Comments on: Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London by Dr. Craig Spence https://2022hist635.jessicaotis.com/2022/04/25/accidents-and-violent-death-in-early-modern-london-by-dr-craig-spence/ HIST 635 Spring 2022 Wed, 27 Apr 2022 23:12:44 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.0 By: William/Bill https://2022hist635.jessicaotis.com/2022/04/25/accidents-and-violent-death-in-early-modern-london-by-dr-craig-spence/#comment-105 Wed, 27 Apr 2022 23:12:44 +0000 https://2022hist635.jessicaotis.com/?p=697#comment-105 I think Callan captures the essence of Spence’s book — how to use simple administrative records to tell a story about a society, here records about accidents. Spence argues that attitudes toward accidental deaths can be interpreted to indicate differing views of causation, i.e., supernatural, chance, and “natural.” Spence claims that these social attitudes shifted between the middle of the 17C and the first part of the 18C, and thus, that Londoners views of causation correspondingly shifted from providential-religious-supernatural to naturalistic. His narrative is well-crafted, and his construction of a database from the information presented in the Bills of Mortality (and other sources) is exemplary. By and large he fulfills his promise to provide a Geertzian “thick” description of the data–insofar as the data allows. But he doesn’t tell us much about Londoners’ attitudes toward causation.

What he does give us though is wonderful. He tells us about the conditions in London, the nature of its economy, the seasonality effects on types of mortality, and something of the nature of early emergency medicine. We learn about apothecaries, barber-surgeons, beadles, brewers, searchers, and waggoners. He tells us about early modern story-telling, pamphlets, and newspapers. London comes to life in his telling of how Londoners died.

I share Spence’s views about the changes in attitudes toward causation in the 18C. The tension between religious and secular/positivist explanations
has a long history in western culture, extending back through the humanists to the Greeks and Romans. It would be more astonishing if two hundred years of writings by the likes of Montaigne, Bacon, Grotius, Hobbes, Galileo, Newton, and Locke hadn’t persuaded some people that there were alternatives to religious explanations. Spence does show us that reporting of accident data is consistent with his claim — it just doesn’t prove it. And that’s OK. His book is valuable for its methodology and it’s vivid portrayal of life in early modern London.

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