Disastro, Catastrophe, and Divine Judgment
Words, Concepts and Images for ‘Natural’ Threats to Social Order in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23417828 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gerrit Jasper Schenk (0000-0001-5492-512X, Technische Universität Darmstadt, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Pages | 45-67 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400-1700 (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/978-1-137-44271-0_3 |
| OpenAlex | W2521368861 |
| ISBN | 9781137442710 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
Which concepts and images were used for terrible and disastrous events in the medieval millennium? This chapter answers this question by taking the example of concepts for natural extreme events such as earthquakes, storms and floods. It can be shown that in late medieval times an abstract notion filled with emotions was found to label numerous events of the same kind: “disastro” (bad star). This transculturally shaped neologism refers to the astrometeorological view of the world according to which particular star constellations have a negative impact on human environment. It was also visualized in images. Whereas this concept has developed in the Roman languages since the fourteenth century the almost forgotten concept of “catastrophe” has come into use for similar events in the German-speaking area only since the sixteenth century.
Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Geography · German · Literature · Middle Ages · Natural (archaeology) · Natural disaster · Order (exchange) · The Renaissance · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Medieval History and Crusades · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research
| Citations per year | 0.14 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2019 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |