Miraculous Plagues
An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7305976 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Walter W Woodward (University of Connecticut, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 886-887 |
| Publication date | 2012-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jas351 |
| OpenAlex | W2335578994 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
Miraculous Plagues anachronistically projects modern epidemiological frameworks onto early New England to show how disease interpretation justified Puritan colonialism and shaped Puritan culture, community, and authority. Because epidemiology “formalizes a set of vocabularies and grammars that articulate ... why certain people get sick while others do not,” it “reinscribe[s] otherwise unremarkable behaviors as dangerous and ... extrapolate[s] this danger to the community at large” (pp. 4, 5). Epidemiologies, then, are inherently political. According to Cristobal Silva, Puritan “justification narratives” politicized catastrophic indigenous contact-period epidemic mortality by positing immunological distinctions between English and Indian bodies based on Christian/heathen and civilized/savage tropes (p. 16). Native epidemics signified a providential endorsement of the Puritan mission, while making the landscape a “vacant wilderness” divinely cleared for English occupation (p. 17). These narratives freed the English from moral culpability as transporters of the diseases and fused legal, theological, and epidemiological rhetoric in the service of colonizing New England. The purely rhetorical nature of justification narratives is underscored by the high incidence of diseases among newly arrived colonists, which were glossed over as the result of poor planning or diet
Archaeology · Art · Biology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · Indigenous · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Narrative · New england · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Theology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |