Writing the Plague: William Austin's Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the Pestilence (1666) and the Crisis of Early Modern Representation

Abstract

The Great Plague of London (1665) brought the city to a halt. To the percussive rattle of dead-carts trundling through the city's streets to collect those who had succumbed to the illness, citizens conducted their lives around an epidemic that would kill between 75,000 and 100,000 Londoners. In tandem with the onslaught of plague, an epidemic of printed material spread through London's streets, commenting on and contextualizing the outbreak. The Great Plague of London provided more opportunities to share information through print than any previous outbreak. In his poem Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the Pestilence (1666), William Austin relates his story of the outbreak while interrogating two aspects of print culture: first, print's capacity to convey truth and humanity during the stressful event of plague and, secondly, the medium's meaning to a seventeenth-century English author. This article argues that Austin's apprehension over the print medium is felt in two distinct ways throughout his lengthy poem: in the conflict he expresses over writing specifically for print and in his exposé of nefarious printing ventures that flourished during the epidemic. In his effort to capture the plague within the confines of a book, Austin finds himself torn between the medium he uses to carry his message forward and its insufficiency to convey the complexity of a city in disorder during plague times.