This introductory chapter, encyclopaedic in nature, covers the main aspects of catastrophe (CAT) risk from a qualitative perspective, offering an overview of what will be explored in quantitative terms in the subsequent chapters. It starts with the definition of the fundamental terms and concepts, such as peril, hazard, risk, uncertainty, probability, and CAT model. It then describes the historical development of catastrophe risk science, which was often influenced by the societal impact of some infamous catastrophes. The main periods are as follows: from ancient myths to medieval texts, mathematization (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and computerization (twentieth century). Finally, it provides an exhaustive list of perils categorized by their physical origin, including geophysical, hydrological, meteorological, climatological, biological, extraterrestrial, technological, and socio-economic perils. In total, 42 perils are covered, with historical examples and consequences for people and structures discussed for each one of them.

This introduction sets out Major’s view of his age, "the experimental century," in relation to curiosity and curation. Although curiosity had been recuperated from a vice to a virtue in early modern Europe, Major continued to relate curiosity to original sin as a faulty, bodily lust for knowledge. This insatiable desire drove all people since Adam, but it did so more than ever in his age when the bounds and divisions set upon knowledge in the traditional encyclopedia were torn down. Curators applied cura or care (from the same root as curiosity) to knowledge. By acknowledging their own flaws, curators could guide the passion for knowledge closer and closer to truth, which, however, always remained out of human reach.

The terms linguistics and philology refer to different but overlapping areas of the Humanities. An opposition between them does not predate the triumph of structuralism. Structuralist linguistics devoted itself mainly to synchrony and theory, with lexicology and lexicography ending up in no-man’s land. A detailed look at dictionary definitions of linguistics and philology for more than three centuries offers a picture of the goals of both disciplines and of the ways the public understood language studies. Before the twentieth century, the focus of philology was the interpretation of old texts and word origins. The treatment of special terminology (including the terminology of linguistics) in dictionaries shows that despite all the differences a clear line between linguistics and philology cannot and need not be drawn, just as such a line cannot always be drawn between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. In the context of the present study, the use of etymology and phonetic transcription in various dictionaries illuminates the difference between and the unity of philology and linguistics.

During the Middle Ages, the iconography of Alexander the Great could be found in religious as well as lay environments. The diversity of illustrated media (mosaics and capitals as well as tapestries and manuscripts) in which his likeness was represented reflects the variety of appraisals assigned to him as a historical figure, from condemnation to admiration. The analysis of various manuscripts and artefacts illustrated with images of the Alexander saga show that the same story, written and illustrated in different contexts, allowed different and nuanced interpretations: historical, political, encyclopaedic, courteous etc. The figure of Alexander the Great was particularly used by medieval rulers to base their political claims and aspirations through an intentional remastering of classical sources and associated iconography.

This chapter introduces the theoretical assumptions that ground the analyses in later chapters. I refer to this model as MDM: Minimalist Distributed Morhpology. It presents a minimalist syntax with emphasis on phases as cycles of syntactic derivation. Roots and categories are separated as distinct syntactic nodes and roots are reanalyzed as indices that link an Encyclopedia item with an exponent. Morpholoy is realizational, with an important role for impoverishment rules and vocabuary insertion rules. Code switching data is used to present these assumptions. The third module of the model is the Encyclopedia, where minimal syntactic structures find conceptual meaning.