From literary representations of historical catastrophes—flooding, strong winds, earthquakes, plague and pestilence, wars—to apocalyptic texts that imagined the social and environmental tremors of the end of the world, premodern thinkers were as fascinated by catastrophe as we are. This special issue seeks to bring focus to how catastrophe shapes and is shaped by literary form, asking: How do premodern thinkers understand and represent catastrophes, both real and imagined? How do authors communicate abrupt or unexpected change? How is form used to counter or manage chaos? What makes particular forms fit for expressing the trauma of catastrophe? How do representations of disaster make visible the affective, didactic, or ethical interactions between texts and readers? What is generative about catastrophe or its representations? We seek articles that address these questions, as this issue reflects on how attending to form might enrich our understanding of the distinctive challenges and possibilities of writing disaster.

For this open-topic issue of the journal, the editors invite articles that are both informed by historical inquiry and alert to issues raised by contemporary theoretical debate. We expect that essays will be grounded in an intimate knowledge of a particular past and that their argumentation reveal a concern for the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpretation. We are particularly committed to work that seeks to overcome the polarization between history and theory in the study of premodern Western culture.

For many centuries the virtues were modes of living. What happens to the habits, practices, and conceptualizations of virtue and the virtue tradition as a result of the Reformations? The Reformations involved complex reorganizations of ritual, sacramental, ecclesiological, theological, and ethical practices. Because we take “virtues” to designate modes of living with determinate teleologies, we welcome essays with a broad understanding of the concept. Inquiries such as the following would be congruent with the aims of this special issue of JMEMS: relations between versions of free will, predestination, and antinomianism; versions of God emerging in Calvinism with their ethical implications; the abolition of penance as a sacrament; the abolition of late medieval understandings of the Eucharist, that consummation of the sacraments and virtues; the consequences of denigrations or adaptations of Thomistic ethics and its understanding of habitus and the virtues; justifications of war. Are there writers in whom we can trace this trajectory with particular force? Contributors might wish to include reflections on relations between premodern virtues and vices and the present moment, which itself may lead to major and unpredictable historical transformations. Contributors should be familiar with an earlier JMEMS special issue edited by Jennifer Herdt on the virtues (vol. 42, no. 1, 2012). We hope to build on work by John Bossy, Eamon Duffy, James Simpson, Thomas Pfau (Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge), Alasdair MacIntyre (especially After Virtue and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry), and Jennifer Herdt (Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices).