Samuel K. Cohn
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199574025
- eISBN:
- 9780191722530
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199574025.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, European Early Modern History
Chapter 1 shows quantitatively the effect of the 1575–8 plague on medical writing and publishing. In two years alone, 1576 and 1577, almost half the century's published writings on plague appeared. ...
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Chapter 1 shows quantitatively the effect of the 1575–8 plague on medical writing and publishing. In two years alone, 1576 and 1577, almost half the century's published writings on plague appeared. This pattern was unique to Italy not only for these years but across the history of plague in Europe from the Black Death to at least the seventeenth century and probably beyond. In addition, the language of plague writing, whether composed by academic physicians or others, shifted abruptly from a majority in Latin (fuelled by the revival in classical medical writing over the past century—medical humanism) to an overwhelming preponderance in the vernacular.Less
Chapter 1 shows quantitatively the effect of the 1575–8 plague on medical writing and publishing. In two years alone, 1576 and 1577, almost half the century's published writings on plague appeared. This pattern was unique to Italy not only for these years but across the history of plague in Europe from the Black Death to at least the seventeenth century and probably beyond. In addition, the language of plague writing, whether composed by academic physicians or others, shifted abruptly from a majority in Latin (fuelled by the revival in classical medical writing over the past century—medical humanism) to an overwhelming preponderance in the vernacular.
Samuel K. Cohn
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199574025
- eISBN:
- 9780191722530
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199574025.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, European Early Modern History
This chapter concentrates on one of the longest and most influential plague treatises of the sixteenth century, that of the Sicilian physician Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia, written in 1575 and 1576. It ...
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This chapter concentrates on one of the longest and most influential plague treatises of the sixteenth century, that of the Sicilian physician Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia, written in 1575 and 1576. It broke with previous plague writing that concentrated on preventative measures and cures directed to the individual patient. Instead, it concentrated on the duties of the prince and public health policy—the creation of new plague hospitals, quarantine, street cleaning, plague passports, and sources of contaminated water. Further, it introduced a new rigour to plague chronicling and disease tracking.Less
This chapter concentrates on one of the longest and most influential plague treatises of the sixteenth century, that of the Sicilian physician Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia, written in 1575 and 1576. It broke with previous plague writing that concentrated on preventative measures and cures directed to the individual patient. Instead, it concentrated on the duties of the prince and public health policy—the creation of new plague hospitals, quarantine, street cleaning, plague passports, and sources of contaminated water. Further, it introduced a new rigour to plague chronicling and disease tracking.
Samuel K. Cohn
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199574025
- eISBN:
- 9780191722530
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199574025.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Early Modern History
The Introduction sets out the main questions of the book, the historiography of plague and plague writing from the Black Death to the seventeenth century.
The Introduction sets out the main questions of the book, the historiography of plague and plague writing from the Black Death to the seventeenth century.
Ernest B. Gilman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226294094
- eISBN:
- 9780226294117
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226294117.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. ...
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During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—this book aims to bring to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation. The book argues that the plague writing of the period attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic, and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. It also trains a critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, it posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague.Less
During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—this book aims to bring to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation. The book argues that the plague writing of the period attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic, and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. It also trains a critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, it posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague.
Ernest B. Gilman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226294094
- eISBN:
- 9780226294117
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226294117.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter contends 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—an event, therefore, ...
More
This chapter contends 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—an event, therefore, fundamentally discursive, even before it became the subject of plague writing, an event that presents itself as a text to be read. The differences between English and Italian modes of plague representation help to illuminate this point, for in the world of Italian visual culture, not only the veneration of the plague saint but the ways in which the saint's mediation is understood as efficacious provide a resource of comfort and explanation in the face of epidemic disease. Put simply, in the Italian tradition, art relieves language of what would become, in England, the burden of accounting for the pestilence.Less
This chapter contends 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—an event, therefore, fundamentally discursive, even before it became the subject of plague writing, an event that presents itself as a text to be read. The differences between English and Italian modes of plague representation help to illuminate this point, for in the world of Italian visual culture, not only the veneration of the plague saint but the ways in which the saint's mediation is understood as efficacious provide a resource of comfort and explanation in the face of epidemic disease. Put simply, in the Italian tradition, art relieves language of what would become, in England, the burden of accounting for the pestilence.
Ernest B. Gilman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226294094
- eISBN:
- 9780226294117
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226294117.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter seeks to read Pepys and Defoe on the plague as reflecting, each in his way, a transitional aspect of the event: an engagement with infectious disease that hovers between the providential ...
