PI Jessica Otis will be presenting on Death by Numbers at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America this week. For anyone attending the meeting, the presentation will be Friday, March 10th, from 4:30-6PM in the Caribe Hilton Gran Salón Los Rosales A - Gran Salón Los Rosales (Garage). Free notebooks and stickers with the project logo will be available for anyone who wants one. Figure 1. Our new swag!
Welcome to the relaunch of our blog and the formal beta launch of the Death by Numbers database. While our blog has been quiet, we’ve been busy behind the scenes getting our code squared away and finishing transcribing some of the early datasets so that the project was in a good place for a public debut. We’re still hard at work adding data to the database and building our first visualizations, so don’t be surprised at how large some of the gaps are in the dataset.
We find a lot of very specific deaths in the London Bills of Mortality that are…well…meme-able. It isn’t that death is funny, but rather, the descriptions of death in the bills can be so that one can’t help but chuckle. And considering the heavy subject matter of our project, we relish those moments. So, while our team took a well deserved break from transcribing the bills, we shared “12 Days of Death” on Twitter
We are in the process of building out a data API to support the data work we’re undertaking with the transcription of the plague bills. We anticipate hundreds of thousands of rows of data by the end of our transcription process, and we wanted an easy and efficient way to work with that data. As part of our work in data-driven historical research at RRCHNM, we are building a data API to store and access data from databases.
One of the ways we are using the transcribed bills of mortality is in data visualization and mapping, in an effort to ask new questions and revisit old ones. At the Southern History Association’s annual meeting in Baltimore, we presented preliminary work on data visualization and the data API. An interactive notebook on this early work is available on Observable for perusal (note, the page may take a moment to load the 100,000+ records).
“London might be said to be all in tears; the mourners did not go about the streets indeed, for nobody put on black or made a formal dress of mourning for their nearests friends; but the voice of mourners was truly heard in the Streets” (Defoe, 19). Although Daniel Defoe’s description of London during the outbreak of 1665-1666 jogs our memories during the early days of the Sars-CoV- 2 virus—where the sick passed away separated from their loved ones, and families were forced to say goodbye apart from their kin—the culture of grief has indeed changed.
The greatest purpose of the Bills of Mortality is to enumerate death, first due to plague then expanding over the years to include other causes. However, there are some gray areas where Searchers lacked the necessary information to provide a label. In these instances, the records reflect the phrase “found dead.” This label carried a wide range of ages and deaths and was listed with a basic description of the deceased person and how they were found.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Bills of Mortality have informed more than three centuries of writing about the plague. Although the Death by Numbers project stands out as the first systematic effort to digitize and process the totality of the bills, a whole bunch of writers, historians, and social scientists have kneaded the numbers collected in the Bills, looking for the historical gist of plague outbreaks in England and Continental Europe.
We have talked on the blog about some of the datasets we are transcribing from the Bills of Mortality - the counts of death by parish, causes of death, and christening and burial numbers. Some of the bills have even more information on them: the price of bread (and eventually other foodstuffs). But why would state-mandated bread prices be included in the Bills of Mortality? To find out, we need to look more closely at the role of bread in early modern England.
God’s Terrible Voice in the City by Thomas Vincent describes the disastrous judgments of plague and fire that devastated London in 1665-1666. Today, two different editions of this work appear in the collections of Early English Books Online and Evans Early American Imprint Collection, the former published in London in 1667 and the latter published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1668. The American publication of a book on a London disaster shows how a religious culture of providentialism- the belief that God cast down supernatural favor and punishment on the world- stretched across the Atlantic in the early modern English world (See Kierner, Inventing Disaster for more).