This book explores reactions to and representations of natural disasters in early modern Europe. The contributors illustrate how the cultural production of the period - in manuals, treatises, sermons, travelogues and fiction - grappled with environmental catastrophe. Crucially, they interrogate how people in the early modern era rationalized and mediated the threat of events like plagues, great frosts, storms, floods and earthquakes. A vital contribution to environmental history, this book highlights the parallels between early modern responses to natural disaster and climate anxiety in our own era.

Sandhya Patel is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies at Université Clermont Auvergne, France.

Sophie Chiari-Lasserre is Professor of Early Modern English Literature at Université Clermont Auvergne, France.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Elucidating Events in Excess in Early Modern Manuals, Pamphlets and Pastorals.- Chapter 2: Prognosticating Tempests in The Arte of Navigation by Richard Eden.- Chapter 3: Tending Ones Own Garden: Husbandry, Weather Lore and Prognostication in Early Modern England.- Chapter 4: Pests, Plagues and Pastoral Husbandry: Representing Ovine Disease in Early Modern England.- Part II: Directed Discussions of Disaster.- Chapter 5:Acqua Alta, Silting, and Plague: Representing Venetian Resilience from an Early Modern British Perspective.- Chapter 6: The Advent of Natural Disaster. The Earthquake in the Philosophical Transactions (1664/5-1700).- Chapter 7: Improving this terrible Visitation: The Three Thomases and the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake.- Part III: Poetics of Disaster.- Chapter 8: The Illusive Elements in Purcell and Drydens King Arthur.- Chapter 9: Mary Shelley, Natural Disasters and Catastrophes.- Chapter 10: Comparative Collapsology: From Shakespeare to George R. R. Martin.