[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 the disease in almost every year between 1348 and 1665 not just in the landmark years of plague—1603, 1625 and 1665. It is no wonder that the plague was a subject of much thought and writing, and that it even became a trope in English literature.

It may seem incongruous to write about the plague and ballads together, but the unlikely fact is that these two subjects were linked in the moral discourse of the period. Renaissance notions of contagion and transmission linked plagues and ballads; the evil in plagues and ballads was thought to disseminate in similar ways. Ballads, like the plague, were perceived to exert evil effects both morally and physically. William Prynne's now-famous criticism of the theatre inveighs against ballads, his language consistent with plague discourse: "Such songs, such poems as these [are] abundantly condemned, as filthy and unchristian defilements, which contaminate the souls, effeminate the minds, deprave the manners, of those that hear or sing them, exciting, enticing them to lust; to whoredom, adultery, prophaneness, wantonness, scurrility, luxury, drunkenness, excess; alienating their minds from God." Like the plague, the ballads were "filthy" and had their effects through "contamination"; their corruption worked on the spirit as well as on the body.

Ballad-sellers, and not just the corrupting ballads themselves, were frequently attacked as conveyors of plague. The 1636 Plague Orders, issued by the Royal College of Physicians in London, required not only that London citizens take specific health precautions and that those who were infected be submitted to quarantine and surveillance within their homes—the usual responses to plague epidemic—but also that "loose persons and idle assemblies" be regulated, that no "wandering beggar be suffered in the streets of this City." Along with restrictions on plays, bear-baitings and other games, the order specifically prohibited the singing of ballads. The offenders were to be severely punished. Since the ballad trade in the seventeenth century depended upon chapmen and wandering peddlers, who were often considered beggars, such orders effectively eliminated the sale of ballads during times of plague.

The case of the restrictions on ballads in the first half of the seventeenth century opens up new possibilities for understanding responses to plague and to the printing economy in early modern England. The association of plagues with ballads is an example of how disease was beginning to be perceived as a material phenomenon, and not solely as a providential one. The discourse on ballads presents this dual explanation of disease inhabiting the minds of seventeenth-century medical practitioners, lay and clerical.

Furthermore, the material explanation of disease by London health authorities was accompanied by a social commentary that articulated anxieties about urban disorder, poverty and vagrancy. As medical explanations offered a substantially modified view of the natural order of things in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English society was also coping with the social upheavals of an urbanizing society. The analogy between disease and popular literature was used by civic authorities, in London especially, to control and suppress certain social groups that threatened civic order, and the association of plagues with ballads illustrates how rhetoric functioned by the use of this powerful analogy to control the popular force of printing. This essay is a chiastic attempt to consider the play between moral and material explanations in the medical discourse of Renaissance England, on the one hand, and, on the other, the articulation of fears about urban disorder as a function of a literary genre, ballads. Put simply, why were ballads blamed for England's literal and figurative ills?

Social and cultural norms always shape the ways disease is represented, interpreted, and treated, since ways of perceiving disease are historically constructed. This is as true for the AIDS epidemic today as it was for the plague of the early seventeenth century. Writing about AIDS in the 1980s, Douglas Crimp pursues the idea that disease does not exist apart from the "practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it.… We know AIDS only in and through those practices." Crimp is quick to add: "This notion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes. Least of all does it contest the reality of illness, suffering and death. What it does contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of AIDS, upon which are constructed the representations, or the nature, or the politics of AIDS." There is of course a political interest in deconstructing myths of AIDS today at a time when AIDS is still treated not just as any health issue, but one charged with anxiety about alternate sexualities. Awareness of the politics of medical perception only sharpens the call for a cultural analysis of this, and other, diseases.

