The invention of the lightning rod by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was one of the first major scientific and technological contributions (with cultural and philosophical significance) to transfer from the Americas to Europe, rather than the other way round. This book broadly describes its European reception. And while the focus is on reactions in the Netherlands, it relates those to American, German, French, and British developments. More importantly, the responses to the invention of the lightning rod are used here as a window on cultural developments, among them the reception of science and technology, but also the diverse variants of religious life, from the traditional to the esoteric, and the experience of nature in the context of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The result is an intriguing combination or rather a reconnection of such relatively dissimilar scientific disciplines as meteorology, disaster research, and the study of religious and cultural mentalities. In short, this book traces both the physical and creative thunderstorms that reverberated in the Western consciousness during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth.

The history of the Low Countries is one of a millennia-long battle against the elements, particularly water. From the west, the North Sea posed a constant threat; from the east, the great rivers Rhine and Meuse all too often flooded the land. Between 1568 and 1648, man-made disasters were added to natural ones as the Netherlands fought an eighty-year-long war of independence from Spain. Only with the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, commonly referred to as the Dutch Republic, formally recognised as a sovereign state. It was the political culmination of the Dutch Golden Age. It also made permanent the position of the Reformed Church as a privileged denomination. Calvinists predominated, but they were by no means the only Protestants. Lutherans, Mennonites, and Remonstrants formed a significant and often very culturally active minority, despite being treated as second-class citizens. And while taken as a whole these congregations resulted in a population that was for the most part Protestant, a sizeable Roman Catholic minority still remained – albeit subject to discrimination.