Organised in the wake of disasters, early modern emergency rituals were intended to persuade God to waive further punishment. However, this article shows that these rituals were as much about communities as about God. Based on a close reading of prayer day letters, sermons, and instruction manuals from the eighteenthcentury Dutch Republic, it proposes a Durkheimian interpretation of the rituals. For a day, participants collectively lived through an emotional disaster experience. This experience was then converted into (financial) solidarity with the victims.

Historians argue that the eighteenth-century Dutch interpreted disasters in an overarching decline narrative. As such, catastrophes were understood as signs of an escalating political, economic, and moral crisis. However, this declensionist narrative was not the only interpretative framework that people could employ for dreadful events. This article traces the temporalities in four contemporary commemoration books on major Dutch flood disasters in 1757, 1775, and 1799. Their authors located recent inundations in time by comparing them to past catastrophes and imagining a future in which floods may or may not recur. The writers of two commemoration books recognised regular cycles of catastrophe, while the authors of the other two titles discerned an increase in the number of and the damage caused by inundations. Nonetheless, most authors provided their readers hope. Through either morality or technology, the writers asserted, people could prevent future catastrophes.

In the last two decades, cultural and historical approaches have gained more attention in the field of disaster studies. The underlying premise is that disasters are as much cultural events as natural ones, and that cultural discourses are key to understanding the social impact of disasters. In this article, we focus on three types of cultural media: news media, occasional poetry and visual sources. We argue that authors and visual artists appropriated disasters and mediated information according to their political, religious and moral convictions. In doing so, they contributed not only to local and national community building, but also to setting and demarcating borders within the larger community.

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Fire disasters were a major threat to eighteenth-century villages and towns. Following such conflagrations, writers, artists, and publishers were eager to represent the disaster in great detail. Printed poems and pamphlets did not only describe the flames’ destruction, but also put great emphasis on the solidarity during and after the catastrophe. The risks of looting and social disorder were acknowledged by authors, but received little attention overall. Instead, poets and writers focused on acts of care and charity in four phases of fire disaster management: firefighting, immediate relief, collecting for reconstruction, and remembrance. While the first two phases were characterised by local and regional solidarity, the latter two could encompass – in the imagination of the authors – the whole Dutch nation. Writers appealed to faith and nationhood to convince people to make charitable donations. Afterwards, they celebrated and remembered the generosity of various communities. This article concludes that authors appropriated destroyed lives and buildings to construct identities and solidarity.