Introduction
In the middle of the 15th century, the German inventor Johannes Gutenburg (d. 1468), designed and built the first known mechanised printing press in Europe, thus introducing a new and effective method for disseminating written knowledge. So remarkable was this invention, that the Italian diplomat, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later to become Pope Pius II, wrote to a friend in Rome, describing Gutenburg as ‘a miraculous man’.[1]
In 1476, the friar Biagio Romero referred to the printed word as God’s salutem in medio terre - ‘salvation on earth’.[2] Printed books would, almost without doubt, have been viewed as a miraculous and divine form of the written word when they first appeared in fairs and market stalls throughout Europe.
The speed with which great quantities of printed books could be produced, and their relatively low cost when compared with manuscripts, all contributed to the idea that print was a heaven-sent means of spreading enlightenment to the masses.
This essay seeks to place the advent of the printing press into the context of plague outbreaks in Early Modern Europe, and England in particular. Using examples, such as remedial treatises and mortality bills from the 16th and 17th centuries, I will argue that the printing press was responsible for a much wider, public dissemination of knowledge about the plague and its effects, but also allowed for the possible spread of misinformation through unscrupulous printers and booksellers.
Plague Literature in Europe
Plague outbreaks played a domineering role in European life for almost four centuries, from 1348 into the early 18th century.
During this time period, a wealth of plague literature emerged. Prior to the printing press, most medical treatises were manuscripts almost always written in scholarly Latin, with the intention of being used and read by members of the clergy and the universities.
Such manuscripts were often expensive and time-consuming to produce, but with the advent of print came the ability to widely circulate information to the broader community in the language of the common people.
In the summer of 1481, the Ripoli Press, in Florence, set about printing 375 copies of Marsilio Ficino’s Advice Against the Plague, which, as Ficino himself wrote, was for everyone in Tuscany.[3] It was a little book, numbering only 100 pages, and contained typical advice, offering remedial prescriptions, precautions, as well as speculating on the potential causes of the plague.
The booklet was distributed beyond Florence with the aid of the cartolaio Giovanni di Nato, and more significantly, his wife Mona Mea, who took twenty-seven copies to Bologna and fifty to Pistoia.[4] From the end of the 15th century onwards, cheaply printed pamphlets and booklets, like Ficino’s Advice, became common throughout Europe thanks to the efforts of booksellers and commercial travellers.[5]
England vs the Continent
Printing in England was slower to take off than on the European continent. It wasn’t until the late 1470s that William Caxton (c. 1422-1491) established the first printing press within the precinct of Westminster Abbey.[6] By the 1530’s, however, we see plague-focused literature, in printed form, making a significant appearance in England.
Arguably, the most influential of these was a plague treatise composed, in the English vernacular, by the Dominican friar, Thomas Moulton. Although originally appearing in manuscript form, it achieved widespread popularity after being printed in a collection of miscellaneous medical remedies entitled The Myrour or Glasse of Helthe that emerged in or around the year 1530.[7]
Moulton’s work mimics a much earlier plague treatise, written by John of Burgundy sometime around 1365, which indicates that certain Medieval ideas and traditions were carried over well into the Early Modern period.
That being said, the Burgundy treatise never appeared in printed form, and Moulton’s adaptation soon replaced it, in England at least, thanks to its widespread circulation through print.[8]
While Thomas Moulton’s treatise is an example of how print, in the early 16th century, changed the way in which primary sources appeared, and who was able to read them, it is still similar, in many respects, to a source one might find in manuscript form almost two centuries earlier. However, if we fast forward to the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, we discover new types of printed plague literature entering the scene.
There were major outbreaks of plague in England during the years 1592, 1603, 1625, 1636, and most famously, 1665.[9] The frequency of these outbreaks called for a new kind of published media, which would allow the public to follow the progress of plague waves as they spread across the country.
The Development of Plague-Related Media
This new media would develop in the form of ‘Bills of Mortality’ which were designed to keep a statistical record of the number of burials within London parishes. The first printed London bill is often said to have appeared in late 1592, although certain records make mention of one as early as 1562.[10]
By 1603, however, London bills were being printed and distributed to the public on a weekly basis, regardless of the intermissions between plague outbreaks. Due to the demand for these bills, printing and selling them became a profitable enterprise, and piracy was not unheard of.[11]
Understandably, the consequences of allowing false or exaggerated mortality figures to be publicly disseminated could have resulted in either ignorance or panic among the population. In order to maintain a stricter control over the accuracy of the statistics, printers required the permission and cooperation of both the municipal and royal authorities to print the bills.[12]
In addition to the Bills of Mortality, the 1660s saw various plague remedies and cures advertised in broadsheet newspapers, such as The Public Intelligencer, operated by renowned pamphleteer and press censor, Sir Roger L’Estrange.[13]
Some of these remedial cures can be traced back to manuscript form, but it can often be difficult to ascertain where they came from and who wrote them.
