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A plague year5/13/2023 ![]() ![]() The gloss on the title of God's Terrible Voice assumes the equal prominence of the two disasters. ![]() The bulk of the treatise, some hundred and fifty pages, is thereafter devoted to explaining the meaning of the plague and fire of London. This general overview of disaster quickly gives way to brief accounts of first the plague of 1665, then the fire of 1666. An early section of the treatise considers the characteristics of plague and fire against the general background of disaster-or, in Vincent's more frequently used expression, "judgements." Vincent lists seven kinds of "terrible speakings" in this introductory catalogue-plague, deluge, fire, sword, famine, "famine of the world," and "terrible things together." Each disaster receives a short explication according to its role in the Bible. ![]() Thomas Vincent's treatise, God's Terrible Voice in the City (1667), one of the major sources for Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, 2) places the association between the plague and the fire at the core of its message. For many, indeed, the plague and fire became two strokes of a single catastrophic blow. 1) It did not take long for writers to draw associations between the two events. The Great Fire of 1666 occurred less than a year after the most deadly months of the plague epidemic had afflicted London. ![]()
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