The aim here is not to dismiss studies in the history of medicine which concern the history of the plague, but to encourage a dialogical and discursive approach to that history, one which seeks to enliven the study of historical representations by invoking the contemporary cultural meanings against which those representations were posited. Historians of medicine might gain by looking into the associations between the plague and certain forms of literature, so as to see the ideas about transmission as a moral and as a physical matter, and those concerned with early printed literature might better understand how medical and philosophical discourses give us guides for interpreting the position of that literature in society. We need to expand the kinds of contexts and preconditions we might use to inform our studies of literary representations, as well as to encourage historians of ideas and of society to look to literature as a way to understand the diversity of cultural response that is offered by the archive.

What was the language of the plague in early modern England? Dating from its first appearances, the plague was coded by Christian theology, and instances of plague were likened to Biblical examples of divine punishment. As early as the sixteenth century, houses where infected people were found were marked with a red cross on the door as part of civic programs for monitoring and containing the illness. This red cross and its accompanying slogan, "Lord have mercy upon us," drew symbolic power from the Bible, and the use of the Biblical trope of marked doors coded the plague as divinely sent. City health officials used the Biblical story of the Passover, where the Angel of Death passed over the marked houses of the Israelites in Egypt (Exodus 12:13), with an inversion: they marked doors of those infected with the plague, as if to say the Angel of Death would visit there. These marks were, like the Passover tokens of blood, red. The sign and slogan reinforced theories that the infection had a divine source, that God had sent the plague to punish sin. By alluding to the Bible in this way, the English added their own history to a long series of divine punishments for sin.

Yet the health officials' placement of these marks upon the doors of contaminated households also promoted materialist explanations of the disease. The doors were marked so that other citizens would stay away; and in these acts of quarantine and segregation, city officials practiced a theory of disease closer to our modern treatments of infection and contagion. Their use of the Biblical trope accompanied reforms in sanitation and hygiene which promoted a radically different explanation of disease, one that was rooted in physiology, not in theology. If God sent the plague to punish those sinners who were spiritually unclean, then only spiritual reform would work; or could human physical hygiene contribute to disease conditions? This conflict in explanatory models was a source of debate between English civil and ecclesiastical authorities between 1590 and 1640. As Renaissance theorists of contagion, such as Fracastero (De Contagione [1546]), turned to physical causes to explain the transmission of disease, so civic authorities sought to control the spread of plague by material measures—quarantine, isolation of the sick, and hygienic reform. The very idea of a program for public health required that diseases be considered to be within the realm of human prevention.

This essay concerns ideas about the plague roughly between the years 1597 and 1630 in England, during which time there were significant outbreaks which destroyed between ten and thirty percent of the population of communities in a single year. The clash between Renaissance health authorities and the Church in their analyses of disease, and thus the ideological clash between providential and material understandings of the world, is evident in the representation of the plague and in its link to the attack on ballads.

Renaissance notions of contagion blurred the distinction between moral and physiological causes of disease. Thomas Lodge, a self-proclaimed "Doctor in Physicke," explained what contagion was in his A Treatise of the Plague (1603). A contagion was: "An evil quality in a body, communicated unto another by touch, engendering one and the same disposition in him to whom it is communicated. So as he that is first of all attainted or ravished with such a quality, is called contagious and infected". In Lodge's account, contagion was a process of "communication," but one with both physical and moral properties: it was an "evil quality" which performed an action from outside, a "ravishment" upon its victims. The plague made both men and women passive victims of a pollution. Yet the moral factor, the "evil quality," was transmissible via physical contact, touch. It had some material properties, which careful civic regulation might inhibit. Lodge's dedication of his tract to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Sheriffs of London, the city's chief public health authorities, offered a "scientific" approach to the pestilence, calling for practical responses to the disease, including street cleaning and fumigation.

Mary Douglas's analysis of the idea of pollution is helpful here. In her account, ideas of uncleanness and pollution reveal a society's concerns with the "relation of order to disorder." She writes: "Dirt … is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements." The Renaissance conception of plague as a kind of pollution, an "evil quality," required that the stricken society do moral penance. That moral penance took diverse and ritualized forms: municipal cleanliness; the exclusion of unruly elements of society, beggers, the poor and vagrants; as well as suppression of some forms of popular literature. These measures reveal the multivalent understanding of pollution. For the municipal authorities, the evils of the city ranged from the physical aspects of dirt to the spiritual ideas of uncleanness, idleness, or unruliness.

