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

Abstract

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.