Sums Theological: Doing Theology with the London Bills of Mortality, 1603–1666

Abstract

AbstractFrom 1603 until the mid-nineteenth century, weekly bills of mortality were printed and published in London, providing detailed statistics on births, deaths, and plague fatalities for each parish. This article analyzes the currency of the bills and their numbers in English religious thought during and after the four great plague epidemics London experienced in the course of the seventeenth century (1603–1604, 1625–1626, 1636, and 1665–1666). A broad survey of sermons, pamphlets, treatises, poems, and dialogues from these years reveals not only the bills’ ubiquity as an index of divine punishments, but the new kinds of intellectual work made possible by a multiplicity of numbers keyed to times and places. Claims about the moral, doctrinal, and political meanings behind the plague could now be made with an unprecedented specificity and sophistication, seized upon by High Church Anglicans, Puritans, and Dissenters alike. As an episode in the history of empirical theology, the bills’ ecclesiastical reception vindicates theology's central place in the epistemological transformations of the early modern period, as well as the influence of new kinds of empirical data on the parameters of religious thought.