This book explores reactions to and representations of natural disasters in early modern Europe. The contributors illustrate how the cultural production of the period - in manuals, treatises, sermons, travelogues and fiction - grappled with environmental catastrophe. Crucially, they interrogate how people in the early modern era rationalized and mediated the threat of events like plagues, great frosts, storms, floods and earthquakes. A vital contribution to environmental history, this book highlights the parallels between early modern responses to natural disaster and climate anxiety in our own era.
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Elucidating Events in Excess in Early Modern Manuals, Pamphlets and Pastorals.- Chapter 2: Prognosticating Tempests in The Arte of Navigation by Richard Eden.- Chapter 3: Tending Ones Own Garden: Husbandry, Weather Lore and Prognostication in Early Modern England.- Chapter 4: Pests, Plagues and Pastoral Husbandry: Representing Ovine Disease in Early Modern England.- Part II: Directed Discussions of Disaster.- Chapter 5: Acqua Alta, Silting, and Plague: Representing Venetian Resilience from an Early Modern British Perspective.- Chapter 6: The Advent of Natural Disaster. The Earthquake in the Philosophical Transactions (1664/5-1700).- Chapter 7: Improving this terrible Visitation: The Three Thomases and the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake.- Part III: Poetics of Disaster.- Chapter 8: The Illusive Elements in Purcell and Drydens King Arthur.- Chapter 9: Mary Shelley, Natural Disasters and Catastrophes.- Chapter 10: Comparative Collapsology: From Shakespeare to George R. R. Martin.
Sandhya Patel is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies at Universit? Clermont Auvergne, France.
Sophie Chiari-Lasserre is Professor of Early Modern English Literature at Universit? Clermont Auvergne, France.
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