A Note from the Editors

Volume 51 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture is, in some ways, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies's very own journal of the plague year. As COVID-19 hit North America in the early spring of 2020, the academic conferences and public lectures that serve as the seedbed for our contributions were all abruptly canceled or postponed. As the pandemic spread, almost everyone in the field found themselves scrambling to work in conditions unlike anything most of us were used to, all while experiencing levels of anxiety, uncertainty, and unsought responsibility that made stringing two sentences together often seem a daunting task. Nonetheless, some scholarly work found a way to bloom and we are fortunate that it did. With vaccinations and time, COVID-19 may recede into historical memory, much like the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century outbreaks of plague that many of us have studied. But the new archives, shrewd questions, provocative insights, and methodological innovations offered up in this volume of SECC will long remain a resource for us. While none of us yet knows what the "after times" will be like and most of us are more than eager to put our own plague year behind us, we should be grateful that, amidst such tragedy and loss and dread, the contributors to this volume help us think in such exciting and generative new ways about the long eighteenth century. They, at least, found a way to bring some lasting good out of a year of such relentless bad.