Plague Writing in Early Modern England (review)

The premise of Ernest B. Gilman’s Plague Writing is excellent: all writing in the seventeenth century occurred within a culture fundamentally shaped by epidemic disease. This is an important assertion, especially for Gilman’s audience of literary scholars, who often relegate considerations of plague to the background. In his most compelling overarching argument, put forth in the introduction and returned to in the conclusion, Gilman urges us to examine narratives of epidemic across time because “past plagues are still present to us, exerting their pressure as shards of cultural memory, traumatic fragments that still have the power to wound even if—especially if—their substance has been ‘forgotten’” (p. 5). He suggests that as we currently inhabit our own plague time (e.g., with AIDS, emerging new diseases, and evolving strains like drug-resistant tuberculosis), we should be particularly sensitive readers not only of past epidemics but of the symbolic ways they continue to resonate long afterward. He lays the groundwork for this larger argument in the first chapter by framing the plague narrative within trauma studies. Readers of this journal will be disappointed to find that this theoretical emphasis comes at the expense of medicine. Indeed, at one point Gilman calls the early modern period “a premedical age” (p. 29). Of course he means a premodern medical age; nevertheless, it is a governing assumption of this book that medicine is not part of the story of plague writing because of its “failure to account for [the plague] in its own terms, as a natural phenomenon capable of being understood and treated,” which “leads to its displacement onto the overlapping terrain of politics and theology—where rationalization and paranoia offer the explanations that medicine cannot supply” (p. 64). Gilman’s lack of engagement with current scholarship on early modern medicine means that numerous places where his readings might be more subtly nuanced instead fall flat as, for example, with his discussion of the “extraordinary pharmacopoeia” in a passage on treatments from Thomas Lodge’s Treatise of the Plague (pp. 140–41). Rather than see Lodge as participating in a long-standing medical and rhetorical tradition, Gilman prefers to cast contemporary materia medica as utterly absurd to the modern eye.

Beginning with chapter 2, Gilman concentrates on politics and theology to develop his second main thesis: that the Reformation fundamentally altered the response to plague. In an oversimplified dichotomy, Gilman argues that the tradition of seeking comfort and healing in images of saints (a practice he locates solely in Italy) becomes unavailable to Protestant England, which now figures plague in textual terms. Most insightful is his careful analysis of the etymologies of the word “plague” in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew to show a fundamental connection between it and the Word, a connection also drawn by seventeenth-century writers (pp. 94 –100). In chapter 3, he considers the 1603 epidemic in detail by examining popular pamphlets, like those of Thomas Dekker, and treatises such as Lodge’s. These readings set the stage for the final three chapters, each of which is focused on a literary figure or figures writing in or about an epidemic: Ben Jonson, 1603; John Donne, 1625; and Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe, 1665. In each, Gilman offers fine literary readings; two of note are his analysis of Jonson’s “Epigram XLV: On My First Son,” written about a child lost to plague, where the poetics of grief are in conflict with Jonson’s own survival (pp. 176–82) and most persuasively, his discussion of the “Dallying and Tallying” in Pepys’ Diary (pp. 219–29), in which “these two pleasures together constitute allied forms of compensation, erotic and economic, for the terrors of the epidemic” (p. 219). Ultimately, Gilman’s long view of the persistence of plague is refreshing.