How did early modern societies think about disasters, such as earthquakes or floods? How did they represent disaster, and how did they intervene to mitigate its destructive effects? This collection showcases the breadth of new work on the period ca. 1300-1750.
How did early modern societies think about disasters, such as earthquakes or floods? How did they represent disaster, and how did they intervene to mitigate its destructive effects? This collection showcases the breadth of new work on the period ca. 1300-1750.
Covering topics that range from new thinking about risk and securitization to the protection of dikes from shipworm, and with a geography that extends from Europe to Spanish America, the volume places early modern disaster studies squarely at the intersection of intellectual, cultural, and socio-economic history. This period witnessed fresh speculation on nature, the diffusion of disaster narratives and imagery, and unprecedented attempts to control the physical world.
The book will be essential to specialists and students of environmental history and disaster, as well as general readers who seek to discover how pre-industrial societies addressed some of the same foundational issues we grapple with today.
Introduction Part 1: Examinations
1. Taming the Future?: From Natural
Hazards and Disasters to a Securitisation Against Risks
2. Power, Fortune
and Scientia naturalis: A Humanist Reading of Disasters in Giannozzo
Manettis De terremotu
3. Thinking with the Flood: Animal Endangerment and
the Moral Economy of Disaster
4. Flood, Fire, and Tears: Imagining Climate
Apocalypse in Scheuchzers De portione (1707/08)
5. Communicating Research on
the Great Frost in the Republic of Letters: From Halle to London Part 2:
Representations
6. What is an Avalanche?: Death in the Snow from Antiquity to
Early Modern Times
7. Disasters and Devotion: Sacred Images and Religious
Practices in Spanish America (16th18th Centuries)
8. Straightening the Arno:
Artistic Representations of Water Management in Medici Ducal and Grand Ducal
Florence
9. Responses to a Recurrent Disaster: Flood Writings in Rome,
14761598 Part 3: Interventions
10. Flood, War and Economy: Leonardo da Vinci
and the Plan to Divert the Arno River
11. The Making of a Transnational
Disaster Saint: Francisco Borja, Patron Saint of Earthquakes from the Andes
to Europe
12. Dikes, Ships and Worms: Testing the Limits of Envirotechnical
Transfer During the Dutch Shipworm Epidemic of the 1730s
Ovanes Akopyan is a Marie Skodowska-Curie fellow at Ca Foscari University of Venice.
David Rosenthal is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and co-director of Hidden Cities apps.
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