Disaster, Apocalypse, Emotions and Time in Sixteenth-Century Pamphlets

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between natural disaster, Apocalypse, emotions and time through a number of pamphlets in the late sixteenth-century collection of the Zurich pastor, Johann Jakob Wick. Zika argues that in early modern Europe the Apocalypse provided a potent meaning-making system for the collective emotional impact and social disruption caused by disaster, and also helped establish an emotional state that reinforced the conviction that the End Time had either arrived or was imminent. The imminence of the Apocalypse sometimes also stimulated strong feelings of being out-of-time, a new dimension in which linear time had collapsed and could be both lengthened and shortened. As a result emotions often became more intense and also conflicted, and the meaning and memory of disaster could be transformed.