For early seventeenth-century medical practitioners, purging was to be accomplished on the social, not only on the individual, level. One author presented this theory by speaking in the voice of a disconsolate London: "I hope it [the plague] will purge my body from bad humours, as vicious persons. Nay, I know it hath already of abundance." In a cruel conclusion, London concedes, "God hath swept my house, so desire to garnish it with virtue, and furnish it with graces." London in particular, and cities in general, were made to shoulder both the moral and physical burden of especially high mortality rates in times of plague.

Cities were seen as the particular targets of God's wrath. The plague was associated with cities—it was an urban phenomenon; and it fed the idea of the metropolis as an eater of people. The city itself was portrayed as the cause of the infection. The plague was seen as a punishment for urban vice, and this anti-city perception may be interpreted as a sign of concern about urbanization in early modern England. The poet John Taylor summed up this theory in his 1636 plague pamphlet, The Fearefull Summer:

Fair London that did late abound in bliss,
And wast our Kingdom's great Metropolis,
'Tis thou that are dejected, low in state,
Disconsolate, and almost desolate,
The hand of Heaven (that only did protect thee)
Thou hast provoked most justly to correct thee,
And for thy pride of heart and deeds unjust,
He lays thy pomp and glory in the dust.

The idea that "citizens [were] plagued for the city's sins" was a common one. Those sins could be physical or spiritual ones: "what ignorance and blindness, what infidelity and prophaneness, what pride and idleness, what gluttony and drunkenness, what whoredom and uncleanness, what deceit and lying, what blasphemies and all cursed speaking, what riot and all manner of excess, do reign in most places," railed one Biblethumper, who saw moral failings as the cause of plague. All of these civic corruptions deserved punishment, and the plague was just that punishment sent by God.

Metaphoric civic "purges" were chief among the many social responses during times of plague, and the logic of purgation led to restrictions on travel, fairs, crowd-gatherings, warnings about immoderate eating and sexual activity, and the regulation of human movement by state surveillance. The city, the body social, must imitate the body personal on a large scale, as prescribed in the frequent reports of the Royal College of Physicians of London. Orders included streetcleanings, civic fumigation, and establishing examiners to determine the exact causes and numbers of deaths. And knowing that their own measures would meet resistance from the divines, members of the Privy Council warned ecclesiastics in particular to buckle under to the regime of public health. Some divines followed Royal command, like Thomas Thayre, who first stressed civic repentance before God. But he also hedged his bets by reminding the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Sheriffs to uphold their public duties of keeping the streets clean, cleaning sewers and ponds, burying all the dead and fumigating and burning infected property.

The policy for enforcing surveillance of individuals and of households by the Privy Council in 1625 and again in 1629 used the two conflicting models for understanding communication of the plague, the moral and the material. Unlike the leprosarium, which instituted a space for the ill apart from the social space, according to Michel Foucault's tracings in Madness and Civilization, the plague, by contrast, was represented as inside the body social. The quarantines and orders for segregation required that infected persons be shut up inside their own houses, the healthy with the sick, and a lock put on the outside door. The plague fractured community, closing community institutions. Parliament recessed; courts closed; trade, theatres, fairs were ordered to cease functioning. The precautions ordered that citizens become prisoners in their own houses. The plague was domestic; it attacked the house, the house on the street and the house of the flesh. The plague was inside—inside the body, inside the house—not outside, like leprosy.

The plague atomized the community. Humans were locked inside their homes, left to live or to die alone. Images of a desolate city recur throughout the plague literature of the period: "Our houses are left desolate … we are afraid of one another, men hardly trust themselves, yea, scarcely the clothes of their back. Where are our solemn meetings, and frequent assemblies; men stand afar off; the streets and highways mourn: traffic ceaseth: merchandise decayeth; the craftsman and cunning artificer is ashamed of his poverty" [William Muggins, Londons Mourning Garment, 1603]. The description ascribes no human agency to the half in city operations: "traffic" simply "ceaseth." Flight, the most common response to the plague, was based on material fear of contagion: doctors warned citizens to "depart from contagious places, unto a purer air," as if the locus of the city exerted some evil equality. Many who stayed behind lamented the desolation of their communities, and they criticized their fellow citizens for failing to take care of each other in times of need.

