Disaster in the Early Modern World

Ovanes Akopyan is a Marie Skłodowska-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.

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 Manetti’s De terremotu 3. Thinking with the Flood: Animal Endangerment and the Moral Economy of Disaster 4. Flood, Fire, and Tears: Imagining Climate Apocalypse in Scheuchzer’s 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 (16th–18th 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, 1476–1598 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