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ABSTRACT Despite repeated outbreaks of plague in the centuries following the Black Death, no consensus existed in England on the issues of how plague should be fought, how the infected should be cared for, and how the implementation of such measures would be funded. An abundance of printed texts emerged during the sixteenth century offering English readers information on what could and should be done to contain plague's spread. Ultimately their authors explained plague providentially, with many going so far as to claim that plague was entirely beyond the control of human actions. Placing the Tudor and Stuart Crowns' evolving quarantine policy into dialogue with the voices of clerics, physicians, philosophers, and poets who engaged with royal policy and at times offered substantial criticisms of it, this essay argues that the national imposition of quarantine provoked royal subjects to articulate and defend their own opinions about the practice, encouraging the development of popular political dialogue. KEYWORDS: providentialist discourse; plague; Simon Forman; Henoch Clapham; Thomas Dekker
BY THE TURN OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, England was rare among European countries in lacking centralized regulation to combat the unremitting spread of plague. A familiar presence in early modern life, plague outbreaks ravaged most communities at least once a decade, and every generation experienced at least one devastation that doubled mortality rates.1 English magistrates were unsure precisely what caused plague buboes to swell, turn black, and burst, and they found themselves paralyzed by the impossibility of fighting "a secret misfortune that creepeth in prively, so that it can neither be seen nor heard, neither smelled nor tasted till it have done the harm."2 That plague spread from country to country, town to town, neighborhood to neighborhood, most typically striking poorer areas and arriving in the warmer months, was apparent. But all other observations of plague's spread defied understanding. It could touch one town but not another, one household but not another, and one family member but not another. The Elizabethan Privy Council thus walked into a minefield of conflicting popular opinion about plague when it demanded the quarantining of infected households throughout the realm to stop its further spread. This essay argues that printed debate over plague's disputed causes and solutions produced an emerging sphere of political discourse,...