A Plague on Both Your Houses of Worship: The Meanings of Epidemic Disease in William Byrd II and Cotton Mather

Treatises on epidemic disease by two North American British Colonial literary figures, William Byrd II and Cotton Mather, demonstrate similar preoccupations with epidemics’ religious meanings, despite Byrd’s Anglican and Mather’s Calvinist Congregationalist differing theological commitments. Both men situate epidemic disease in the inherent weakness of the human condition, while Byrd is more inclined toward human reason and Mather toward spiritual intervention in the selection of preventives and treatments. Mather’s role in the 1721 smallpox inoculation controversy may represent competition between Boston’s traditional ministerial intelligentsia and the emerging university-trained medical intelligentsia.