The Legacy of Plague and the Printing Press
Through print, many unscrupulous apothecaries and charlatans were given the opportunity to repurpose existing recipes and make the unprecedented claim that they were able to cure the plague.
For example, several 1665 issues of The Intelligencer contained an advertisement for a plague remedy called ‘Lady Kent’s Powder’, which contained numerous costly ingredients and a list of the apothecaries in London where they could be bought.[14] To further reinforce the notion that plague misinformation was prevalent in 17th century England, The Intelligencer even reported on June 24th, 1665, that:
“It has been the business of several people to report the mortality to be much greater, and the sickness to be more general than God be thanked it is […]”[15]
Although the mass printing of pamphlets, broadsheets, recipes and bills in the Early Modern period has left historians today with a much wider range of literature on the plague, it is also important to note that because of their cheap and consumable nature, many have not survived.
Another factor, as we have seen, is that historians may have to contend with the likelihood that not all the information that these sources contain may be accurate representations of plague history. However, in many of the examples listed throughout this essay, it is evident that the printing press contributed as much to the spread of knowledge about plague, as the plague itself contributed to a diverse movement in literature and media.
Plague outbreaks in Early Modern England, and across the broader landscape of Europe, helped to create and shape new ways in which information was distributed to the mass of the common people, and without the printing press, this would not have been possible.
Endnotes:
Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence, (Penguin Random House, 2022), p. 142-143.
Brian Richardson, ‘Debates on Printing in Renaissance Italy’, La Bibliofilia, vol. 100 (1998), p. 141.
Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence, p. 373.
Ibid.
Laura Carnelos, ‘Cheap Printing and Street Sellers in Early Modern Italy’, Cheap Print and the People, (Cambridge, 2019), p. 328.
Marianna Stell, England and the Printing Press: A Subject Guide, (Library of Congress, 2022) https:// guides.loc.gov/english-print.
Rebecca Totaro, The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources 1558-1603, (Penn State University Press, 2010), p. 2.
George Keiser, ‘Two Medieval Plague Treatises and Their Afterlife in Early Modern England’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 58, no. 3 (2003), p. 310.
Stephen Greenburg, ‘The Plague, Printing Press, and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 4 (December 2004), p. 509.
Cornelius Walford, ‘Early Bills of Mortality’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 7 (1878), p. 214.
Greenburg, ‘The Plague, Printing Press and Public Health in Seventeenth-Century London', p. 512.
Ibid, p. 513.
Yann Ryan, Recipe Books, Plague Cures and the Circulation of Information, (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2021) https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/recipe-books-plague-information/#easy-footnote-1-19984.
Ibid.
The Public Intelligencer, London, June 24th, 1665. Excerpted from F. G. Kitton, ‘Some Old Newspapers: From Charles I to Queen Victoria’, The Strand Magazine (1896), p. 294 https://www.victorianvoices.net/ ARTICLES/STRAND/1896B/S1896B-Newspapers.pdf.
Bibliography:
Carnelos, Laura. ‘Cheap Printing and Street Sellers in Early Modern Italy’ in Cheap Print and the People. Edited by David Atkinson & Steve Roud. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. pp. 324-353.
Greenberg, Stephen. ‘Plague, the Printing Press and Public Health in 17th Century London’ in Huntington Library Quarterly, Volume 67, No. 4. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. pp. 508-527.
Keiser, George. ‘Two Medieval Plague Treatises and Their Afterlife in Early Modern England,’ in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 58, No. 3. July 2003. pp. 292-324.
King, Ross. The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance. Penguin Random House, 2022.
Kitton, F. G. ‘Some Old Newspapers: From Charles I to Queen Victoria’ in The Strand Magazine. 1896. https://www.victorianvoices.net/ARTICLES/STRAND/1896B/S1896B Newspapers.pdf
Richardson, Brian. ‘Debates on Printing in Renaissance Italy’ in La Bibliofilia, Volume 100, No. 2/3, 1998. pp. 135-155.
Ryan, Yann. Recipe Books, Plague Cures and the Circulation of Information. Folger Shakespeare Library, 202. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/recipe-books-plague information/#easy-footnote-1-19984
Stell, Marianna. England and the Printing Press: A Subject Guide. Library of Congress, 2022. https://guides.loc.gov/english-print
Totaro, Rebecca. The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources 1558-1603. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.
Walford, Cornelius. ‘Early Bills of Mortality’in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Volume 7, 1878. pp. 212-248. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3677889
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