epiloimia—the book trade is also connected to the medical underworld
of the seventeenth century. These same booksellers lower themselves to
make a profit, creating a false image in the quack; they ‘trim him up’ and
‘are his looking-glass’, using ‘scowring sand to bright his brass’.
The worlds of medicine and print existed in an uneasy relationship.
Medical publishing that veered from the accepted orthodoxies, written in
Latin, became vulnerable to accusations of quackery. As Furdell writes in
Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (2002): ‘Writing

about medicine at all, let alone publishing recipes and remedies in the
vernacular, undermined the secretive traditions of the orthodox medical
community’.63 However, booksellers and printers often relinquished per-
sonal convictions when it came to running their businesses, and a seller
who promoted a lofty Latin work by a respected physician would publish
concurrently works by itinerant medical practitioners, quacks. Medical
literature, by physicians or those deemed quacks, could potentially breach
all lines of society in the fight against illness, as described in my earlier
chapter on medical debates during the outbreak. Austin, however, making
specific references to Galen and orthodox medicine, abhors the multitude
of ‘other’ medical practitioners present during the outbreak, referring not
only to quacks, but also to apothecaries and nurses. Quacks are particu-
larly dangerous, ‘These are the times in which he must commence,/Being
to the Plague a very pestilence’, more ominous than the disease afflicting
the nation.64 The tendency toward self-diagnosing and medicating in
seventeenth-century England meant a wide and varied audience for the
quack’s cures.65 In contrast to Austin’s poem, dotted with Latin passages
to distinguish the author as a learned figure, an unorthodox medical
practitioner more often published in the vernacular. In the early modern
period, the title quack represented more than a crooked figure swindling
the unsuspecting victims of illness and the term became a catch-all for the
feared ‘other’ in the medical realm.66 In Epiloimia, Austin positions
quacks amongst plague’s feminine medical figures: ‘With Searcher, Nurse
and Quack too rule our state,/To make compleatly a Triumvirate’.67 In
this way, Austin sets up a literary landscape where the quack and print fall
to the margin of the respectable authorial landscape, a margin occupied
by the spectre of women searchers, collecting data for the bills of mor-
tality, and nurses.68 Austin is unequivocal as he denounces these char-
acters, calling for caution in believing those who choose the print
medium in plague times.
In addition to medical practitioners’ contributions to the print sphere,
officials added to the growing collection of printed works, attempting to
pacify citizens while communicating established measures to stop the
spread of the disease. The Orders Conceived and Published by the Lord
Major and Aldermen of the City of London, Concerning the Infection of the
Plague outlines a method for coping with plague, articulating the roles to
be filled during the outbreak, such as those for watchmen and searchers,
and stating which public spaces were to remain closed until the outbreak
subsided. These formed part of the public health measures put in place to
combat the spread of the disease. Yet orders in place to thwart the infec-
tion and save lives had the opposite impact on paper, giving the impression
of neglecting human life and in particular the neediest in London, those
infected with the disease. For Austin, such orders were no better tolerated
than the quackery printed by unorthodox medical practitioners:
With ev’ry rule we are at mortal strife

Would draw us from th’ anomaly of life:
Orders confound, and morals send to beg
In fields and woods, with neither arm nor leg.
As if reason were stupid sloth to feel
Aculeate spur, we place it at our heel.
Justice and dignity we onely put
Before, to take the first place of our foot.
In harming others, that we harm not less
Our selves, we murther our own consciences.69
Austin describes orders and rules devoid of humanity. While plague

strikes a chaotic chord for the poet, a time when ‘graves gape[d]
wide’ and death seemed to descend on the city, so too do these rules
that dictate citizens ignore morality by following official dictates. The
most-opposed order, to shut the houses, states: ‘If any person shall have
visited any man, known to be Infected of the Plague, or entred willingly
into any known Infected House, being not allowed: the House wherein
he inhabiteth, shall be shut up for certain daies by the Examiners
direction’.70 The order turned the home into a prison. A watchman
ensured the occupants remained locked inside for the prescribed
amount of time, typically forty days during the 1665 outbreak. He
became their only link to the outside. Debate over the orders took to
the print sphere, and Austin joined other writers in questioning the
shutting up of houses. In the anonymous document The Shutting Up
Infected Houses as It Is Practised in England Soberly Debated (1665),
the author debates the atrocity of the order, stating:
We are acted by a Principle of self preservation, as well as you, and therefore as

soon as we find our selves or any member of our Families infected, so dreadful it
is to us to be shut up from all comfort and society, from free and wholesome air,
from the care of the Physician, and the Divine, from the oversight of Friends
and Relations, and sometimes even from the very necessities, and conveniences
CONCLUSION 205
of Nature, that we run as far in City and Country as our feet can carry us, leaving
Wives and Children to the Parishes, empty walls, and shops to Creditors,
scattering the infection along the Streets as we go.71
That such a wish would be committed to print and to further suggest such a
measure made for a reasonable manner of controlling plague baffled Austin
and many others. The anonymous document further points to the folly in this
plan, which drives the infected and those in contact with the infected from
their homes, potentially spreading the infection. Much in the same manner
that medical information was passed on through print, leading to an ineffec-
tual cure from the sixteenth century coming into use during the seventeenth
century, so too were orders from earlier outbreaks. For instance, the order to
shut houses had been enforced since 1578 during plague times in England.72
The technology of print, ironically, marked a step back, the antiquated orders
contrasting the flow of original printing in 1665.
CONCLUSION
Though Winstanley and Austin construct what are in many ways opposing
authorial personae, Winstanley obscuring his identity and Austin fore-
grounding his important role as the author, each perceives authorship and
the act of bringing writing to the reading public as essential in the face of
plague. Austin invokes pestilence as a co-author, turning to death for per-
mission to write ‘Lifes hasty post’. These words, as Austin argues, are not
only testament to his life but a necessary and fitting memorial for those who
suffered through the outbreak. Winstanley gathers together numerous
examples of intertextuality to engage with both the epidemic and the printed
discourse surrounding the disease. In The Christians Refuge and Epiloimia,
each work’s paratext creates conflict with the message the author attempts to
convey in his writing. Winstanley’s emphasis on spiritual salvation above all
other concerns during plague times seems in conflict with the receipts for the
body captured in a quite separate text at the end of The Christians Refuge.
Austin’s distrust of print and emphasis on the noble act of writing seems
diminished in a text so blatantly commodified within the parameters of the
print marketplace. Both Winstanley and Austin include references to and
quotations from other texts to support and corroborate their works.
Winstanley structurally supports his writing with verse breaks and inclusions
from other popular plague texts. These additions from other authors validate
Winstanley’s message. Austin uses intertextuality in two ways: to support the
creation of a learned authorial persona, providing classical references to help

