The DisComPoSE project is coming to an end. The team is organizing the international conference Davanti alla fine. Culture e Politiche della calamità in età moderna (Before the end. Cultures and Policies of calamity in the early modern age). They will present the results of an interdisciplinary research lasting six years which has investigated the reactions of the societies of the past in the face of extreme natural phenomena occurring in the European and extra-European territories of the Spanish Monarchy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuriy. The event will take place on 18th and 19th December at the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria located in Castel Nuovo in Naples.
During these two days, historians who are specialists in studying information, institutions, culture and art, together with scholars of the Italian and Spanish languages and literature, will present the results of their research. They will illustrate how disasters were interpreted by pre-industrial communities and will explain how the impact of these catastrophes influenced the evolution of cultural frameworks, social relationships and power structures in those societies.
The speakers will focus on the words and images used to represent disasters, on the intention of the information and propaganda present in prose and verse documents and on communication networks, memory building, prevention measures and responses to disasters.
The digital archive of the sources will be presented on this occasion. It consists of a vast corpus of manuscripts, printed texts and images that have been collected in archives and libraries throughout Europe. The participants will also be introduced to DisComPoSE Routes, a new software that allows any interested visitor to view graphically the circulation of news about natural disasters in the early modern times.
Furthermore, the guests will have the opportunity to participate at the inauguration of the exhibition Catastrofe del mondo (Catastrophe of the World), which will display books, drawings and engravings from the 16th to the 19th century, belonging to the Storia Patria’s precious collections.
You can register for the conference by clicking this link or by sending an email to infodiscompose@unina.it
Download the program of the conference
Read the article on the newspaper “Corriere del Mezzogiorno”
Read the article on the university magazine “Ateneapoli”
Read the article on the website of the University Federico II
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