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Reviewed by:
  • Plague Writing in Early Modern England
  • Kristen Poole (bio)
Plague Writing in Early Modern England. By Ernest B. Gilman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Illus. Pp. xi + 295. $35.00 cloth.

Plague Writing in Early Modern England is a compelling and, in many ways, groundbreaking book. The simple title belies the complexity and innovation of its methodological approach and the profundity of its conclusions. Instead of a straightforward historical account of the plague and readings of early modern texts about the plague, Gilman invites us to read the period (as well as our own) through the lens of trauma theory. This lens, fortunately, never slips into a template, and the prose remains forceful, lively, and accessible. While most readers will probably be familiar with the basic facts of the plague in seventeenth-century England—deadly outbreaks in 1603, 1625, and 1665, corresponding with the accession of two different monarchs and the 1666 Great Fire of London; the staggering death tolls; the inconvenience posed to the theater—many will be startled at the cultural and psychological impact of the disease. Gilman convincingly shows that pre- and posttraumatic psychic conditions were permanent parts of life, as the English of this time lived continuously in the wake of one plague outbreak and in anticipation of the next.

The book's introduction and first chapter alone are worth the price of admission. In an elegantly written meditation, Gilman weaves together the history of [End Page 617] pandemics, early modern literature, modern epistemology, and trauma theory. The motivation for the book is to understand not only the English seventeenth century as a period of pre- and postplague traumatic stress, but also the continuities with our own post- and preepidemic moments. Such a project, Gilman asserts, would have been bizarre only a scholarly generation or two ago. Citing a 1974 essay by René Girard, who argued that plague can only be understood metaphorically in a modern world in which epidemics have disappeared, Gilman discusses how AIDS, avian flu, and resurgent tuberculosis have led to an "impending crisis of faith in the ability of medical science to conquer epidemic disease" and the "exhaustion of a dominant triumphalist [medical] paradigm" (29). Gilman reiterates the by-now-familiar apocalyptic warnings from the epidemiologist community that a pandemic is imminent; the specter of medical failure, rather than the vision of medical success, is becoming normative. We too live in a plague time. This positions us to reassess the early modern discourse of the plague and presents strong affinities between pre- and postmodern worlds. Understanding the seventeenth century as an "historical moment uncannily similar to our own" (31) renders discursive constructions of the plague particularly salient, since one of our inheritances is the notion that plague requires "hermeneutic as well as diagnostic skills" (4).

For Gilman, the plague is a discursive event, and all seventeenth-century English literature is plague literature. Sermons, broadsides, poems, and plays directly concerned with the plague are obviously plague texts. In reading the literature of the period as the product of trauma, texts which do not address the plague (for instance, Bacon's philosophical writings) are also plague texts. Maintaining an argument in the negative—so that absence proves presence—is difficult, and Gilman sets out to do this in two ways. First, the bulk of the book (chapters 2, 3, and 4) positions Ben Jonson's Epigram 45, "On my first sonne," within the larger context of plague literature. Epigram 45 (on the death of Jonson's seven-year-old son in 1603) is not overtly concerned with the plague. But having spent two chapters establishing some of the patterns of seventeenth-century plague literature, Gilman performs a convincing reading of the poem as utterly enmeshed in plague dynamics. Chapter 2 juxtaposes Italian and English modes of representing the plague; the former is largely a pictorial tradition of portraying succor from intercessory saints, the latter is a verbal tradition, as numerous authors in the period point to the fact that the Hebrew word ... (in its seventeenth-century Anglicized form, DBR) meant both "word," "Word," and "plague" (96). Among other things, this means that plague is discursive, that plague is produced...

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