his reader interpret the plague, and to interrogate the validity of the voices
that emerged with the increase of printing on plague that occurred in 1665.
Each work invokes the print marketplace, which becomes intrinsic to the
poet’s success in relating his story of the epidemic. Print supports
Winstanley’s multifaceted and urgent account of the affliction. The approach
is not without challenges; Winstanley’s message of spiritual rehabilitation
seems at odds with the receipts that focus on the body at the conclusion of
the book. In confronting a disease as ominous as plague, however, the
approach is fitting. The climate of desperation contributed to the transfor-
mation of the print marketplace, as citizens were forced to interpret and
engage with the disease in hopes of finally finding an effective response.
While Winstanley expresses no qualms with the print medium, he half-
heartedly evades detection in The Christians Refuge. For Austin, print pro-
vides the only appropriate vehicle for the gravity of his message. The medium
ensures posterity for the plague epidemic that swept through London. As he
establishes in his earlier writing, such as A Joyous Welcome, print amplifies a
message, capturing a transient moment, however big or small, and allowing
it to live on in pages of text, spreading to countless readers. Simultaneously,
Epiloimia reveals not only the horrors of the disease but also the widespread
fraud and inhumanity that could spread as easily as pestilence. Ironically, the
author offers a printed antidote to remedy these grievances. In his effort to
capture the plague within the confines of a book, Austin finds himself torn
between the medium he uses to carry his message forward and its insuffi-
ciency to convey the complexity of a city in disorder during plague times.
NOTES
1. W. W., The Christians Refuge: Or Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague in
This Time of Generall Contagion. To Which Is Added the Charitable
Physician (London: 1665). (W. W. 1665)
2. William Austin, Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the Pestilence (London:
1666) (Austin 1666); Parts of this chapter appeared in two earlier articles:
Kathleen Miller, ‘Writing the Plague: William Austin’s Epiloimia Epe, or, the
Anatomy of the Pestilence (1666) and the Crisis of Early Modern
Representation’, Library & Information History Journal, 26.1, 3–17;
Kathleen Miller, ‘Illustrations from the Wellcome Library: William
Winstanley’s Pestilential Poesies in The Christians Refuge: Or Heavenly
Antidotes Against the Plague in This Time of Generall Contagion. To
NOTES 207
Which Is Added the Charitable Physician (1665)’, Medical History, 55

(2011), 241–250. (Miller 2011)
3. I have identified William Winstanley as the author of The Christians
Refuge, which was previously not attributed and only featured the initials
W.W. Miller, ‘Illustrations from the Wellcome Library: William
Antidotes Against the Plague in This Time of Generall Contagion to Which
Is Added the Charitable Physician (1665)’, Medical History, 55 (2011),
241–250. (Miller 2011)
4. W. W., ‘Meditations of the Miseries of Mans Life’, in The Christians Refuge,
pp. 1–73 (p. 4).
5. William Winstanley, England’s Vvorthies. Select Lives of the Most Eminent
Persons from Constantine the Great, to the Death of Oliver Cromwel Late
Protector (London: 1660). (Winstanley 1660)
6. W. W., ‘Meditations of the Miseries of Mans Life’, p. 39. (W. W. 1665)
7. [William Winstanley?], Englands Triumph. A More Exact History of His
Majesties Escape After the Battle of Worcester, with a Chronologicall
Discourse of His Straits and Dangerous Adventures into France, and His
Removes from Place to Place Till His Return into England, with the Most
Remarkable Memorials Since (London: 1660). (Winstanley 1660). Englands
Triumph is listed in the British Library Catalogue with Winstanley as possi-
bly the author, [By William Winstanley?].
9. William Winstanley, The Muses Cabinet, Stored with Variety of Poems, Both
Pleasant and Profitable (London: 1655). (Winstanley 1655)
10. William E. Burns, ‘Winstanley, William (d. 1698)’, in Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, Oxford University Press: 2004; online edn, May 2005
<www.oxforddnb.com> [accessed 21 Jan 2010]. (Burns 2004)
11. Burns, ‘Winstanley, William (d. 1698)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. (Burns 2004)
12. The text on the copy in the British Library contains statistics up to 9 June 1636,
and the medicine reads: ‘A speciall meanes to preserve health. FIrst, fast and pray,
and then take a quart of Repentance of Ninive, and put in two hand-fuls of Faith
in the blood of Christ, with as much Hope and Charity as you can get, and put it
into the vessell of a clean Conscience: then boyle it on the fire of Love, so long till
you see by the eye of Faith, the black foame of the love of this world stinke in your
stomacke, then scumme it off cleane with the spoone of faithfull Prayers. When
that is done, put in the powder of Patience, & take the cloth of Christs
Innocency, and straine all together in his Cup: then drinke it burning hot next
thy heart, and cover thee warme with as many clothes of Amendment of life as
God shall strengthen thee to beare, that thou mayst sweate out all the poyson of
covetousnesse, pride, whoredome, idolatrie, usury, swearing, lying, and such
like. And when thou feelest thy selfe altered from the forenamed vices, take the
powder of Say-well, and put it upon thy tongue: but drinke thrice as much Doe-
well daily. Then take the oyle of good Workes, and annoint therewith thine eyes,
eares, heart, and hands, that they may be ready and nimble to minister unto the
poore members of Christ. When that is done, then in Gods name arise from sinne
willingly, take up Christs Crosse boldely, stand unto it manfully, beare it
patiently, and rest thankfully, and thou shalt live everlastingly, and come to
heaven safely. To which place hasten us, Lord, speedily. Amen’. Anonymous,
Lord Haue Mercy Vpon vs A Speciall Remedy for the Plague (London: 1636).
(Anonymous 1636)
13. Anonymous, An Unparalel’d Antidote Against the Plague: Or, a Special
Remedy for a Sick Soul; Whereby a Sinner May Recover Himself from the Vale
of Teares to the Hill of Ioy (London: 1665). (Anonymous 1665)
14. W. W., ‘Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague’, in The Christians Refuge,
pp. 1–15 (pp. 10–11). (W. W 1665)
15. Winstanley, The Muses Cabinet, Stored with Variety of Poems, Both Pleasant
and Profitable, p. 47. (Winstanley 1655)
16. William Winstanley, The New Help to Discourse: Or, Wit, Mirth, and Jollity
Intermixt with More Serious Matters Consisting of Pleasant Astrological,
Astronomical, Philosophical, Grammatical, Physical, Chyrurgical, Historical,
Moral, and Poetical Questions and Answers, 2nd edn (London: 1672), n.p.
(Winstanley 1672)
17. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, p. 384.
(Johns 1998)
18. 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 Used in the City the Former Yeere
(London: 1604).
19. Maura Ratia, ‘Investigating Genre Through Title-pages: Plague Treatises of
the Stuart Period in Focus’, Varieng, 14 (2013) <Helsinki.fi/varieng>
[accessed 13 January 2016].
20. Richard Macksey, ‘Foreward’, in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, by
Gérard Genette, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), pp. xi–xxii (p. xviii). (Macksey 1997)
21. W. W., The Christians Refuge, n. p. (W. W 1665)
23. City of London, Orders Conceived and Published by the Lord Major and
Aldermen of the City of London, Concerning the Infection of the Plague
(London: 1665), p. B2. (City of London 1665)
1985)
NOTES 209
26. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, pp. 244–245.
(Slack 1985)
27. W. W., The Christians Refuge, n.p. (W. W. 1665)
28. W. W., The Christians Refuge, n.p. (W. W. 1665)
29. W. W., ‘Meditations of Death’, in The Christians Refuge, p. 156. (W. W. 1665)
30. W. W., ‘Receits Against the Plague’, in The Christians Refuge, pp. 157–166.
31. Winstanley writes: ‘These rules well practised will be a good preparatory for
thy soul against the Contagion of sin, in the latter end of the book thou wi
[ . . . …] finde receits against the Contagion of the body, such as have been
approved of by man[y] able Phisicians, to which is added two short Prayers
to God, without whose help all Physick Signifies nothing’. The two short
prayers he refers to cannot be found in the receipt section of the text, but
notes to the copy state that the ‘last leaf of Remedies’ is missing. W. W.,
‘Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague’, p. 15. (W. W 1665)
1985)
33. W. J., A Collection of Seven and Fifty Approved Receipts Good Against the
Plague, p. 4. (W. J. 1665)
34. W. W., ‘Receits Against the Plague’, pp. 161–62. (W. W 1665)
35. W. W., ‘Meditations of the Miseries of Mans Life’, p. 21. (W. W 1665)
36. W. W., ‘Meditations of Death’, pp. 96–97; In ‘Two Renaissance Epitaphs’
(1955), Curt F. Bühler relates the history of the epitaph. Curt F. Bühler, ‘Two
Renaissance Epitaphs’, Renaissance Society of America, 8:1 (1955), 9–11.
(Bühler 1955)
37. Winstanley, The New Help to Discourse, pp. 249–250. (Winstanley 1672)
41. A fifth, missing poem is described in W. C. Hazlitt’s Second Series of
Bibliographical Collections and Notes on Early English Literature, 1474–
1700 (London: 1882) (Hazlitt 1882); Sidney Lee, rev. Sarah Ross,
‘Austin, William (b. 1627/8, d. in or before 1677)’, in Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004;
online edn, Jan 2008 <www.oxforddnb.com> [accessed 1 July 2009].
(Lee 2004)
42. William Austin, A Joyous Welcome to the Most Serene, and Most Illustrious
Queen of Brides Catherin, the Royal Spouse and Consort of Charles the Second
(London: 1662). (Austin 1662)
43. William Austin, Triumphus Hymenaeus. Londons Solemn Jubile, for the Most
Auspicious Nuptialls of Their Great Soveraign Charles the Second (London:
1662). (Austin 1662)
44. Austin, A Joyous Welcome, title page. (Austin 1662)
45. Austin, Atlas Under Olympus: An Heroick Poem (London: 1664). (Austin 1664)
46. Lee, ‘Austin, William (b. 1627/8, d. in or before 1677)’, in Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography. (Lee 2004)
47. Austin, Epiloimia, p. 1.
48. “will, n.1”, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2012)
<oed.com> [accessed 25 September 2012]. (Oxford English Dictionary
2012)
50. Andrew Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century
England’, in Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in
Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
pp. 55–100 (p. 55). (Wear 1985)
51. Austin, Epiloimia, pp. 67–68.
55. Austin, Epiloimia, n.p.
56. Austin, Epiloimia, n.p.
58. Lucan, Civil War, trans. by Susan H. Braund (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), p. 109. (Lucan 1999)
59. Lucan, Civil War, p. 275. (Lucan 1999)
61. Austin, Epiloimia, pp. 29–30.
62. Peter Isaac, ‘Pills and Print’, in Medicine, Mortality and the Book Trade, ed.
by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press,
1998), pp. 25–49. (Isaac 1998)
2002)
65. Porter, Quacks: Fakers & Charlatans in English Medicine, p. 40. (Porter 2000)
66. Porter, Quacks: Fakers & Charlatans in English Medicine, p. 15. (Porter 2000)
70. City of London, Orders Conceived, n. p. (City of London 1665)
71. Anonymous, The Shutting Up Infected Houses as It Is Practised in England
Soberly Debated (London: 1665), p. 5. (Anonymous 1665)
CHAPTER 8
Conclusion: Recalling the Plague of 1665

