Quarantining Contagion: Providentialist Debates over Plague and Public Health in Elizabethan and Jacobean England

Abstract

abstract:Despite repeated outbreaks of plague in the centuries following the Black Death, no consensus existed in England on the issues of how plague should be fought, how the infected should be cared for, and how the implementation of such measures would be funded. An abundance of printed texts emerged during the sixteenth century offering English readers information on what could and should be done to contain plague's spread. Ultimately their authors explained plague providentially, with many going so far as to claim that plague was entirely beyond the control of human actions. Placing the Tudor and Stuart Crowns' evolving quarantine policy into dialogue with the voices of clerics, physicians, philosophers, and poets who engaged with royal policy and at times offered substantial criticisms of it, this essay argues that the national imposition of quarantine provoked royal subjects to articulate and defend their own opinions about the practice, encouraging the development of popular political dialogue.