ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book concerns with the way historians in ancient, medieval and primarily early modern times, viewed the attempts to control nature as these developed throughout history. It highlights one particular historiographical manifestation of divine accommodation, namely the way historians from antiquity to the eighteenth century utilized it in order to explain the operations of nature, not least natural calamities which afflicted human beings. White's emphasis on biblical cosmology as the main source for the traditional Western anthropocentric outlook on nature has retained much of its authority, although it has been subjected to some important correctives. The book emphasizes that some of the most important eighteenth-century historians, particularly, but not only, in the first half of the century, still held on to modified and mitigated forms of divine accommodation explanations.