in Later Literary Culture
When plague struck Marseilles, France, in 1720, lines of communication

for Londoners were free and effective enough by way of printed materials
that citizens could track the rise of the disease in an array of documents.
Sparking worry of an outbreak in London and jolting memories of the
city’s dire affliction in 1665, plague on the continent drove Londoners to
consider the information available to them to fend off and manage another
epidemic in the metropolis. With Londoners clamouring for information
about plague, Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year, a text that
brought readers back to 1665. Though published in 1722, 57 years
following the 1665 plague in London, A Journal of the Plague Year exists
as a testament to the opportunities afforded by early modern print culture
to compiling and narrating a story of the illness. Even decades following
the outbreak itself—Defoe was only a child in 1665—he was able to
narrate a convincing image of the plague. A Journal of the Plague Year
is indebted to a print culture that preserved complete documents about
the epidemic. From facts and figures derived from contemporary bills of
mortality to details gleaned from first-hand accounts of the outbreak,
Defoe created a climate of truth in the work, grafting these artifacts
of seventeenth-century print culture into a story penned in the eight-
eenth century. While the plague may have been but a distant memory,
the texts that circulated in 1665 could be revived at a distance. In this
way, the memory of the epidemic could remain vivid in later literary

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_8
212 8 CONCLUSION: RECALLING THE PLAGUE OF 1665 IN LATER . . .
culture, and Defoe’s book would long be recognized as the defining

work on the outbreak, first taken as a true account and later as one of the
foremost literary responses to the epidemic. Defoe, however, was not the
only eighteenth-century consumer of texts that saw this seventeenth-
century epidemic preserved in cultural memory.
PLAGUE IN EDWARD WORTH’S LIBRARY

