Evelyn Lord is a local historian and emeritus fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She is the author of The Hell-Fire Clubs, The Stuart Secret Army, and The Knights Templar in Britain.
“The Great Plague of 1665 is too often seen as a metropolitan
disaster, even though it brought death and dislocation across much
of southern and eastern England. This timely study of Cambridge
provides a thorough and imaginative account of the crisis which the
epidemic inflicted upon the town, describing the impact upon its
society and the experiences of individual families. In doing so it
makes a valuable addition to both the literature on the Great
Plague and the history of the town.”—Stephen Porter, author of The
Great Plague
“Rich in the sights and sounds and smells of a seventeenth-century
city, this is an evocative portrait of a teeming social world
shattered by epidemic disease. Evelyn Lord’s adroit and sensitive
reconstruction of daily routines and the urban landscape cranks up
the tension as plague advances steadily towards its victims. We
follow people down winding streets and alleys and peer into homes,
finding there pitiful scenes of the dead and the dying and the
distressed. Lord’s tale is horrific yet ultimately uplifting as
life crowds back into the spaces left by the grim reaper—panic and
misery followed by hope and recovery.”—Malcolm Gaskill, author of
Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
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