Description
Book SynopsisA narrative of Elizabethan London through the eyes of William Muggins, an impoverished silk-weaver who wrote poetry about the plague, motherhood, childrearing, poverty, and the responsibility individuals have to one another.
Trade Review“[A] remarkable book, and the reorientation it offers is profound. Rather than zeroing in on a valued cultural object to put it in its contexts, A Weaver-Poet and the Plague radiates outward from London’s Mourning Garment and shows how scholars distribute foregrounds and backgrounds in the histories they build.”
—William N. West SEL: Studies in English Literature
“A rich and thoughtful domestic context for anyone interested in early modern plague history.”
—Lori Jones Canadian Journal of Health History
“A Weaver-Poet and the Plague interacts expertly with primary sources and secondary literature about the plague, the labor of poor men and women in early modern London, grief and gender. This original book offers a fascinating reading of the weaver William Muggins’s poem London’s Mourning Garment (1603) and a compelling microhistory of this poet in relation to his social network. Oldenburg offers a fresh perspective on a ‘nonaristocratic aesthetics’ of low and middling sorts of poets and prose writers.”
—Jennifer C. Vaught,author of Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser
“Scott Oldenburg's interdisciplinary approach in A Weaver-Poet and the Plague, with its synthesis of historical detail and literary textual analysis, offers numerous insights into how plague writing related to everyday life in early modern England. The level of archival research in the manuscript, and particularly the use of parish registers, is to be applauded.”
—Kathleen Miller,Queen's University Belfast
“Oldenburg’s study is a compelling example of the benefits to be gained by attending to early modern subjects from the poorer end of the middling sort and the historical and literary traces they leave behind. Doing so, this volume demonstrates, enriches and enlivens our view of life and death in London’s parishes, and prompts reconsideration of marginal, nonelite texts that are too often read too lightly, dismissed as predictable or trite.”
—Patricia Phillippy Journal of British Studies
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Silk-Weavers’ Song
1. Company and Complaint: The Limits of Craft Identity
2. Life and Debt in the Poultry: The Communal Bonds of the Parish
3. Grief and Grievance: Communal Elegy in St. Olave’s Parish
4. The Jeremiah of Southwark: The Prophetic Poetry of William Muggins
Epilogue: The Horizon of the Past
Appendix: London’s Mourning Garment
Notes
Bibliography
Index