Dr. Edward Worth was an eighteenth-century physician who left
behind an exemplary library that is held in Dr Steevens’ Hospital in
Dublin, Ireland. Worth’s book collection contains, unsurprisingly,
many medical works. The gravity of the plague was not lost on
Worth, and many works in the library address the disease. Of the
4,400 volumes in the collection, 22 address the subject of plague.1 Of
these plague texts, 12 were published in or around 1720, including a
quarto copy of Ijsbrand van Diemerbroeck’s Tractatus Copiosissimus de
Peste Libris IV (1721), a number of books by François Chicoyneau, an
octavo copy of Richard Mead’s A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential
Contagion (1722) and a duodecimo copy of Jérôme Jean Pestalozzi’s Avis de
Precaution Contre la Maladie Contagieuse de Marseille (1721). The collec-
tion also includes an octavo copy of Nathaniel Hodges’ Loimologia (1672) in
Latin, notable as an English translation was published in 1720. Ample
evidence points to Worth’s interest in plague, and it can be concluded that
the outbreak in France was of particular interest to the Irish physician. While
Worth’s collection of plague texts only indicates one collector’s tastes, what is
collected in Worth’s library gives a small impression of the importance of
plague texts in the international book trade, in which Worth was also an active
participant.
As Worth’s library does not include sales catalogues for the years 1720
to 1722, we cannot be certain which volumes Worth marked for purchase
in the sales catalogues he perused at the height of the plague in Marseilles.
The Library, however, includes a number of later London book sales
catalogues, from 1723 to 1731, which provide a wider impression of the
continuing value placed on early modern and eighteenth-century plague
texts in the international book trade. A survey of the London book sales
catalogues in Worth’s collection, focusing on works in English and where
available those under the heading that includes medical texts, reveals a
portrait of what was being traded in the international book marketplace.
As becomes evident, interest in the literature of the disease persisted well
INTERPRETING THE LITERARY CULTURE OF PLAGUE IN 1665 213
beyond 1720, and books on the subject of pestilence continued to be

traded in an international context long past the plague in Marseilles, with
many of these written in the seventeenth century. These catalogues give an
impression of the works an Irish book collector in Dublin had access to
and the types of titles that maintained currency in the eighteenth century;
for example, a quarto text entitled Concerning the Constitution of an Aire
Infected and How to Know Plague-Sores and Carbuncles (1644) from
Oxford was listed in a catalogue under the personal name Charles Davis,
described as a Catalogue of Choice and Valuable Books in Most Faculties
and Languages; Being the Sixth Part of the Collection Made by Tho.
Rawlinson, to be auctioned on ‘Thursday the second of March 1726’.2
Three English language texts, in particular, feature multiple times in these
catalogues: Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a
Following Index, and Made Upon the Bills of Mortality, Hodges’
Loimologia, which at times is listed under its eighteenth-century translator’s
name, John Quincy, and finally Richard Mead’s A Short Discourse
Concerning Pestilential Contagion. Both of these last works are also featured
amongst the plague books in Worth’s Library. Graunt’s Natural and
Political Observations and Hodges’ Loimologia were seminal texts during
the outbreak of 1665. That they continued to be traded in the eighteenth
century with considerable frequency gestures to enduring interest in the
outbreak, both as it could be understood in the context of later outbreaks,
such as that in Marseilles, and also as an event accompanied by texts that
contributed to the valuable growing discourse on the disease in England.
INTERPRETING THE LITERARY CULTURE OF PLAGUE IN 1665

Plague writings that emerged in 1665 in areas where the context for
literary production had changed significantly resulted in innovative dialo-
gues on a long-endured illness. While memory of plague as an affliction
was long, with many writers referencing biblical plagues when describing
that in 1665, interpreting pestilence within the world of Restoration
England required new ways of writing about the illness and of under-
standing its advance on the city. Plague could be punishment for the
suppression of religious figures. It could result from the city’s sins specific
to that period of time. If one sought medical treatment from the wrong
practitioner in London’s overloaded medical marketplace, packed with
quacks, Helmontians, College-backed physicians and apothecaries, the
results of infection were dire and most certainly deadly, or so potential
patients read in medical pamphlets. Literary authors oversaw this din of

new dialogues alongside the old, creating their own narratives inspired by
this infected world. They warned of unsavoury publishing and unjust rules
brought about in plague times, while often distinguishing their own
writing or the act of writing as having protective or preservative effects.
Recall, too, that Achinstein notes the belief in early modern England that
texts had the capacity to spread not only ‘dangerous content’, but they
could also physically spread pestilence, which could literally infect their
pages.3 Writing in plague times was a charged act, from the controversial
ideas that were inscribed on paper to the possible material transmission of
the disease through texts.
In the two subgenres where I propose the greatest innovation occurred
in plague writing in response to the outbreak in 1665, religious and
medical writing, it is understood that these areas of expertise on the
disease were not entirely exclusive of one another. Whether a medical or
religious author agreed, religion, medicine and disease were frequently
linked in the early modern mind. Wear explains:
The merging of the two worlds of life and death, of body and soul, and the
dual and interchangeable senses of Christ the physician, medicine and
health, probably helped the sick to move easily from medicine to religion
and vice versa, and reflects the fact that there was more than one mode of
healing available in the seventeenth century.4
These essential modes of understanding in the face of plague, medical and