Civic regulators sought to contain the plague, but their measures also effectively controlled unruliness in a society that was increasingly filled with anxieties about urban disorder, not only about disease. The city of London itself at this time did provoke many worries, since it was rapidly becoming fixed as the center of a new kind of cosmopolitan economy, as the nation's administrative and commercial hub, and as the nexus of leisure and culture. But at the same time, the plague worked to break down the emerging patterns of metropolitan community and civic consciousness. During the time of plague, the city lost its urban character, "streets bare, Temples empty, shops shut up." Those who could fled from the city into the country; those who could not afford to do so holed themselves up in their houses and huts, hoarded supplies and refused to go out into the streets. The plague was associated with cities, and yet it un-citified cities.

Theories about transmission of the plague relied upon particular facts about city life. that provoked anxiety. Thomas White complained that "the city is full" of sinning people: "adulterers and harlots, theives and vagabonds do swarm in most places of the same, and no marvel, for Dicing houses, Dancing Schools, bowling alleys, Alehouses, are almost lawless in every place." These places of disorderly and unauthorized society were likened to places infected by plague: "me thinks the policy were good to note on those places (LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US) as on infected houses," White concludes. The equation between social outcasts inhabiting the city and the victims of plague is explicit.

These fears about unruliness were epitomized in the ballad-trade, an unauthorized economy which transmitted morally suspect materials to a non-elite audience. Later in this essay, we shall see how these several aspects of the trade in ballads contributed to the discourse of the plague.

Lodge's language concerning contagion, "an evil quality in a body, communicated unto another by touch, engendering one and the same disposition in him to whom it is communicated," applies also to the communication through the media. Despite the idea that God had sent the plague to punish the city for its sins, the contrary interpretation was that the plague was communicable from one human to another through physical means—by paper, for example.

Plague was carried along transport routes, often arriving in London by ship and moving along predictable trade circuits. The growth of London and the increase in road traffic made the rest of the country more susceptible to plague influence. Certain goods were particularly suspect, especially cloth and paper goods, even books. Heretical ballads and other forbidden published matter were sometimes smuggled into England, but in addition to the dangerous content of published material, the very physical object itself was a potential carrier of disease, since the rags from which paper was made were thought to be able to carry plague. Archbishop William Laud angrily blamed trade and the consumer culture for the rapid spread of disease in 1637: "And it is now clear as the sun, that the last increase [of plague] came by the carelessness of the people, and greediness to receive into their houses infected goods. To this add great defect in inferior governors, and great want among the poor, by reason of so many base tenements … and you have all the causes under God himself of the present infection."

It was thought that the plague could reside in many material substances, and this was the reason that the household goods of a plague victim, especially his clothes and linens, were burned upon his death. In The Fearful Summer (1625), John Taylor recounted how even private correspondence through letters was suspended out of fear that the plague would be carried along with the paper:

Nor London letters little better sped,
They would not be receiv'd (much lesse be read)
But cast into the fire and burnt with speed
As if they had been Hereticks indeed.

Taylor's analogy between letters and heretics is not a casual one; heresy and treason were often planned by letters, the exposure of which formed magnificent scandals in the early seventeenth century. Thus both the content and the material of the letters could transmit disease.

Thomas Dekker played upon the fear that paper could carry disease in The Wonderful Year (1603): "If you read, you may happily laugh; tis my desire you should, because mirth is both physical and wholesome against the plague, with which sickness (to tell truth) this book is, (though not sorely), yet somewhat infected." His own book was "somewhat infected": Dekker here correlates political or moral corruption with the dissemination of ideas in print. The reader was not to worry, though; the reader's resistence to the plague would improve with his pamphlet, since mirth itself would be a corrective.

