Calamities and the Conscience: Religion, Suffering and Intellectual Change in the Face of Disasters in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

Disasters in colonial America, as in the early modern world more generally, formed episodes laden with religious significance - an ideal subject for moral and spiritual lessons.  Indeed, providential interpretations of calamity were so strong that it is tempting to categorize premodern attitudes to disaster as doctrinally isolated, static, and backward, until they were at last dragged into rational modernity by a combination of Enlightenment philosophy and science.  However, a closer examination of pamphlets, tracts and sermons reveals a more complex array of intellectual and emotional responses to disasters, which both incorporated new scientific work and underwent important transformations.

The date of this event has changed from December 14.