religious, went through significant changes in 1665. Religious and med-
ical texts were some of the most sought out texts in plague times, and
these areas of understanding frequently overlap and could be taken in
tandem to stave off infection or to provide counsel on the disease.
Changes within these long-established plague writing subgenres influ-
enced the literary climate of the outbreak and responses to the illness.
To consider the novelty of these dialogues on the illness, I have focused on
documents that would not traditionally be analyzed in a work on litera-
ture, amongst them medical pamphlets and religious tracts destined for
devoted followers. By locating the literature of the outbreak, that written
in 1665, as well as texts composed in the epidemic’s aftermath, at a specific
historical moment, I have drawn the literary out of these non-canonical
works of religious and medical writing. By taking into consideration these
texts that are traditionally considered to have greater historical significance
INTERPRETING THE LITERARY CULTURE OF PLAGUE IN 1665 215
than literary, this book locates the major plague writing subgenres in 1665,
and considers how these were made new and novel during the outbreak.
Providing micro-histories of how texts composed in the areas of medical and
religious writing responded to an outbreak at a specific moment in time—
from works by nonconformists to debating medical practitioners—is essen-
tial to establishing a balanced reading of the literary culture of the outbreak in
1665. However, the literary dimension of these works cannot be ignored.
Until the plague bacterium could be magnified and viewed, plague as a
disease was often understood in literary, metaphorical terms.5 In many
of these texts, the author plots out the route to and meaning of plague
infection and death, filling pages with charged constructions of how and
why plague struck. The path taken toward infection could be described in
medical terms—pestilential miasma or a shock on the archeus. The journey
leading one to death by plague could be justified within a religious context—
one’s sins or the city’s sins brought on the outbreak. In most of these stories
that are created around plague, however, death remains the uniting factor.
While their authors offer different perspectives on that death, from writers
helping their readers navigate the treacheries of the move to the afterlife to
those who describe the corpse as an expressive medium in its own right, these
writings are connected by their fixation on mortality.
Plague writing, across the noted subgenres, is united by a singular
fixation on death.6 In the early modern mind, disease and death were
inextricably correlated, with plague resonating as particularly emblematic
of mortality.7 The connection between plague and death plays out in so
many of these texts that death becomes a unifying feature of these writings
and must be considered when reading plague texts. It is the element that
cuts across historically contingent interpretations of the disease. Yet, as I
have demonstrated through analysis that locates the grotesque and the
abject in some of these images of death, they are rarely as one sided and
definitive as they may first seem. By theorizing these plague stories and the
images that play out in these texts in terms of Bakhtin’s work on the
grotesque or Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the doubleness of plague
images may be accounted for. Portraits of plague death are frequently
ambivalent, fraught with indecision, even writhing with surprising life,
showing that the disease can never simply be read as an end. Plague
texts are alive with creeping borders, and the boundaries of the healthy
and well-defined body versus the infected and oozing body come alive in
these works. To cope with the experience of death in these texts, stories of
corpses and heaving graveyards are mediated within the realms of religion
and medicine. These authors guide their readers through the fear of death
within a discipline-specific context. Despite these mediating voices, in so
many of these texts—consider the frame of skeletons and winding sheets
of a Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Us broadside or the image prefacing
Thomson’s text, in which the corpse lies open, its body disrupted by spots,
its skin peeled back—death seems to have infected life.8
If plague is overwhelmingly negative and death is the unifying factor
pervading these texts, then the act of writing about plague, containing it
within a pamphlet or book, is a profoundly life-affirming one. Thomson
notes, following his plague dissection and after dabbling his hand in the
corpse’s entrails and finding it grow stiff and numb: ‘I might better (had I
foreseen what I do now) kept it out, than thrust it out; for those slie,
insinuating, venemous Atoms, excited by the heat of the body, opening
the pores of my skin, had quickly free ingress’.9 Thomson’s hand is over-
whelmed by the outbreak, which spreads through him, leading to infec-
tion. He has taken incredible risk and, as he describes, may be overcome
entirely by death. Even at this stage in the narrative, however, Loimotomia
is a testament to his life. He was spared. He was allowed to carry on. All of
this is made evident and clear by the fact that one can read his story and the
history of the dissection in Loimotomia. In this way, plague takes on a role
as a co-author in these texts, allowing some to write and others to die.
Some authors go so far as to offer up writing as a preservative in plague
times, either in very literal ways or as implied by their engagement with the
disease and subsequent capacity to record its horrors. In the same way that
images of death included in plague texts are not simple or singular, the act
of writing a plague text is a dynamic activity. For every death described,
someone lived to tell the story. In conclusion, while death is the most
knowable aspect of a plague text, the act of writing is profoundly life-
affirming. Plague has a hand in each of these texts, furnishing their pages
with corpses and infected bodies, while granting the author the right to
live and tell the story of the affliction, of the horror that is a plague
outbreak. While the literary culture of the plague outbreak in 1665
brought with it significant novelty and innovation in the religious and
medical responses that were produced, some of the most timeless expres-
sions of the disease that were committed to the page in early modern
England were found in such works as the simplistic Lord Have Mercy Upon
Us broadsides or in the story of the piper, who seems to transgress the
border between life and death in each re-telling of the story.
NOTES 217
NOTES
1. Research Fellowships at the Worth Library. edwardworthlibrary.ie/
research-fellowships/. Accessed 22 October 2016.
2. Charles Davis, Catalogue of Choice and Valuable Books in Most Faculties and
Languages; Being the Sixth Part of the Collection Made by Tho. Rawlinson
(London: [1726]). (Davis 1726)
4. Though these were connected, there were, of course, struggles between
physicians and religious figures, Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in
Seventeenth Century England’, pp. 69-70. (Wear 1985)
5. Ernest Gilman, ‘Afterword: Plague and Metaphor’, in Representing the
Plague in Early Modern England, ed. by Rebecca Totaro, Ernest B.
Gilman (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 219–236 (225). (Gilman 2011)
6. Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 74. (Houlbrooke 2000)
7. Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England’,
p. 55. (Wear 1985)
8. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4.
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INDEX
A works by: Book M, 9, 14,

Achinstein, Sharon, 15, 18, 21n44, 131–153, 155n6,
128n55, 214 155n9; ‘Meditation on my
Act of Uniformity, 97, 111, death’, 139, 145; ‘Meditations
112, 123 on the Sickenes and of
nonconformists Highbury’, 143; ‘Observation
and, 97, 100 on my Dream. Of
William Dyer and, 110 Monition’, 138; ‘On the Birds
Anatomy Singing in my Garden’, 138,
Epiloimia Epe, or, The Anatomy 139; ‘On the sickeness’, 142;
of the Pestilence (Austin), 10, ‘On the Situation of
14, 22n47, 183, 200, 201, Highbury’, 144–146; ‘Vpon
205, 206, 206n2 Gods giveing me health’, 140
rise of, 170 Austin, William, 10, 14, 22n47,
Anglican Church, 98 183–186, 194–206
Apocalypse Galenists and, 201
nonconformists and, 123 medical writers and, 119–200
Thomas Vincent and, 99–109 works by: Atlas Under Olympus:
William Dyer and, 99, 100, An Heroick Poem, 195;
117–119, 121, 123 Epiloimia Epe, or, The Anatomy
Austen, Katherine of the Pestilence, 10, 14, 22n47,
bible and, 9 183, 206n2; A Joyous
A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) Welcome, 194, 206, 209n41;
(Defoe) and, 134, 146 Triumphus Hymenaeus, 194,
life of, 132–134, 136–146 195, 209n42

