The diluge ahead

Essay by Darmstadt Aretin Prize winner David Blischke in the Middle Ages Blog

2021/06/07

The history of crisis management of the Magdalen flood of 1342 in selected examples

This essay is the short version of the thesis for history university degree program Lehramt an Gymnasien at TU Darmstadt, submitted in November 2019 with the title “Vor uns die Sintflut – Zur Krisenbewältigung des Magdalenenhochwasser 1342 an ausgewählten Fallbeispielen”. In this essay, the author describes how people dealt with the effects of the flood and the extreme precipitation which caused it. For this purpose, reactions and measures of events around the 22nd July 1342 (the saint’s day of Mary Magdalene) were presented and classified in concepts of crisis management and crisis perception. The aim of this essay is to summarise the results of this work.

Follow this link to read the entire essay (in German only).