Denotat attoniti quid tremor iste soli? Earthquakes as Representations of Crisis in Bohemian Literary Texts before 1620

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F67985955%3A_____%2F25%3A00637509" target="_blank" >RIV/67985955:_____/25:00637509 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://doi.org/10.47075/CEC.2025-1.05" target="_blank" >https://doi.org/10.47075/CEC.2025-1.05</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.47075/CEC.2025-1.05" target="_blank" >10.47075/CEC.2025-1.05</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Denotat attoniti quid tremor iste soli? Earthquakes as Representations of Crisis in Bohemian Literary Texts before 1620

Original language description

The paper focuses on earthquakes as one of the representations of crisis in the early modern Bohemian literature of the pre-White Mountain period (1590–1620). The earliest extant texts discussing an earthquake to have happened in the Bohemian lands date back to 1590. These five texts, written in Czech and Latin and including sermon-like treatises, news, epic and elegiac poems, relate to the earthquake that occurred in the Bohemian lands in 1590. They are surprisingly concurrent in dealing with this natural disaster, giving it an important religious meaning, i.e., God’s warning and punishment. This strong religious message remained the central theme in earthquake discourse throughout the entire pre-White Mountain period, in which four other earthquakes are said to have happened, and was included even in a university thesis. Besides the five 1590 texts about the earthquake, a further nine sources describing or mentioning an earthquake have survived from the pre-White Mountain period, all of which will be analysed in this paper. Employing a series of examples taken from Czech and Latin source material, provided herein with the author’s English translation, this paper considers the main points and transformations of the earthquake discourse as presented by contemporary Bohemian authors, who appear to have mostly belonged to the broader University of Prague milieu, and thus were non-Catholic. Importantly, the position of the earthquake discourse among discussions of astronomical phenomena and other disasters is assessed.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_ost - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60206 - Specific literatures

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA22-03419S" target="_blank" >GA22-03419S: Forms of humanism in the literature of the Czech lands II (Companion to Central and Eastern European Humanism: The Czech Lands, Part II)</a><br>

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Central European Cultures

ISSN

2786-068X

e-ISSN

2786-0671

Volume of the periodical

5

Issue of the periodical within the volume

1

Country of publishing house

HU - HUNGARY

Number of pages

19

Pages from-to

78-96

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

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