Ralph Tailor's Summer

by Keith Wrightson

Overview

The plague outbreak of 1636 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne was one of the most devastating in English history. This hugely moving study looks in detail at its impact on the city through the eyes of a man who stayed as others fled: the scrivener Ralph Tailor.

As a scrivener Tailor was responsible for many of the wills and inventories of his fellow citizens. By listening to and writing down the final wishes of the dying, the young scrivener often became the principal provider of comfort in people’s last hours. Drawing on the rich records left by Tailor during the course of his work along with many other sources, Keith Wrightson vividly reconstructs life in the early modern city during a time of crisis and envisions what such a calamitous decimation of the population must have meant for personal, familial, and social relations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300177596
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	12/06/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Keith Wrightson is the Townsend Professor of History at Yale University and the author of Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. He lives in Guilford, CT.

Editorial Reviews

Shortlisted in the non-fiction category for the 2012 Portico Prize for Literature, as given by the Portico Library and Gallery.

The Portico Library and Gallery - Portico Prize for Literature

Shortlisted in the non-fiction category for the 2012 Portico Prize for Literature, as given by the Portico Library and Gallery.

— Portico Prize for Literature

The Portico Library and Gallery

Introduced to his subject through the serendipitous discovery of Tailor's "elaborate and distinctive" signature, Wrightson (history, Yale Univ.; English Society: 1580–1680) employs the historical methodology of Carlo Ginzburg and Peter Burke in an effort to reconstruct from the "bottom up" a mid-17th-century English town beset by the plague. Wrightson's aim is not to attempt a total reconstruction of the life of Ralph Tailor but rather to use the scrivener's various writings and those of his companions to provide a window into the world of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1636. Although the plague disrupted the "normal rhythms and patterns" of daily life, the residents Wrightson presents go about their business much in the way we would expect, seeking information about sick neighbors, making their own final arrangements, and burying their dead. The uniqueness of the records discovered, analyzed, and elegantly presented by Wrightson is that they provide readers with an alternative version of the event through a "remarkable range of voices," including poor servants and women, otherwise lost to us. VERDICT While general readers will prefer Paul Slack's broader work, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, Wrightson's microhistory will be enjoyed by those with a deeper knowledge of 17th-century social history.—Brian Odom, Pelham P.L., AL

Library Journal