Volcanoes in eighteenth-century europe, Mccallam, David

Encountered on the Grand Tour, sought out by scientific explorers or endured by local populations in southern Italy and Iceland, erupting volcanoes were a physical reality for many Europeans in the eighteenth-century. For many others, they represented the very image of overwhelming natural power,
whether this was ultimately attributed to spiritual or material causes. As such, the volcano proved an effective and versatile tool for thinking in a century which ushered in modernity on several fronts: continental tourism, new earth sciences, the sublime and picturesque in art, industrial and
political revolution, the conception of the modern nation-state, and early intimations of environmental and climate change. But the volcano also gives us, in the twenty-first century, a privileged site (as both topography and topos) at which we can reconnect disparate and divided fields of research
across the sciences and the humanities.