Dekker here applied the Galenic model of disease, where disease was cured by righting an imbalance in the humours.

The physician Thomas Lodge recommended preventing contagion by restricted modes of social intercourse: "it behoveth every man to have special care that he frequent not any places or persons infected, neither that he suffer such to breathe upon him." To stem the spread of plague, circuits of physical communication were to be regulated—touching, breathing, traveling. In this common view of contagion, even human conversation was suspect. The preacher Roger Fenton explained that the scriptural word commonly used for the pestilence was "derived from a verb that signifieth to speak, as some think, because where it is, everyone speaketh of it, enquireth after it, how it encreaseth, what remedies there be for it, what preservatives against it, what be the symptoms and qualities of it." Fenton's etymology of plague blurred the distinction between the thing spoken of and the act of speaking.

Defining the plague was itself a kind of plague. Thomas Dekker traded on this equation between discourse about the plague and the plague itself in the epistle dedicatory to his plague-poem, "News from Grave's End." Dekker employs the common belief that the plague could reside in the paper of books, that the distribution of books through trade could spread the plague. "Shall I creep (like a drowned rat)," he asks, "into thy warm bosom, (my benefique Patron!) with a piece of some old musty Sentence in my mouth … and so accost thee? Out upon't!" Dekker's own writing works like a plague upon his reader, "creeping" like dead vermin into the reader's warm, living flesh. The equation works the other way round as well; writing about the plague gives the writer symptoms of the plague: "A stiff and freezing horror sucks up the rivers of my blood: my hair stands on end with the panting of my brains: mine eye-balls are ready to start out, being beaten with the billows of my tears: out of my weeping pen does the ink mournfully and more bitterly than gall drop on the pale-face'd paper, even when I think how the bowels of my sick country have been torn." Dekker is infected with plague merely by writing about it. Thinking of the plague is enough to disfigure him: his very organs are expelled from his body in so doing. This passage plays on the associations of the plague with civic sins, which need to be purged from the "bowels of my sick country." Like Lodge's "evil quality," the disease is inside the body, or the state, and it struggles to escape through any orifice.

As a metaphor for verbal communication, the plague could also signify the spread of subversive ideas, religious dissent, or even treason. In the Bible, plague in Egypt was punishment for an entire nation's political mistake, and political ramifications were never far from the surface of fears about plague. When plague struck Barnstaple in 1646, for example, some inhabitants blamed the local congregation of Independents, and had them chased out of town. Bottles of plague-infected air were said to have been brought by the French to poison the English in 1665, and Catholics were sometimes suspected of spreading the disease as an act of warfare. The Laudian innovations in the church were seen by some Puritans as a cause of plague: "The plague of God is in the land for the new mixture of religion that is commanded in the Church," said John Dod in 1635. Plague was also seen as punishment for civic corruption, and the coincidence of plague with the deaths of Elizabeth in 1603 and James in 1625 was seen by some as a warning of God. Anti-monopolists took the metaphor of plague in their attacks on crown policy in 1641.

The idea of plague purging the evil within the state is found in many critiques of state policy. George Wither associated plague with the difficulties of Parliament in 1628:

Some did so counsel, and so urge
The Body politic to take a purge
To purify the parts that seemed foul.

And the anonymous author of The Plague at Westminster (1647) makes the connection between plague and political evil outright, imitating plague orders for a "sick Parliament, grievously troubled with a new Disease." The sorrows, brought about by the House of Lords, are like the plagues of Egypt on the Israelites: "besides your continual taxes, collections, assessments, and the like (a burden that breaks our backs and very hearts); which continually follow one on the neck of another, with every particular belonging to our trade and livelihoods; our wives, our daughters, our sons, our houses, our beds, our apparel, our horses, our hay, our beeves, our muttons, our lambs, our pigs, our geese, our capons, and the rest of our goods are forced from us.…" The author here imitates Pharaoh's piling up of burdens on the Hebrews, and he evokes the punishment of God upon the rulers who are too hard. The author ends with a burst of irony: "O almighty and everlasting Lords, we acknowledge and confess from the bottom of our hearts, that you have most justly plagued us these full seven years for our manifold sins and iniquities.… For we know too well (0 Lords) understand we have grievously sinned.

