SOURCE: "Plagues and Publication: Ballads and the Representation of Disease in the English Renaissance," in Criticism, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 27-49.

In the following essay, Achinstein observes that the publication of ballads in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England was closely associated in the public mind with the dissemination of plague.

The scope of devastation by bubonic plague in early modern Europe is hard for us to imagine today, even as some call AIDS a modern plague. The Black Death haunted Western Europe from its first great appearance in 1348 for over four hundred years. The initial catastrophe of plague in England in 1348-9 swept away one third of the population, at a minimum. Though this first outbreak was the most severe, the epidemic continued to threaten English society over the next four hundred years. Plague deaths were part of daily life in early modern England, with repeated outbreaks of...