Posts tagged with Providence

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).  Disaster in Europe mattered in North America.   The Bills of Mortality offered a way to calculate the scale of disaster, and this distinction is clear in Cambridge printer Marmaduke Johnson’s title page.  The American version of the text also advertised the addition of a General Bill to the printing, noting under the author’s credit: “To which is added, The Generall Bill of Mortality, Shewing the Number of Persons which died in every Parish of all Diseases, and of the Plague, in the Year abovesaid.”  Although neither the Evans nor EEBO transcriptions (or the America’s Historical Imprints scans of either version) show a copy, table, or even a list of Parishes like the title page touted, the 1665 General Bill clearly accompanied the printing in some form.  The Bills took on significance far beyond London.