More
This chapter seeks to read Pepys and Defoe on the plague as reflecting, each in his way, a transitional aspect of the event: an engagement with infectious disease that hovers between the providential and the quotidian. Pepys's diary accommodates the fire—and the plague—by collating their otherwise unaccountable horror with the ordinary events of a life that goes on, rather than by subsuming his individual experience to some great design. Closer to picaresque than to epic, the Diary offers a microhistory suited less to grand narrative than to local observation and chance encounters. Pepys tracks events at street level, notes the fluctuations in the death toll as published in the bills of mortality, and produces a record of the plague indexed to the daily activities of the writer. In this way, his diary entries for the plague year of 1665 are of a piece with the day-to-day accounts in Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, written in 1722, although with crucial differences in social perspective as well as in the proximity of the two narratives to the event itself.Less
This chapter seeks to read Pepys and Defoe on the plague as reflecting, each in his way, a transitional aspect of the event: an engagement with infectious disease that hovers between the providential and the quotidian. Pepys's diary accommodates the fire—and the plague—by collating their otherwise unaccountable horror with the ordinary events of a life that goes on, rather than by subsuming his individual experience to some great design. Closer to picaresque than to epic, the Diary offers a microhistory suited less to grand narrative than to local observation and chance encounters. Pepys tracks events at street level, notes the fluctuations in the death toll as published in the bills of mortality, and produces a record of the plague indexed to the daily activities of the writer. In this way, his diary entries for the plague year of 1665 are of a piece with the day-to-day accounts in Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, written in 1722, although with crucial differences in social perspective as well as in the proximity of the two narratives to the event itself.
Ernest B. Gilman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226294094
- eISBN:
- 9780226294117
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226294117.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter aims to set Donne as a plague writer into the context of the fatal and memorable year and, by doing so, correlate the epidemic crisis in London with a transformative personal crisis for ...
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This chapter aims to set Donne as a plague writer into the context of the fatal and memorable year and, by doing so, correlate the epidemic crisis in London with a transformative personal crisis for Donne, occasioned by his own near-fatal illness two years before. The central texts include three works not usually taken together but all part of Donne's engagement with disease: his own, London's, and the world's. The Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, published the year before the plague as a meditation on his recent illness, would be in the bookstalls during the plague year, along with the 1625 edition of the “Anniversaries.” These earlier poems, with their prolonged lament for a “sicke World,” would now likely be reread in the light of the plague, and in the context of Donne's writing, as a prelude to the Devotions.Less
This chapter aims to set Donne as a plague writer into the context of the fatal and memorable year and, by doing so, correlate the epidemic crisis in London with a transformative personal crisis for Donne, occasioned by his own near-fatal illness two years before. The central texts include three works not usually taken together but all part of Donne's engagement with disease: his own, London's, and the world's. The Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, published the year before the plague as a meditation on his recent illness, would be in the bookstalls during the plague year, along with the 1625 edition of the “Anniversaries.” These earlier poems, with their prolonged lament for a “sicke World,” would now likely be reread in the light of the plague, and in the context of Donne's writing, as a prelude to the Devotions.
Ernest B. Gilman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226294094
- eISBN:
- 9780226294117
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226294117.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
There is a series of exemplary texts in the history of early modern English plague writing, which form a series in that each responds, in turn, to the three pandemics that ravaged London between 1603 ...
More
There is a series of exemplary texts in the history of early modern English plague writing, which form a series in that each responds, in turn, to the three pandemics that ravaged London between 1603 and 1665. They are exemplary in that they speak immediately to moments of personal crisis—the death of Jonson's son, Donne's recovery from a near-mortal illness—and to the crises of their times. In 1665, Pepys offered something new, the perspective of a walker in the plague city, while Defoe reconstructed the same epidemic many years later from an amalgam of childhood memory and journalistic research, at a moment in 1722 when London seemed again vulnerable to an outbreak of plague. Over the century that separates Jonson's epigram on his son and Defoe's Journal, the discourse of infectious disease was gradually, though incompletely, passing from the province of the divine to that of the physician (who was to assume something of the priestly aura of his predecessor, along with the warrant of the new empirical science).Less
There is a series of exemplary texts in the history of early modern English plague writing, which form a series in that each responds, in turn, to the three pandemics that ravaged London between 1603 and 1665. They are exemplary in that they speak immediately to moments of personal crisis—the death of Jonson's son, Donne's recovery from a near-mortal illness—and to the crises of their times. In 1665, Pepys offered something new, the perspective of a walker in the plague city, while Defoe reconstructed the same epidemic many years later from an amalgam of childhood memory and journalistic research, at a moment in 1722 when London seemed again vulnerable to an outbreak of plague. Over the century that separates Jonson's epigram on his son and Defoe's Journal, the discourse of infectious disease was gradually, though incompletely, passing from the province of the divine to that of the physician (who was to assume something of the priestly aura of his predecessor, along with the warrant of the new empirical science).