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0
236 INDEX
B C
Bacon, Francis, 193, 194 Calamy, Edmund, The Nonconformist’s
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 17, 46, 54n63, Memorial: Being an Account
70, 71, 101, 215 of the Ministers, Who were Ejected
Barker, Christopher, 35 or Silenced After the Restoration,
Bartholomew Day 1662, 96, 99, Particularly by the Act
112, 125n7 of Uniformity, 112
Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 38, Charles II, 38, 62, 194, 195
52n28, 52n34 Chicoyneau, François, 212
Baxter, Richard, 10, 125n7 Civil War (Pharsalia)
Bill, John, 35 (Lucan), 201
Bills of mortality, 4, 5, 8–10, Clapham, Henoch, An Epistle
29, 34, 35, 39, 43, 95, Discoursing Upon the
148–149, 152–153, 191, Pestilence, 179n29
192, 199, 200, 203, Clarendon Code, 96, 97, 110
211, 213 A Collection of Seven and Fifty
Natural and Political Observations … Approved Receipts Good Against
Upon the Bills of Mortality the Plague (W. J.), 20n21, 193
(Graunt), 191, 213 The College of Physicians, 58, 59,
Blood-letting, 173 62, 66, 67, 83
Boghurst, William, Loimographia, Conformists, 98, 99
3, 18n2 Cook, Harold J., 80
Book of Common Prayer, 96 Crichton-Stuart, John Patrick, 10
Book of Revelation Crouch, Humphrey (H.C.), 31, 41,
Christs Voice to London and The 44, 47
Great Day of Gods Wrath Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon
(Dyer), 13, 22n55, 96, Us (1637) (H.C.), 28–34, 41
111, 112 Londons Vacation, and the Countries
Thomas Vincent and, 105–106 Tearme, 41, 45
William Dyer and, 109–123
Bowers, Rick, 42
Broadsides, plague, 8–10, 12, 28, D
29, 50, 87 Davis, Charles, 213
Broadsheets, 51n14, 216 Death, theme of
Bute Broadsides collection, 11, in Book M (Austen), 136
12, 189 Christs Voice to London and The
Humphrey Crouch (H.C.) Great Day of Gods Wrath
and, 31, 41 (Dyer), 13, 111, 112
Brook, Nathaniel, 198–200 in plague writing, 145
Bunyan, John, 10 William Dyer and, 121
Burns, William E., 187 De Courtenay, Edward, 193
INDEX 237
Defoe, Daniel, 1, 2, 10, 14, 15, Dyer, William, 10, 13, 98–100,
40, 41, 45, 47, 48, 108, 134, 109–123
136, 146–152, 211, 212 ejections and, 111
A Journal of the Plague Year, 1, 10, literary persona of, 112
14, 15, 40, 41, 58, 109, 132, portrait of, 115
134, 144, 146, 211 as preacher, 63–72
Dekker, Thomas, 1, 41 Dyer, William, works by
A Rod for Run-Awayes, 8 A Cabinet of Jewels, 112
‘The Meeting of Gallants at an Christ’s Famous Titles, 112
Ordinary: Or, The Walks ‘A Call to Sinners, or, Christ’s
in Paul’s’ (Middleton Voice to London’
and Dekker), 165 (sermon in Christs Voice
De la Bédoyère, Guy, 164 to London), 109
Diarists Christs Voice to London and The
John Evelyn, 14, 161, 162, 164, Great Day of Gods Wrath, 13,
167, 168, 170, 171, 177 96, 110–113, 116–118, 121
Samuel Pepys, 14, 146, 147, 162, ‘Considerations of Death:
164, 167, 168, 170, 171, 177 Containing some few Reasons
war and, 163–165 why men fear it’ (in Christs
Diemerbroeck, Ijsbrand van, Tractatus Voice to London), 117,
Copiosissimus de Peste Libris IV 121–122
(1721), 212 ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (dedication)
The Diseases and Casualties to Christs Voice, 116
this Week, 147 ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’
Disease, theme of (sermon in Christs Voice to
Book M (Austen), 131–155 London), 117, 119
God’s Terrible Voice in the City
(Vincent), 13, 36, 96, 98,
100, 101, 103–106, 108, E
109, 117 East India Company, 136
Thomas Vincent and, 98 Eckerle, Julie A., 134
Dissection, of plague victim, 172 Elizabeth, I., 27
The Diary of Samuel Pepys Epidemic, 3–11
and, 174 medical narratives of, 70
George Thomson and, 57–58 Evelyn, John, 14, 161–162
Loimotomia, or, The Pest correspondence with Samuel
Anatomized:In These Following Pepys, 134, 146–147, 161,
Particulars (Thomson), 58 162, 164, 167, 168, 170,
Donne, John, 1 171, 177
Dowd, Michelle M., 134 hunger and, 166
Drapers’ Company, 136 plague and, 163–165
238 INDEX
Evelyn, John, (cont.) The General Bill of Mortallity: With

war and, 163–165 a Continuation of this Present
works by: diaries of, 163–165; Year 1666 (1666), broadside,
Kalendarium, 163–164; The 29, 31
Mysterie of Jesuitisme (trans Genette, Gérard, 190
and edited by Evelyn), 166 Gilman, Ernest B., 15, 31, 49, 81–82,
Ezell, Margaret J. M., 16, 133 147, 186
Graunt, John, Natural and Political
Observations … Upon the Bills
F of Mortality (1662), 191
Fire of London, 7, 101 Great Plague of London
God’s Terrible Voice in the City (1665), 99, 183
(Vincent) and, 13, 36, 96, aftermath of, 10, 13, 64, 74, 111
98, 100, 101, 103–106, The Diary of Samuel Pepys
108–109, 117, 199 and, 156
Thomas Vincent and, 10, 13, flight of clergy during, 98
36, 95, 100–109, 199 God’s Terrible Voice in the City
First Anglo Dutch War, 161 (Vincent), 13, 36, 96, 98,
Fletcher, James, 67 100, 101, 103–106, 108–109,
Fragmentation, theme of, 163, 118, 199
172–174, 176–177 John Evelyn and, 14, 161
of bodies, 172, 173 Katherine Austen and, 9, 14,
John Evelyn and, 14, 161 131–159
Samuel Pepys and, 14, 161 in later literary culture, 211–216
of society, 172, 173 literary culture and, 15, 75, 99
war and, 163, 173–174, plague writing and, 183
177–178 poetic responses to, 183 (see also
Freke, Elizabeth, 141 Plague writing, poetry)
Furdell, Elizabeth Samuel Pepys and, 14, 161
Lane, 62, 203 Thomas Vincent and, 10, 13, 36,
95, 100–109, 199
William Dyer and, 10, 13, 96
Greenberg, Stephen, 15
G
Gribben, Crawford, 107
Galen, 61, 62, 72, 201, 203
humoral theory, 62
Galenists, 8, 58–66, 74–75, 77,
79–83, 86, 87 H
Galenists vs Helmontians Healy, Margaret, 15, 142
debate, 8, 58–60, 64, 65, Helmontian medicine, 63, 64
74–75, 87 Helmontians, 8, 58–65, 74–75, 86,
views of pestilence, 201 87, 102, 213
INDEX 239
Galenists vs. Helmontians debate, 8, K

58–60, 64, 65, 74–75, 87 Keeble, Neil, 97, 112
plague and, 59, 61, 65, 75, King James, 131
86, 213 Kristeva, Julia, 17, 70, 117,
Henchman, Humphrey, 64, 98 122, 215
Hester, John, 89n27
Highlord, John, 136
Hill, Christopher, 120 L
Hodges, Nathaniel, 13, 58, 60, Le Febvre, Nicholas, 62
65–68, 69, 72–86, 151, Ley, Anna, 131–132
212, 213 Licensing of the Press Act (1622), 7
Galenists and, 58, 60, 66, 74–75, London Orders of 1609, 6, 20n22
77, 80, 83 London, plague in, see Great Plague
George Thomson and, 13, 58 of London (1665)
language and, 80–82 London Plague Orders, 27, 34
Paracelsian medicine, 68 Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon
works by: Loimologia, or, An Us (1665) (Anonymous),
Historical Account of the Plague 28–34, 41
in London in 1665, 58, 151; Lord Have Mercy Vpon Vs: A Speciall
Vindiciae Medicinae & Remedy for the Plague, 187
Medicorum, 58, 68, 76,
77, 83, 84
Houghton Library, Harvard
M
University, 10, 26, 30
Marseilles, France outbreak, 10, 41,
Humoral theory of Galen, 62
148, 211
Hyde, Henry, 170
McDowell, Paula, 15
Mead, Richard, 212, 213
A Short Discourse Concerning
I Pestilential Contagion
The Intelligencer, 5 (1722), 212
Intertextuality Medical debates
Book M (Austen), 133, 152 about the plague, 57–87
Epiloimia Epe, or, The Anatomy Galenists vs Helmontians, 8, 58–60,
of the Pestilence (Austin), 200, 61, 63–65, 74–75, 86, 87
201, 205, 206 George Thomson and, 13, 57–59
Isaac, Peter, 200 Nathaniel Hodges and, 13, 58
print and, 16, 58, 60, 74,
83, 86
J Medicine
Johns, Adrian, 188 anatomy, rise of, 172
Jonson, Ben, 1, 38 chemical philosophy of, 63
240 INDEX
Medicine (cont.) A Journal of the Plague Year

