5. The Great Plague of 1665

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we examine the Great Plague of 1665 which wiped out nearly a quarter of London’s population. We examine what this plague was and why it was so deadly. We also look at contemporary descriptions of the plague and how it was remembered in the centuries that followed.

Course

In this course, Dr Jane Stevens-Crawshaw (Oxford Brookes University) explores the relationship between plague and public health during the renaissance in England. We start by looking at how public health functioned and developed in the renaissance. We then move on to have a closer look at the changing nature of plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After this we look at how hospitals changed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The penultimate module will see us look more closely at the idea of quarantine and how this influenced how society dealt with plague. Finally, we examine the Great Plague of 1665 which wiped out nearly a quarter of London’s population.

Lecturer

Jane Stevens-Crawshaw is a senior lecturer in early modern European history at Oxford Brookes University. She specialises in the history of renaissance Europe with a focus on the impact of the developing ideas about 'cleanliness' on the public health. She has also written on the establishment of plague hospitals in Europe.