“Disaster Narratives”: the debate about this volume

There is a heated debate about the analysis and interpretation of the sources of the natural disasters that occurred in the Kingdom of Naples in the early modern age. This has been encouraged by the book Disaster narratives in Early Modern Naples. Politics, Communication and Culture edited by Domenico Cecere, Chiara De Caprio, Lorenza Gianfrancesco and Pasquale Palmieri. This monograph, published by Viella in 2018, has aroused the interest of scholars from various disciplinary fields and has stimulated the production of a conspicuous number of reviews in prestigious journals in Italy, Spain, Germany, Great Britain and the USA.

This comprehensive chronological study of disaster literature in the Kingdom of Naples has brought to light hitherto overlooked printed and manuscript material on disasters that occurred in late mediaeval and early modern central and southern Italy.

Based on a large corpus of sources on natural disasters produced by local authors from a broad social and cultural milieu, the contributions to this volume investigate the relationship between natural disasters and different communication strategies which embraced politics, religion, propaganda, dissent and collective responses from the lower segments of society.

By undertaking research with a wide chronological and geographical scope, this volume contributes to a long-standing multidisciplinary scholarly tradition that has approached the study of natural disasters through the disciplines of intellectual and social history, anthropology, literary theory and linguistics.

Read the reviews