Plague as a physical entity and as a circumstance of political subversion collided in the physical matter of paper. Sir Simonds D'Ewes wrote in his journal of a letter sent to Mr. Pym in the House of Commons in 1641 which contained "an abominable rag full of filthy bloody atter," that is, pus from a sore. The letter turned out to be a "scandalous libel" in which Mr. Pym was called a "Bribe-taker, Traitor and other opprobrious names," and that the sender of the letter "had sent him a cloute [cloth] drawn through a plague sore which he had running upon him hoping that the same should kill him by infection." This paper, just as it might communicate slander and political opposition figuratively, could also communicate disease and death literally.

This political dimension of plague discourse depended upon a model of disease that made a cosmic analogy between the state of the individual and the political state. Galenic medical theory combined the moral and the material explanations of disease in this analogy, which connected political ills and physical ills. Galenism gave an account of the origin of disease—humoural imbalance, which might be caused by the stars, by lapses in personal discipline (errors in eating, sleeping, or sexual activity), by communal sins or by God's punishment. Those who ascribed to this Galenic model of disease sought to restore the nation's health by typical Galenic means: purging and bloodletting. Clean people and clean states resisted infection. One doctor recommended internal purgation, "it should be good to evacuate and expel those superfluities of humours," including hemorrhoids, ulcers, menstrual blood, itches and boils. This returns us to Douglas's idea of pollution and uncleanness.

Though the plague was often imagined as arriving from foreign shores, the plague was treated as if the dangers were inside the body social. The "purge" was to take place on a social level, and regulations specified particular control of those "superfluities" in human terms—beggers, the poor, wandering chapmen, and players. All these seemed to be outsiders, to pose a threat to society. Plague was often accompanied by riots by the poor, who were hit hardest. The fact that more poor folk suffered from the ravages of the plague seemed proof that they were morally degenerate. Suffering sometimes led to protest: "the unruliness of infected persons and want of government" were the occasion of riots in Manchester in 1605. The wanderers, too, were morally suspect because they were "masterless men," but they were also dangerous as potential carriers of infection because of their itinerant behaviors and their spreading potentially subversive mores.

In the ample body of literature concerning the plague and the playhouses, the notion of the plague's moral foundation in sin lent authority to the public health officials' attacks on idleness, leisure, and playgoing. According to the dictates of the Royal College of Physicians during plague-time, plays and other crowd-gathering events were to be prohibited, including "Bearbaitings, games, singing of Ballads, Buckler-play, or such like assembly of people." Opponents of the theatre made use of the threat of the plague to quell popular entertainments since such activities were already morally and spiritually suspect. Francis Herring wrote that popular entertainments left the body "disposed to infection, and the contagion dangerously scattered both in city and country." The moral became material, as the body was weakened by its moral failings.

A body could predispose itself toward infection by certain behaviors, both physical and spiritual, according to theories about plague. Idleness was seen as particularly risky. The reasons for this were part physiological and part moral. According to Thomas Thayre, idleness "dulleth the body, filling and repleting it with superfluous and evil humours, which breed many sicknesses." Thayre was not bashful in explaining the social costs of idleness: "As exercise and labour is a preserver of health, so idleness is the shortener of life, enemy unto the soul and body, and very unprofitable in a Commonwealth."

The state would go far in prosecuting idleness, as an example from Manchester in 1605 shows. One Philip Fitton, a vagrant, "of evil demeanor and behaving himself lewdly and dangerously in going to the places and persons infected with the plague," was punished for so doing, first by being locked in a cabin by the constables. But he escaped, and continued in his disorderliness without fear of the plague. He ignored the plague orders, traveled freely within the town, sleeping in out-houses, and wherever else he would. This was too much, and the constables sent him to the Manchester dungeon, not explicitly for carrying infection, but for his "disordered behavior." In the case of Philip Fitton, fears about the plague and about social disorder were one and the same.

