| The widespread incidence of plague in early modern England produced massive cracks in the social order, not merely as a result of its massive death tolls, but as people sought to explain the nature of the sickness and attempted to protect themselves against it. Prior to the nineteenth-century study of bacteriology, plague's only observable traits were the swollen buboes it produced, and its unexplained spread over vast distances. Early modern people had neither the technology nor the medical framework necessary to understand the mechanics behind plague; but they did have access to a growing amount of printed material attempting to explain and offer advice on how to treat, and hopefully avoid the sickness. Within these printed texts, disagreement about the sickness's root causation infected a great many other contentious discourses, making it a frequent topic of debate between physicians, magistrates, and preachers.;Writers as a whole most frequently understood plague in Biblical terms, as a punishment from God, deserved by humanity for its sin. The purported sinfulness of the specific human works adopted by authorities evoked multifaceted public commentary throughout the seventeenth-century; and Reformation debates about the role of human works within divine providence took up a great deal of practical relevance as people sought to take up arms against plague's further spread. Worrying about the idolatry of human works, writers feared that remedies such as flight and quarantine undermined Christian charity, and would thus only further anger God. When the Crown attempted to nationalize a policy of public health to contain plague's spread in 1579, it therefore positioned itself in an epistemological quagmire. Not only did these printed discourses inform subjects, they put them on the road towards active political engagement and citizenship. |
