ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Visitation Revisited: Plague Pamphlet Publication and Distribution in 17th Century Britain

• In Event: Disciplinary Perspectives on the London Bills of Mortality, 1518–1858

English Abstract

Overall, this entire session focuses on the content of plague pamphlets, broadsides, and other related publications in the British Isles over a very long period of time: nearly three centuries. The linchpin is the data; how it was collected, characterized, and utilized by public and private entities and individuals. This paper, however, takes a step back to consider how very strange it was in these centuries for this data to be made publicly available at all. England had no tradition of protected free speech (Milton’s Areopagitica was not published until 1644, and was largely ignored at the time), and those who printed unauthorized material faced such imaginative Tudor/Stuart punishments as public humiliation in the stocks, cropped ears, and branding the letters “SL” (for “seditious libeler”) on one’s cheek. But somehow plague information was different, and the complete power of the early printing press was harnessed to get the most reliable data available out to interested parties with remarkable speed.

This paper will focus on a very particular publication: London’s Dreadful Visitation, a compilation of plague and more general mortality statistics published in 1665. But this publication will serve as merely a vantage point from which to examine what we know, what we surmise, and what remains mysterious, after decades of individual research, about the process (and business) of putting those inky sheets into the hands of commoners and aristocrats alike.

Author

• Stephen Greenberg, Independent Scholar