The Plague in Print

This book has the laudable aim of making a selection of sixteenth-century English plague documents more readily accessible to a scholarly audience. To that end, Totaro has selected six printed sources: a book of plague remedies, a pamphlet of prayers, a Socratic-style dialogue, a royal proclamation, a bill of mortality, and a journalistic summary of events, with commentary and extensive notes. Although the texts were obviously selected with considerable thought, it is an odd mélange. The first, Thomas Moulton's Myrror or Glasse of Helthe, is not properly “Elizabethan” at all, as it was first published in 1531, during the reign of Henry VIII, and two years before Elizabeth was born. Totaro rightly points out that Moulton's work was reprinted many, many times, but often it was simply appended to other, newer texts; a common printer's method of squeezing the most out of a text in hand before copyright in its modern form was even thought of. This may be a small terminological point (the book could just as easily been subtitled “Essential 16th Century Sources”), but in a larger sense it is representative of the uneven level of scholarship throughout the book.

Ancient history · Art · Literature · Plague (disease) · Political science · Politics · Proclamation · Reign · Scholarship · Style (visual arts) · Classics · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Historical and modern epidemiology studies · History · Law · Literature Analysis and Criticism

• Print, authority, and the bills of mortality in seventeenth-century London

  Jacob Murel•The Seventeenth Century•2021

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