Summary: This volume deals with natural disasters in late medieval and early modern central and southern Italy. Contributions look at a range of catastrophic events such as eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, floods, earthquakes, and outbreaks of plague and epidemics. A major aim of this volume is to investigate the relationship between catastrophic events and different communication strategies that embraced politics, religion, propaganda, dissent, scholarship as well as collective responses from the lower segments of society. The contributors to this volume share a multidisciplinary approach to the study of natural disasters which draws on disciplines such as cultural and social history, anthropology, literary theory, and linguistics. Together with analyzing the prolific production of propagandistic material and literary sources issued in periods of acute crisis, the documentation on disasters studied in this volume also includes laws and emergency regulations, petitions and pleas to the authorities, scientific and medical treatises, manuscript and printed newsletters as well as diplomatic dispatches and correspondence.

Contents: Chiara De Caprio, Narrating Disasters: Writers and Texts Between Historical Experience and Narrative Discourse || Francesco Montuori, Voices of the "totale eccidio": On the Lexicon of Earthquakes in the Kingdom (1456-1784) || Rita Fresu, "The Water Ran with Such Force". The Representation of Floods in the Early Modern Era: Textual Configurations, Conceptual Models, Linguistic Aspects || Pierluigi Terenzi, Earthquakes, Society and Politics in L'Aquila in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries || Francesco Senatore, Survivors' Voices: Coping with the Plague of 1478-1480 in Southern Italian Rural Communities || Domenico Cecere, Moralising Pamphlets: Calamities, Information and Propaganda in Seventeenth-Century Naples || Giancarlo Alfano, The Portrait of Catastrophe: The Image of the City in Seventeenth-century Neapolitan Culture || Lorenza Gianfrancesco, Narratives and Representations of a Disaster in Early Seventeenth-century Naples || Silvana D'Alessio, On the Neapolitan Plague of 1656: Expedients and Remedies || Pasquale Palmieri, Protecting the Faithful City: Disasters and the Cult of the Saints (Naples, 1573-1587) || Giovanni Gugg, The Missing Ex-Voto: Anthropology and Approach to Devotional Practices during the 1631 Eruption of Vesuvius. (Viella Historical Research, 10)

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