The College of Physicians, 58, 62, (Defoe), 146–152
66, 83 mortality statistics in, 146–152
dissection, of plague victim, 172 See also Diaries
Galenists, 8, 58–66, 74–75, 77, ‘A Necessary Prayer for this Present
79–83, 86, 87 Time’, 29
Galenists vs. Helmontians, 8, 58–60, The Newes, 5
64, 65, 74–75, 87 Nonconformists, 95
Helmontians, 8, 58–65, 74–75, 86, Act of Uniformity, 123
87, 102, 213 apocalyptic sentiments and, 126
humoral theory of Galen, 62 challenges facing, 99
medical thought in 1665, 61–65 ejection of, 96, 101
Paracelsian, 58, 63, 64, 67, 68 literary culture of the late
views of plague and, 39, 96 seventeenth century, 96–97
Middleton, Thomas, 41, 42, 44–48, plague and, 95–124
165, 166 Restoration England, 161
‘The Meeting of Gallants at an William Dyer, 109
Ordinary: or, The Walks in
Paul’s’ (Middleton and
Decker), 53n43, 54n53 O
Moote, Dorothy C. and The Orders Conceived and Published
Lloyd A., 15, 191 by the Lord Major and Aldermen
Mortality statistics, 8–9, 12, 14, 29, of the City of London, Concerning
136, 146–152, 154, 170 the Infection of the Plague (1665),
in Book M (Austen), 14, 136, 146, 190–191, 203
150, 152, 154 Oxford Experimental Philosophy
The Diary of Samuel Pepys and, 146 Club, 67
A Journal of the Plague Year
(Defoe), 14, 136, 146, 148
in narratives, 14, 146–152 P
The Mourning-Cross, or, England’s Paracelsian writings, 58
Lord Have Mercy Upon Us: Paracelsus, 62–63
Containing the Certain Causes of Paraclesian medicine, 62–63
Pestilential Diseases (1665) paratexts, 14, 85, 184–186,
(Broadside), 10, 26, 29 190–192, 194, 198, 205
Munkhoff, Richelle, 15 Patrick, Symon
A Brief Exhortation to Those Who are
Shut Up from Our Society, 98
N A Consolatory Discourse, Perswading
Narratives, ‘private’, 146–152 to a Chearfull Trust in God in
Austen and, 146–152 These Times of Trouble and
Defoe and, 146–152 Danger, 98
INDEX 241
Pepys, Samuel, 14, 18, 146–147, Marseilles, France outbreak

161–178 1720, 41
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 147 nonconformity and, 95–124
letters to John Evelyn, 162, 164, society and, 172
167, 168, 170, 171, 177 special church services for, 98
life of, 134–135 symptoms of, 173
Pestalozzi, Jérôme Jean, Plague body, horror of, 69–74
Avis de Precaution Contre medical debates and, 69–74
la Maladie Contagieuse de Nathaniel Hodges and, 58
Marseille, 212 physician’s descriptions
Pestilence, 96 of, 69, 70
accounts of in correspondence Plague, descriptions of, 103
and, 134–135 Christs Voice to London and The
accounts of in diaries, 135 Great Day of Gods Wrath
The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Dyer), 96, 111
and, 161 descriptions of death, 147, 177
famine and, 165–171 George Thomson and, 58
fragmenting the body, 172–178 physician’s descriptions of, 69
Galenists’ views of, 61 in Samuel Pepys, 134
war and, 165–171 in Thomas Vincent, 95
Pest-ships, 169–170 William Dyer and, 110
Philosophical Transactions Plague, medical debates
(science periodical), 5 about, 57–93
Physicians George Thomson and, 58, 59
Galen, 12, 58, 79 horror of the plague body, 69–74
Galenists, 59–60, 64–66 medical thought in 1665, 61–65
Helmont, 58 Nathaniel Hodges, 58
Helmontian, 12, 13, 58 role of print during plague
See also Medicine outbreak, 74–87
Piper story, in plague Plague, medical writing and, 58, 74, 75
narratives, 49, 147 See also Hodges, Nathaniel;
Plague Thomson, George, works by;
on board ship, 170 William Austin and
cures, 5–6 Plague orders
gallows humor and, 40 debates about, 203, 204
imagery of death and, 190–191 London Orders of 1609, 20n22
in library of Edward London Plague Orders, 27, 34
Worth, 212–213 The Orders Conceived and Published
literary culture of by the Lord Major and
in 1665, 213–216 Aldermen of the City of London,
London 1665 outbreak (see Great Concerning the Infection of the
Plague of London (1665)) Plague (1665), 190
242 INDEX
Plague writing role of print during plague

