'Disaster upon Disaster Inflicted on the Dutch'. Singing about Disasters in the Netherlands, 1600-1900

This article focuses on Dutch songs about natural disasters, published roughly between 1600 and 1900, and investigates which functions they fulfilled from a long-term perspective. It argues that this particular genre is an important source to understand how people coped with catastrophes in the past by highlighting three of its main functions. Firstly, they were used to spread the news by communicating detailed information about the happening from the time of the event to the location and number of deadly incidents. Secondly, authors made sense of the events by interpreting them. In all cases,... Mehr ...