Natural disasters and the European Printed News Network

The circulation of news about natural calamities in early modern Europe can
be analysed from different points of view. This text will concentrate on the
development of the news network about natural disasters in the context of the
history of the circulation of news, from its beginning with manuscript newssheets
or avvisi through to the complex and more fully articulated network developed
throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. In particular, I will focus on
the news that crossed political or linguistic borders. It is no easy task to consider
this subject exhaustively. One of the crucial points is the quantities to consider:
the volume of sources, which is to say handwritten news, news pamphlets (relations,
broadsheets) and newspapers (or gazettes) on the one hand; on the other,
the number of events. For instance, the European Archive of Historical
Earthquakes Data (ahead) counts 204 ‘large’ and ‘extra large’ events in Europe
and western Turkey between 1501 and 1750.1 Digital humanities helps significantly
in this area of research through the digitisation and the uploading of
more and more documents, but the corpus is not yet large enough to cover the
whole mass of news and events. The calamities selected are those caused by
geophysical activity like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, floods,
and storms. Each type of event has different spatiotemporal development and
this affects the ways in which they were communicated.