Miraculous Plagues

In the summer of 1629 John Winthrop described a series of epidemics that devastated Native American populations along the eastern seaboard of New England as a miraculous plague. Winthrop was struck by the providential nature of these waves of disease which contributed neatly to the settlers' justifications for colonial expansion. Taking Winthrop's phrase as its cornerstone Miraculous Plagues reimagines New England's literary history by tracing seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century epidemics alongside events including early migration the Antinomian controversy the evolution of the halfway covenant and jeremiad and Boston's 1721 inoculation controversy.