This collection of essays addresses the concept of 'disaster' through a variety of literary texts dating back to the early modern period.

Sophie Chiari is a tenured professor of early modern English Literature at Université Clermont Auvergne. She holds a doctoral degree from Université Paul Valéry - Montpellier 3, France, and she received her accreditation to supervise research from Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. Among her recently published collections of essays are Freedom and Censorship in Early Modern English Literature (2018) and Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare, co-edited with John Mucciolo (2019). Her monograph Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment, was published in 2019 and her latest book, entitled Shakespeare and the Environment: A Dictionary, was published in early 2022.

General Introduction

Sophie Chiari

PART I. Extreme Conditions

Chapter 1

'Shakespeare, Natural Disaster, and Atmospheric Phenomena'

Geraldo U. de Sousa

Chapter 2

'Frozen: English Journeys to the End of the World'

Sophie Lemercier-Goddard

Chapter 3

'Musical Representations of Natural Phenomena in Early Modern English Madrigals'

Chantal Schütz

PART II. Tempestuous Skies

Chapter 4

'Man in Stormy Weathers in the Age of Shakespeare'

Danièle Berton-Charrière

Chapter 5

'The Storms of Othello in 1613'

David M. Bergeron

Chapter 6

'Francis Bacon and the Mastery of the Winds'

Angus Vine

PART III. Biblical Calamities

Chapter 7

'The Plague of Gnats in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries'

Sophie Chiari

Chapter 8

'Michael Drayton and the Invention of the Disaster Epic: Eco-catastrophe in the Late Poems'

Todd A. Borlik

Chapter 9

'John Ray's Inquiry into the Future Dissolution of the World in The Miscellaneous Discourses'

Mickaël Popelard

Coda

'Climate Change and the Postsecular in Paul Schrader's First Reformed'

John Gillies