The moral explanation for the plague was often confused with the material one in the voices of the Royal College of Physicians. Their orders concerning "loose persons and idle assemblies" during times of plague did not clarify how the infection worked, but rather elided the material explanation with the moral one: "Nothing is more complained on, than the multitude of Rogues and wandering Beggars, that swarm in every place about the City, being a great cause of the spreading of the infection." These 1636 plague orders connected ballad-selling with another set of worries: fears about spreading the plague by "Rogues and wandering Beggars," morally suspicious persons who spread not only disease, but possibly other kinds of dangers as well. Vagrants were impounded during times of virulent infection.

Ballads were unlike plays and other types of crowd gatherings, since not only did they spread "infection" by drawing a crowd, but they also spread "infection" around the countryside. Ballad-hawkers were restricted in 1581 and again in 1608. The cultural construction of contagion hit at a specific economy, that of disseminators of popular culture. The laws punishing rogues and vagabonds were carried to their fullest extent during times of plague, and chapmen, peddlers and pot-men especially were to be apprehended, searched, sometimes sent home, whipped or even incarcerated.

Philip Stubbes opposed the ballad-sellers, those "bawdy Parasites as range the Counties, rhyming and singing of unclean corrupted and filthy songs in Tavernes, alehouses, Inns, and other public assemblies" because the threat of such "filthy Ballades and scurvy Rhyme" was a public one, and more specifically, one on the move. The ballad-sellers were travellers who might spread contagion through physical contact. Those singing and selling ballads were morally debased and debasing; the material itself was evil: as "corrupt meats do annoy the stomachs, and infect the body, so the reading of wicked and ungodly books" (Anatomie). The evil, moreover, was contagious, as the "infection" of these men spread through social contacts found in low places, taverns, inns, alehouses. Some writers themselves condemned the extent of ballad circulation, and their criticism told a story of movement from the city into the country. In 1631, William Brathwaite described how ballads travelled from the city into the country, "till at last they grow so common there too, as every poor milk-maid can chant and chirp it under her cow." Likewise, John Earle scorned the popularity of the ballader's product, particularly in the country: "chanted from market to market, to a vile tune, and a worse throat, whilst the poor Country wench melts like her butter to hear them." The complaint was about their widespread influence.

In a society that mistrusted forms of idleness, the ballad-singers appeared to transmit the worst forms of this vice. Philip Stubbes turned against the distributive nature of the bawdiness; he worried about the public dissemination of such material. Ballads and other literary wares hawked by travelling salesmen carried stigmas, moral and material: "These Basilisks [the ballad-sellers], these bad minded monsters, brought forth like vipers by their mothers' bane, with such lascivious lewdness have first infected London the eye of England, the head of other Cities, as what is so lewd that hath not these contrary to order been printed, and in every street abusively chanted." Most important in this writer's attack, the ballad-sellers' wandering permits the spread of evil; like a disease, the "infection" of these men was spreading by contact with many. The thorough dissemination of the ballads, their pervasiveness, their being changed in "every street," all terrified the critic. The ballads posed a public threat, not confined geographically to London (already regarded as morally corrupt), but sweeping into every location in the land.

According to this writer, ballad sellers were "able to spread more pamphlets by the State forbidden than all the Booksellers in London" because of their uncontrollable means of dissemination. The chapmen could evade more easily the censures of the civic authorities than the booksellers, whose stock stayed in one place. Part of their threat was that they were dispersed without proper authority, and dispersed through routes that were uncheckable, like the plague's progress.

The repeated printing orders concerning ballads issued by the Stationers' Company attempted to restrict ballad production because of piracy, but also because of their moral and morally-transmissible danger. The Orders of 1612 restricted the number of ballad printers to five, because of "great abuses" daily practised in the ballad industry, but also because of the ballads' lewdness, "offensive both to God, the Church and the state," leading to "the corrupting of youth and evil disposed people." Like other forms of idleness, listening to ballads corrupted those already predisposed to sin. This explanation of the route of corruption into already corrupt matter follows the Galenic interpretation of the plague: like attracts like, both in moral and in material arenas. A soul's morality could be "evil infected" like a body.

There were many reasons the Stationers' Company sought to keep ballads under control, and it did its utmost to restrict ballad production. As the regulatory body charged with the mission of administering all printing and publishing in England, the Stationers' Company maintained records of ballad production. Though only 3081 of the estimated 15,000 broadside ballads published between 1557 and 1709 were listed in the records of the Stationers' Company after formal licensing, there is evidence of a considerable structure of regulation for the market in ballads in the Court records of the Stationers' Company. Unlawful publication of ballads fell largely under two categories: publication of indecent and lewd ballads and literary piracy; fines could be a mere five shillings for printing without license, to forty shillings for piracy and indecent printing. The presses of a ballad printer were on occasion seized and his stock burned. Ballads were persistently an object of worry about unruly economic and moral behavior within the printing industry.

Such concerns about dissemination of this material reveal a real pressure point in early modern English society. The attacks which focused on the public setting of ballads, on their distribution, specifically their route of travel from London into the outlying countryside, were also attacks on their audience. The ballads were being communicated to an audience specifically vulnerable to the plague: the poor, the outcasts. The printing trade brought urban vice—moral and physical vice—to the countryside. Yet the country was supposed to be a place of refuge, a place to fly to. This was the kind of communication circuit that was under regulation because of the plague, yet regulation with respect to the wandering chapmen in the printing industry was especially fraught with worries, since social outcasts were involved.

The plague was a disease with mortal consequences, spots, buboes and fever, but it also provided a rhetoric for dealing with anxieties about the body social. Along with the outbreaks of the malevolent, mysterious and invisible disease came forms of communication concerned with plague matters. We still need further inquiry into the ways in which certain social and economic groups were stigmatized through their association with the plague, and especially the theories of contagion and communication the plague provided. This is no more pressing than today, when a second generation of people with AIDS lives with what is still a stigmatized condition.

The trade in ballads is one example of an unauthorized economy in early modern England which was intwined in the rhetoric of the plague. The concern about dissemination of ballads also tells us something about early modern notions of transmission, both of ideas and of disease. The use of the plague metaphor with respect to this commercial literature reveals Renaissance ideas of communication in the media: the plague gave a ready rhetoric for expressing worries about social and cultural changes experienced and felt in the society of early modern England: urbanization, masterless men, and also institutional threats like those of the theatre and the printing industry. Not just any metaphor would do, since the plague was understood both as a moral and a physical accomplishment, and it seemed to work invisibly.

By the early seventeenth century, public health officials were increasingly adopting a material understanding of disease, and their regulations stressed the kinds of actions that followed from that understanding: quarantines, civic sanitation, and the like. But common notions about the moral worth of certain social groups, and fears about social and political subversion colored public policy. Citizens had to explain why the plague struck one person and not another, and the observation that there was selective punishment gave rise to the many explanations of the disease. Physicians stressed that infection could be communicated from one human to another, and this was why their main efforts to regulate public health imposed quarantine and segregation on infected persons. One should abstain from social intercourse of all sorts.

A moral code also determined reactions to the plague, and that moral code was concerned with wanderers like ballad-sellers. The ballads threatened public order, not only in London, but especially as they carried vice into the countryside. The printed nature of the material was a problem, since many balladeers also transgressed against the regulations of the printing authorities, and they engaged an audience that was unacceptable. Hawkers of ballads were one example of the kinds of carriers thought to be dangerous because theirs was an unauthorized economy, and also because the literature they purveyed brought morally controversial material to a morally controversial audience. It is true that as a public and specifically urban problem, the vagrant and idle poor were becoming increasingly visible. Contemporaries saw this however as a decay in morals. As idlers, vagrants, and as distributors of alternative social practices, the hawkers of popular literature were the real foci of worries their early modern English contemporaries had about the social changes they were experiencing.