Traditional studies of the Great Plague in pre-modern Europe have generally been concerned with explaining how the transmission of the bubonic plague—its scale and recurrence—was shaped by the social order and population density and with describing the impact of these epidemics upon Europe's development. A combination of qualitative sources and statistical data has provided resources for an academic debate, which typically discusses the plague at national and European levels or relates case studies to these frameworks. But the extent and the complexity (notably unfamiliar methodologies in the medical science journals on the epidemiology of Yersinia Pestis and the behavior of Xenopsylla cheopis) has had the unintended consequence of obscuring the human aspects of the Great Plague within historical writing. Evelyn Lord's book provides an alternative approach. She is barely concerned with the role of the Black Death in the late medieval and early modern transition and what pathogen carried the disease. Rather, she follows the example of John Hatcher's The Black Death: The Intimate Story of a Village in Crisis, 1345–1350 (London, 2008). Both historians have turned to local history— in Lord's case the town of Cambridge in 1665–66. Perhaps some indication in the title could have been given to indicate to readers that this is a study of a town and not equivalent to Diane Purkiss's The English Civil War: A People's History (London, 2006). More controversially Lord and Hatcher draw upon the literary device of imagining the situations experienced by historical individuals. Lord suggests that literary recreation, far from hindering historical understanding of the Great Plague, serves to advance it (ix–x). How the line between literary recreation and the historical record should be drawn in practice is a matter for discussion.

Lord does not recreate dialogues between historical people, with the result that the encounters in The Great Plague lack the heat and drama of the stand-offs in Hatcher's “intimate story of a village in crisis.” Instead Lord relies upon third-person descriptions of what people did and what they thought about their actions, with the result that her recreations are at one remove; the approach is reminiscent of Vermeer's paintings looking onto street scenes and into houses.

A second difference is that Hatcher's recreations all relate to historical people of local significance, but in Lord's book Isaac Newton makes several appearances and there is a cameo role for King Charles II. It is notable that the patterns of thought of these national figures are not discussed in the manner of Lord's reflections upon the “small worlds” of local people. Perhaps the wealth of detail on the lives of Charles II and Isaac Newton would have led to a different type of book if their fears and hopes in 1665 had been opened up to the reader. Lord mainly draws upon diaries, hearth tax records, letters, maps, property transactions, parish registers, and wills with local connections (in contrast to Hatcher's extensive use of national and European sources), and her narrative is mainly focused upon Cambridge, albeit with some description of the plague and the Great Fire of London

The first victim of the plague in Cambridge in 1665 was a five-year-old boy, who was taken to a pest house, where he died ten days later, while a red cross was painted on the family home, which placed it under quarantine for forty days. The opening scene brings home how prevention brought trauma and the possibility of death through starvation and dehydration. Another scene midway through the book narrates how a group of teenagers gathered at the Great Bridge looking towards St. John's College on the evening of 13 August 1665. When Jacob King leaves this group early to go home, the reader follows him into the workshop, through the kitchen, past the hearth, and from there up a short flight of stairs to a small chamber with a wooden bed and a foldout trundle bed. Jacob rests there and is unable to eat the bread and cheese brought by his father. After learning of the signs of the plague on the boy's body, the reader meets the apothecary, Peter Dent (d. 1689), who lived opposite. Through scenes such as this the reader empathizes with how the Great Plague destroyed family life. In three parishes where the plague broke out, 30–49 percent of the plague victims were children (65–66), while many other children simply disappear from the record, sometimes following the death of their breadwinners from the plague. Lord dismisses the view that the pre-modern family “created an adult society of emotional cripples unable to relate to and love their offspring” (65), and recreates scenes of affection and bereavement between generations, spouses, courting couples, and friends as the plague exerted its heavy toll. Lord does not shy away from the attitudes of the time. The dissenter Lancelot Hooper presents the contemporary argument that the plague was God's punishment for the excesses of the aristocracy and immorality of women at the royal court. Lord also gives space to the early modern view that the poor brought the plague to Cambridge, and the better and middling sort had reason to withhold sympathy for plague victims who were poor.

Lord's book engages with the historical debate on the Great Plague both directly and indirectly, but her main concern is with recreating the smell of freshwater fish, reeds, and peaty waters; the sounds of the rhythm of work and entertainment in the town falling eerily silent; the feel of the cold fen winds; and the open skies in the fenland landscape. Readers will greatly enjoy her depiction of daily life, and the book is produced to the high standards of Yale University Press (but there is one mistake in the bibliography: Victoria County History, Cambridgeshire 9 was published in 1989 not 1959). Lord is to be congratulated on her meticulous scholarship and on her use of the historical empathy in providing academic and general readers with such an engaging book.