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  • Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early American Narrative by Cristobal Silva
  • William Van Arragon
Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early American Narrative. By Cristobal Silva. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011.

The subtitle of this fascinating book suggests how Cristobal Silva intends to bring together the burgeoning field of medical history and epidemiology with literary criticism to interrogate not only the first century of colonial settlement but the field of New England studies itself. Silva hopes to explore a framework for understanding the mechanics of colonial epidemics as well as the narrative and theological practices that arose from them. “An epidemiology of narrative,” Silva argues, “describes an analytical framework that charts the genealogy of New England’s literary history according to the temporal and geographical specificity of epidemical outbreaks—a specificity that relates to shifting migration patterns and immunological conditions over time as much as it does to factionalism, political intrigue, and religious orthodoxy” (13). Turning our attention from the New England “Mind,” in other words, Silva is fascinated by the specificity of New England bodies and by the rhetorical practices that were formed by people and communities in sickness and in health during the first century of colonial settlement.

Silva offers perceptive and sometimes counterintuitive readings of key episodes and texts that in outlines will largely be familiar to scholars of early New England but which will seem less familiar after engaging this book, as Silva’s epidemiological analysis allows for new questions and new lines of inquiry. He begins with the 1616–1619 epidemics that killed up to 95 percent of the indigenous inhabitants of New England before the first wave of Puritan settlement. “Epidemics certainly facilitated settlement in New England,” Silva remarks, but they also provided settlers with justification narratives, “with the language through which to understand and legitimate their migration” and colonization (26). Next, he turns to the epidemiological rhetoric that informed the Antinomian Crisis of the 1630s and the debates about separatism and congregationalism among the settlers themselves, demonstrating how Antinomianism was pathologized as a “figural epidemic” by its opponents (76). In both cases, which are key moments in the history of the New England colonies, the rhetorical practices of epidemiology came to enact the politics of conquest and schism. Where the first generation of Puritan settlers saw indigenous susceptibility to disease as providential justification for their enterprise, meanwhile, the mid-century epidemics among Anglo-Americans undermined that certainty, reflected in the evolution of the jeremiad form and the debates about the halfway covenant; this is the subject of the third section of the book. Finally, Silva devotes a fascinating chapter to the smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1721, in which Cotton Mather features so prominently.

Silva’s analysis is richly rooted in the historiography of early New England, from Williston Walker to Perry Miller to contemporary scholars in both medical history and literary studies such as Priscilla Wald and Louise Breen. Non-specialists may find the [End Page 249] interiority of these debates to be difficult to navigate (and in fact Silva himself “sheepishly” apologizes for reviving scholarly conversations that are in some cases more than fifty years old [71]), but specialists will find much to appreciate. Silva’s readings of the 1616–1619 epidemics and of the 1721 Boston Inoculation Crisis, the episodes that bookend his monograph, are particularly interesting in this regard because his use of epidemiological theory cuts against the grain of conventional interpretations, reclaiming some of the erased narratives—the “counter-epidemiologies”—of indigenous peoples and Africans who were the subjects of colonial appropriation. The book is challenging, rewarding, and highly recommended.

William Van Arragon
The King’s University College, Canada
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