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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2012
During the Great Plague of London (1665), William Winstanley veered from his better known roles as arbiter of success and failure in his works of biography or as a comic author under the pseudonym Poor Robin, and instead engaged with his reading audience as a plague writer in the rare book The Christians Refuge: Or Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague in this Time of Generall Contagion to Which is Added the Charitable Physician (1665). From its extensive paratexts, including a table of mortality statistics and woodcut of king death, to its temporal and providential interpretation of the disease between the covers of a single text, The Christians Refuge is a compendium of contemporary understanding of plague. This article addresses The Christians Refuge as an expression of London’s print marketplace in a moment of transformation precipitated by the epidemic. The author considers the paratextual elements in The Christians Refuge that engage with the presiding norms in plague writing and publishing in 1665 and also explores how Winstanley’s authorship is expressed in the work. Winstanley has long been seen as a biographer or as a humour writer; attributing The Christians Refuge extends and challenges previous perceptions of his work.
1 Clinton Scollard, ‘William Winstanley, Critic (1687)’, in Lyrics from a Library (New York: G.W. Browning 1913), 27.
2 W.W., The Christians Refuge: Or Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague in this Time of Generall Contagion to Which is Added the Charitable Physician (London: 1665).
3 ‘The Great Plague of London, 1665’, in Harvard University Library Open Collections Program: Contagion, http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/plague.html, accessed 5 November 2010.
4 Anonymous, The Four Great Years of the Plague (London: 1665).
5 Paul Slack explains: ‘The plague epidemic of 1665, the first serious visitation in London for nearly thirty years, generated responses which were partly familiar, partly novel. Much of the novelty lay in the amount of information about the epidemic which was made available to contemporaries. At least forty-six publications concerned with plague appeared in 1665 and 1666, rather more than in 1625–6, and a much larger proportion of them – nearly two-thirds as opposed to one-third – dealt directly with the natural causes of plague, with natural remedies or with the incidence of disease’; Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 244.
6 Richard Macksey, ‘Foreword’, in Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Jane E. Lewin (trans.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xi–xxii: xviii.
7 W.W., op. cit. (note 2), n. p.
8 Slack, op. cit. (note 5), 203.
9 City of London, Orders Conceived and Published by the Lord Major and Aldermen of the City of London, Concerning the Infection of the Plague (London: 1665), B2.
10 Slack, op. cit. (note 5), 242.
11 A. Lloyd and Dorothy C. Moote, The Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 69.
12 W.W., op. cit. (note 2), n.p.
13 Slack op. cit. (note 5), 244–5.
14 W.W., op. cit. (note 2), n.p.
15 W.W., ibid., n.p.
16 W.W., ‘Meditations of Death’, in ibid., 156.
17 W.W., ‘Receits Against the Plague’, in ibid., 157.
18 Winstanley writes: ‘These rules well practised will be a good preparatory for thy soul against the Contagion of sin, in the latter end of the book thou wi[...] finde receits against the Contagion of the body, such as have been approved of by man able Phisicians, to which is added two short Prayers to God, without whose help all Physick Signifies nothing.’ The two short prayers he refers to cannot be found in the receipt section of the text, but notes to the copy state that the ‘last leaf of Remedies’ is missing; ‘Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague’, in op. cit. (note 2), 14–15.
19 Slack, op. cit. (note 5), 247.
20 W.J., A Collection of Seven and Fifty Approved Receipts Good Against the Plague. Taken out of the Five Books of that Renowned Dr Don Alexes Secrets, for the Benefit of the Poorer Sort of People of These Nations (London: 1665), 4.
21 W.W., ‘Meditations of the Miseries of Mans Life’, in op. cit. (note 2), 4.
22 William Winstanley, England’s Worthies: Select Lives of the Most Eminent Persons from Constantine the Great, to the Death of Oliver Cromwel Late Protector (London: 1660).
23 W.W., ‘Meditations of the Miseries of Mans Life’, in op. cit. (note 2), 39.
24 William Winstanley, Englands Triumph. A More Exact History of His Majesties Escape after the Battle of Worcester, with a Chronologicall Discourse of His Straits and Dangerous Adventures into France, and His Removes from Place to Place till His Return into England, with the Most Remarkable Memorials Since (1660).
25 Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 48.
26 William Winstanley, The Muses Cabinet, Stored with Variety of Poems, Both Pleasant and Profitable (London: 1655).
27 William Winstanley, The Loyall Martyrology, or, Brief Catalogues and Characters of the Most Eminent Persons who Suffered for their Conscience During the Late Times of Rebellion either by Death, Imprisonment, Banishment, or Sequestration Together with Those who were Slain in the Kings Service (London: 1665); William Winstanley, The Lives of the Most Famous English poets, or, The Honour of Parnassus in a Brief Essay of the Works and Writings of Above Two hundred of Them, from the Time of K. William the Conqueror to the Reign of His present Majesty, King James II (London: 1687).
28 William E. Burns, ‘Winstanley, William (d. 1698)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29760>, accessed 5 November 2010.
29 ibid.
30 W.W., ‘Meditations of the Miseries of Mans Life’, in op. cit. (note 2), 21.
31 W.W., ‘Meditations of Death’, in ibid., 96–7.
32 Curt F. Bühler, ‘Two Renaissance Epitaphs’, Renaissance Society of America, 8, 1 (1955), 9–11: 10–11.
33 William Winstanley, The New Help to Discourse: Or, Wit, Mirth, and Jollity Intermixt with More Serious Matters Consisting of Pleasant Astrological, Astronomical, Philosophical, Grammatical, Physical, Chyrurgical, Historical, Moral, and Poetical Questions and Answers, 2nd edn (London: 1672), 249–50.
34 W.W., ‘Heavenly Antidotes Against the Plague’, in op. cit. (note 2), 10–12.
35 William Winstanley, The Muses Cabinet, Stored with Variety of Poems, Both Pleasant and Profitable (London: 1655), 47.
36 Winstanley, op. cit. (note 33), n.p.
37 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
38 Ibid., 384.
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