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.
