English summary: Wars, pandemics, extreme forces of nature, and famines decisively shaped the lives of people who lived in the Middle Ages. They were essential factors for population development, shaped contemporary mentalities, and were also given an intense representation in the literature of the period. This anthology offers an interdisciplinary series of studies from the fields of history, German, Romance, and Slavic philology, art history, music studies and forensic genetics, which pursue the perception, meaning, coping skills, and memorial culture of natural catastrophes in medieval...