This special issue of the journal Tracés focuses on interdisciplinary practices across the social sciences and natural sciences. we sought to reflect on ways of practising interdisciplinarity across disciplines whose research objects, methods, epistemologies and theoretical references seem to differ significantly

Disasters and catastrophes are considered here in the forms of writing they elicit within the human world they disrupt. The different case studies examined illustrate how far the variety and fluidity of the rhetorical-literary forms used in 14th-17th century Italy are a powerful factor in the evolution of language, literature and hermeneutic models