Kristi Viiding: On the Literary Representation of Crises: Strategies of Explanation, Warning, Comparison and Intensification in Early Modern Livonia

Organized by the Department of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History

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Abstract

Researchers of the early modern era – a period of intense political, religious and military conflicts – often refer to individual and collective representations of crises. In this age before statistical or press reporting, literary texts and works of art supplied information and expressed ideas about key social and historical events. For some historians, literature and art works are in fact the most sensitive tools for interpreting crises since they can capture the very essence of these developments. In literary representations, crises may be accelerated, slowed, diagnosed and overcome. This lecture will uncover the strategies typically used by Livonian Neo-Latin authors to convey and interpret real and imagined crises of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Invitation pdf