ABSTRACT
National governments and international aid organisations respond to rescue survivors, establish temporary housing for those displaced and bring in emergency aid, equipment and expertise. As a consequence, terms such as ‘risk management’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ have well and truly entered the public lexicon, and awareness of environmental hazards has perhaps never been higher. This chapter is about natural disasters in the later Middle Ages in Europe. It provides an overview of the many environmental hazards which threatened people in the past, such as earthquakes, severe weather, floods and disease, and shows how medieval societies responded to these threats. For the Middle Ages, however, much of the existing scholarship, at least from a social science perspective, has tended to focus primarily on documentary evidence. ‘Rapid-onset’ weather conditions such as floods, storms at sea and lightning are among the better recorded natural disasters of the period.
