Disasters, Communication and Politics in South-Western Europe: the Making of Emergency Response Policies in the Early Modern Age

Project Information

DISCOMPOSE

Grant agreement ID: 759829

DOI

10.3030/759829

Project closed

EC signature date 30 October 2017

Start date 1 February 2018

End date 31 January 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 481 813,00

EU contribution

€ 1 481 813,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI FEDERICO II
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - DISCOMPOSE (Disasters, Communication and Politics in South-Western Europe: the Making of Emergency Response Policies in the Early Modern Age)

Reporting period: 2022-08-01 to 2024-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the early modern period, reports and accounts flourished in the aftermath of earthquakes, eruptions, floods and other calamities that marked the history of several areas. The DisComPoSE project investigates what kind of information people received about such shocking events, how reports, accounts, images and individual memories of them amounted to authoritative interpretations, and in which ways the latter oriented the recovery process, from the 16th to the 18th century.
Research focuses primarily on disasters associated with extreme events occurred in the Spanish Empire. By working on different territories of this polycentric Monarchy, the project aims at shedding new light on the making of practices and policies set up by pre-industrial societies in order to minimise the impact of extreme events, in the light of actual knowledge, information networks, values and beliefs of institutional and societal actors.
DisComPoSE aims at analysing the decision-making process in the light of cultural attitudes and available knowledge. In order to do this, some members of the research group have carryied out in-depth studies of a number of extreme events that affected four selected areas: Catalonia, Naples, Sicily and Valencia.
The project supersedes the often merely descriptive and fragmented case-studies by adopting a wide geographical scope and a long chronological range. Moreover, one of the DisComPoSE objectives is that of advancing our understanding of the factors that led these societies to develop their peculiar patterns of coping with environmental threats, by overcoming the prevailing separation between cultural and socio-institutional approaches.
The insights gained are likely to advance our understanding of socio-cultural interactions in times of crises, when exceptional events fuel the dissemination of news and opinions. They have shed new light on how government bodies and civil bodies interact in the management of risk and disruption, thus they provide valuable comparative elements for scholars researching how times of emergency affect the emergence of concepts comparable to states of exception and the redrawing of the boundaries of political power.
Finally, research carried out is providing a new, cross-disciplinary methodology based on the application of textual critique and cultural history to disaster and environmental studies.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In order to ensure these objectives, the research team engaged in a wide-ranging collection of texts and images, whether printed or handwritten, produced in the aftermath of major calamities and preserved mainly in Italian and Spanish, but also in other European and American libraries and archives. The research team has developed a shared method of textual and iconographic analysis that was applied to the collected texts and images, in order to help scholars to detect metaphors, narrative techniques and rhetorical strategies that were used in highly standardized texts.
A Digital Archive of disaster texts developed by the research team partly reflects this collaborative and interdisciplinary work aimed at establishing a shared method of analysis. Apart from being an essential tool for research and data sharing, the Digital Archive is per se one of the main results of the research, as it provides the international scientific community with a vast corpus of sources, bearing detailed metadata that facilitate their search, reuse and interpretation.
Based on this collection, the research has taken a twofold approach:
On one hand, the research team has explored how information was shared in the aftermath of disasters in the European, American, and Asian territories of the Spanish Monarchy. Two lines of research have been outlined and carried out: 1) the study of the ways in which ancien régime societies perceived, interpreted and represented in words or images extraordinary and dreadful events; 2) the study of how news, memories and reports were transformed into influential narratives about collective suffering.
On the other hand, we focused on how the prevailing interpretations of disasters affected the elaboration of emergency response policies, exploring how groups and institutions prepared to respond to disasters. Combining these different lines of research enabled us to study the implementation of emergency policies, by applying the insights gained from textual and visual analysis to the study of political, administrative and judicial papers.
Research has shed new light on how socio-cultural interactions unfolded during crises, leading to the emergence of institutions and practices designed to mitigate risks and protect society. Furthermore, comparing narratives of events that occurred in very distant territories, provided abundant evidence that the development of emergency response practices in early modern societies was not based only on local experiences and memories, but substantially depended on the sharing of knowledge and experiences among different territories, yet belonging to the same polity.
Apart from a series of workshops, conferences, and publications, addressed mainly to scholars and students in the Humanities, a series of activities and dissemination tools enabled the team to share the research data and findings with other scholars in different fields, with policy makers and with sectors of civil society.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The research activities undertaken have shown the fertility of a shared method of exploiting sources, based in the combination of different methodologies of different research fields. The Digital Archive has been designed as a software that provides a suitable combination of close reading and distant reading, to facilitate comparisons and searches through a large corpus of sources. This work put the research team in a position to bring to light the peculiar features of cultural production in the aftermath of disasters, depending on the different contexts and periods; and to make a step further in our understanding of the behaviour of groups and institutions, by linking actions and responses to the making of shared perceptions of certain phenomena.
Thus, the team was allowed to overcome the so far prevailing “atomistic” approach and detect long-term continuities and changes in the way disasters were experienced, communicated and handled.
Overall, research has shown that in the early modern period disasters inevitably produced a huge amount of information and interpretations, and often generated friction about how they should be managed. However, how this manifested itself varied greatly across different periods and settings in terms of the responsibilities that public bodies felt they had with respect to the communities affected. Over the course of the seventeenth century the consolidation, codification and spread of specific informative genres and then the emergence of periodicals not only influenced how disasters were interpreted and narrated but also helped to turn them into newsworthy events per se rather than just in terms of their consequences. These shifts are also connected to changes in how territories were governed, in the concept of statehood, and in the relationship between power and where it was exercised. In addition, research has shown the key role of emerging notions and practices of governance based on the view that the ability to ensure the survival and wellbeing of one’s subjects could be an important element in legitimising power.

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