- ISSN: 0008-8994
- E-ISSN: 1600-0498
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oa “The Last Time that We Can Say the Plague Raged”: Historicizing Epidemics
- Brepols
- Publication: Centaurus, Volume 64, Issue 1, Jun 2022, p. 73 - 86
Abstract
In the 17th century, English plague-tract writers began replicating a practice begun some decades earlier by their French and Italian counterparts: creating local histories to better describe the disease and explain how best to manage it. After the great London outbreak of 1665, however, plague deaths often went unrecorded and English tract-writing declined significantly. Without local epidemics to record or historicize, the authors became remote spectators of plague elsewhere, their own outbreaks perhaps now seemingly safe in the past. When plague raged in Marseille in 1720, the disease generated fear but was in some ways a bygone event to English tract-writers. Marketing their tracts as historical accounts, a number of English authors likened the Marseille plague to the epidemics that were forming part of England's social memory. By repeatedly hailing 1665 as the last time plague had raged in London, some writers emphasized England's long plague-free status, pointing to the success of past efforts to contain the disease and also, in some cases, denying that plague could ever have been endemic in the kingdom. They did not downplay the threat that the Marseille outbreak posed should it spread; indeed, concern that plague might devastate English cities once again is at times palpable in the tracts. However, for numerous writers, plague had become an imported foreign threat, one that could be mitigated with appropriate measures, not one that arose domestically. They pointed specifically to the Ottoman Empire, describing it as disease-ridden and the source of their own plagues-historically and, potentially, in the future. In other words, 18th-century English tract-writers relegated their plague epidemics to the past by both firmly historicizing them and making the disease definitively foreign. Plague had not come to an end, but it was no longer their plague.