Anna Ley poem about plague outbreak, 64, 74–87,
outbreak of 1625, 131 148, 184
Book M (Austen), 31–59 spreading medical philosophies
diaries, 135 through printing
humor and, 40–41 press, 64
mortality statistics in, 146–152, 170 William Austin and, 194–205
plague, war, and famine William Dyer and, 109–123
in, 163, 165 Printed artifacts, use of
proclamations, 34–39 A Journal of the Plague Year
religious, 87, 146 (see also Thomas (Defoe), 108, 146
Vincent; William Dyer; William Proclamations
Winstanley) plague writing, 34–39
sixteenth century plague texts, 165 print and, 34–39
story of the piper in plague See also Bills of mortality;
narratives, 39–48, 216 plague orders
theme of death in, 145 Psalm, 100, 136, 142, 146
theme of war and famine in, 165 A Pulpit to be Let. With a Just Applause
women’s writing and, 132 of those Worthy Divines that Stay
See also Plague writing, poetry with Us (1665) (anonymous
Plague writing, poetry, 183–203 pamphlet), 37
Anna Ley poem about plague Puritan Revolution, 3, 7, 12, 58,
outbreak of 1625, 131 61, 62, 74, 87
The Christians Refuge (Winstanley), importance of reading, 114
183–194 medical debates and, 58
Epiloimia Epe, or, The Anatomy Puritans, 9, 97, 101, 105
of the Pestilence (Austin), 206 spirituality and, 55
William Austin and, 194–205 Puritan sermon, 105
William Winstanley, 183–194
Plomer, Henry, ‘Literature
of the Plague’, 126n19
Q
Porter, Roy, 42, 70
Quarantine, 18, 168
Print, culture of, 148, 172, 184,
Quincy, John, 151
185, 187, 190
dissenters and, 125n7, 125n10
Epiloimia (Austin) and, 194
medical debates and, 74, 82 R
medical writings of plague-ridden Rattansi, P. M., 87
London, 74 The Red-Crosse: Or Englands Lord
poetry about the plague, 185–186 Have Mercy Upon Us
reading, importance of, 114, 188 (Dekker), 29
INDEX 243
Reresby, John, The Memoirs of the works by: ‘De Apoplexia’, 66;
Honourable Sir John Reresby, 41 Galeno-pale, or, A Chymical
Restoration England, 11, 16, 62, Trial of the Galenists, 74, 77,
161, 163, 178, 213 83; ‘Letter to the Reader’
medical debates and, 74 (preface to Loimotomia), 75,
nonconformists and, 112 78; Loimologia. A Consolatory
The Nonconformist’s Memorial: Advice, And Some Brief
Being an Account of the Observations Concerning
Ministers, Who were Ejected the Present Pest (1665), 58;
or Silenced After the Loimotomia, or, The Pest
Restoration, Particularly Anatomized: In These Following
by the Act of Uniformity Particulars, 58
(Calamy), 112 Totaro, Rebecca, 15–16
A Rod for Run-Awayes (Dekker), 8
Ross, Sarah C. E., 135
Royal Society, 62 V
van Helmont, Jean Baptiste, 57–58
Vincent, Thomas, 10, 13, 36, 37,
S 95–108, 117, 118, 124
Scollard, Clinton, ‘William Book of Revelation in, 120–121
Winstanley, Critic (1687)’, 183 fanaticism of, 126
Second Anglo Dutch War, 14, 161, A Journal of the Plague Year
166, 168 (Defoe) and, 108–109
Shakespeare, William, 1 puritan sermon and, 105
Sheldon, Gilbert, 64, 76–77 Vincent, Thomas, works by
The Shutting Up Infected Houses God’s Terrible Voice in the City, 13,
as it is Practised in England 36, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103–109,
Soberly Debated (1666), 204 117, 118
Slack, Paul, 5, 15 ‘the Addition of a Sermon Preached
Smyth, Adam, 147 at the Funeral of Mrs. A. J …. ’
Some, Joseph, 50 (in God’s Terrible Voice
Steele, Robert, 35 in the City), 105
St. Paul Covent Garden, 98
W
T war, 96
Thomson, George, 13, 57 correspondence and, 163–165
Galenic medicine and, 61 diaries and, 163–165
Helmontians and, 13, 58 The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Nathaniel Hodges and, 13, 58, and, 163–165
151, 212 famine and, 165–171
244 INDEX
war (cont.) Poets, 187; The Loyall

fragmenting the body, 172–178 Martyrology, 187; ‘Meditations
John Evelyn and, 161 of Death’ (in The Christian
pestilence and, 161–178 Refuge), 184; ‘Meditations
Samuel Pepys and, 14, 38, 161 of the Miseries of Mans Life’
Wear, Andrew, 19, 59, 69, 75, 86, (in The Christian Refuge), 184,
103, 196 186; The Muses Cabinet, Stored
Wilson, Robert, 136 with Variety of Poems, 187; The
Winstanley, William New Help to Discourse:
poetry of, 186–194 Or, Wit, Mirth, and Jollity
spirituality and, 187, 188 Intermixt with More Serious
works by: The Christian Refuge, Matters, 188, 193
186–205; Englands Witherley, Thomas, 67
Triumph, 186; England’s Worth, Edward, 212–213
Worthies, 186–187; ‘Heavenly
Antidotes Against the Plague’
(in The Christian Refuge), 183, Y
184, 187, 188, 192; The Lives Yersinia pestis bacteria, 4
of the Most Famous English See also Plague

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Early Modern Literature in History

More information about this series at

The Literary Culture

Early Modern Literature in History

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950442

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover image: Huntingdon Library

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

I ﬁrst became interested in plague writing of the early modern period

the Wellcome Library in London for her invitation to consider the

2 Continuities in Plague Writing 25

3 Medical Debates on Plague 57

4 Plague and Nonconformity 95

5 Katherine Austen’s Reckoning with Plague in Book M 131

6 Pestilence and War 161

7 Pestilential Poesies 183

8 Conclusion: Recalling the Plague of 1665 in Later Literary

Fig. 2.1 Anonymous, The Mourning-Cross: Or, England’s Lord Have

© The Author(s) 2016 1

Methods of offsetting the threat of legtters by washing, airing or toasting

The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England describes the

DESCENDING INTO EPIDEMIC

1625 and 1636.14 A plague epidemic of the magnitude seen in 1665

publications concerned with plague appeared in 1665 and 1666, rather

The changes Slack describes are reﬂected in plague writing completed

when their ability to preach to congregations in the spiritually awakened city

Innovations in plague writing in 1665 co-existed with a strong tradition

produced across early modern England, I narrow in on how these differing

Life writing reveals how citizens incorporated an understanding of the

UNDERSTANDING THE WRITING OF THE GREAT PLAGUE

research, including Paul Slack’s magisterial study of The Impact of Plague in

early modern marketplace of print’.63 The Literary Culture of Plague in Early

5. Ernest B. Gilman provides a compelling reading of plague in relation to lan-

detailed information on the printing history of Philosophical Transactions, see

45. Katherine Austen, Katherine Austen’s Book M British Library, Additional

61. Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies,

Continuities in Plague Writing

On the page, a woodcut of a winding sheet and a rough image of a cofﬁn

© The Author(s) 2016 25

A true Relation of Seven modern Plagues or Visitations in London, with the

plague retained currency from outbreak to outbreak. Documents that were

LONDONS LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US

conveyed by mounting plague deaths, typically listed in columns by 1665, as

Reader, what ever thou art, rich or poor,

Death startles all, but more the guilt of sin,

He may attend upon thy house to morrow.

Composed in rhyming couplets, the verse is simplistically con-

verse ends on an awkward rhyme, creating a jarring conclusion to the poem:

Political texts represented an area in which signiﬁcant repetition was

A number of royal proclamations issued in relation to the visitation

The crowds Vincent describes in the churches parallel those crowding

BEloved; and he sweetly thus goes on,

Despite the threat of contracting plague through professional service

INHERITED MYTH: THE STORY OF THE PIPER

one of unimaginable horror—or so one would surmise. Under the

persistent expression of plague humour, re-emerging across seventeenth-

disease, written as a journal detailing one man’s encounter with an epi-

Speaking in part about Dekker’s plague pamphlets, Rick Bowers explains

each of these stories of avoided premature burial, the author’s sleight of

Within the discursive space of ofﬁcial responses to an outbreak, a plague

As for lame persons, and maim’d soldiers,

told in verse by Crouch or collected in a ﬁctional journal by Defoe. There is