WEATHER AND CLIMATE

WEATHER AND CLIMATE. The history of the climate during the early modern age is largely centered on the climatic deterioration known as the "Little Ice Age." Much evidence testifies to a significant degradation of atmospheric conditions from the perhaps uniquely favorable circumstances of the High Middle Ages to the cooler, wetter, and less stable weather of the early modern period. No consensus exists with regard to the nature or the chronology of this phenomenon, the value of the sources available to investigate it, or its impact upon European societies. Nevertheless, the recognition of the importance of climate as a historical factor has led researchers to revisit many well-traveled paths of European history. Their efforts have become particularly relevant considering twenty-first-century fears of global warming.

The sources that historians draft to document the climate of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries may be arranged in two main categories: literary and iconographic documents and serial and/or quantifiable data. In turn, this second group of sources may itself be divided into direct and indirect records. The value and the limitations of all relevant sources are still debated. References to weather conditions are found in many diaries, almanacs, chronicles, letters, professional accounts, and scientific and military logs. Yet this information is very heterogeneous and thinly and unevenly distributed across the continent and the centuries. It is inevitably subjective and likely to recall extreme or rare occurrences (similar comments may be directed at the pictorial records that testify to various effects of the weather). More systematic and more intentional direct records of weather conditions are rare, particularly early in the period. Their great merit is to enable the construction of data series, yet the lack of standardized measures of temperatures and other climatic variables greatly complicates the task of researchers.

To complete this rich yet insufficient medley of references, historians turn to indirect evidence. Some of it requires refined scientific analyses, ranging from the mapping of tree rings to carbon dating and the assaying of soil or ice cores. A second category of proxy sources includes evidence of weather-dependent economic output, principally crops. Municipal rolls of market prices, institutional accounts of harvests, church tithes registers, or seigneurial records may all reflect variations in local weather conditions. However, both agricultural production itself and the transactions that produced these records were also shaped by economic, political, and cultural tensions. (Agronomists also warn of the intrinsic complexity of the relation between weather and output.) For instance, the dates of grape harvests have always been linked to competitive pressures and evolving tastes as well as spring and summer conditions, just as flood reports are shaped by water levels but also by demographic pressures, hydraulic works, or fiscal imperatives. Increasingly rigorous standards have been applied to the reconstitution of early modern climates, demanding advanced dissections of the effect of weather upon the documented variables and sophisticated statistical testing of the resulting figures.

Several significant cross-disciplinary collaborations substantiate the existence of a negative turn in the weather during the early modern era and also expose its complexity. Its outside limits range from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, although its beginnings are obviously less documented than its end. Naturally, no uniform weather pattern stretched across this long period or across all regions of Europe; this calls for the study of fine regional and chronological distinctions. Temperatures are perhaps better known than precipitation amounts, and great variability as well as episodes of extreme weather are emerging as key findings. Charts of growing seasons and growing ranges have been drawn and compared with the more favorable conditions of the High Middle Ages and the well-documented contemporary era. To date, the geography and chronology of the early modern climate "pessimum" (severe deterioration) remain the object of much valuable work.

Historians speculate on the origins of this climatic deterioration, notably turning to factors such as solar, volcanic, or even human activity, but they are chiefly interested in its consequences. Its impact upon food production is at the center of many debates, because of its crucial importance to many aspects of early modern social, economic, and even political life. Inquiries into the demographic impact of the Little Ice Age continue to enrich our understanding of related subjects such as famines, epidemics, and epizootics. Increasingly, historians separate the consequences of sharp and brutal but short events from those of medium-term, interannual, and decadal or secular trends and underscore the distinctions to be made between the great climatic zones of Europe. They also contrast the impact of weather in secure agricultural areas with that in marginal lands of all sorts and have started to acknowledge the importance of microclimates. New knowledge of climatic patterns is also being applied to many long-standing historical concerns: the "general crises" of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries; large-scale migration patterns, and, occasionally, the disappearance of whole communities; popular rebellions; economic trends ranging from the southward retreat of vineyards to the shifting of fishing grounds and the great inflation of the sixteenth century; and some of the key advances of the early modern age, such as the agricultural revolution. Finally, climate history has also entered the field of cultural studies, with explorations of the role of climate in shaping popular beliefs and traditions reflected in language, ceremonies, superstitions, and even witch-hunts.

The implications of research on the history of climate are many. Even those who remain skeptical of the solidity of such probes will agree that they serve to highlight and explain the importance and the diversity of human responses to environmental challenges. Research devoted to the early modern climate can also speak to early modern communities' ability to diversify their crops, their landholding patterns, the attempts of authorities to mitigate the impact of brutal episodes, the role played by growing commercial networks and related levels of specialization, the flexibility or rigidity of certain social structures, and the reasons behind important evolutions of landscapes. In the course of these investigations, several fundamental assumptions have been questioned, such as the vulnerability of preindustrial communities to climatic fluctuations, and even the stability of the natural environment in which they functioned.

The strongest objections to the work of climate historians revolve around the value of the data and methods used. But there are also regular denouncements of the risks of determinism associated with these (and other) probes into environmental history. This is particularly so because of a longstanding tradition linking the supposedly favorable climate of Europe with the successful projection of European power across the oceans. Many aspects of the European environment have been and are still advanced to justify what has been called the "European Miracle," ranging from its (mostly) temperate nature and the (relative) absence of large-scale destructive episodes, to its very diversity. All such theses stand accused of ignoring or underestimating the historically crucial element of human agency and, most significantly, of simplifying the great complexity of climate patterns and their impact upon land and people.

Such Eurocentric interpretations of the influence of climate upon societies are not new. Emboldened by the growing reach of their information networks, early modern thinkers linked geography and climate with social and cultural development in several ways, just as they started to reflect on the possibility of climatic variations over time. These reflections could join speculations on the relative merits of ancient and modern societies, or the clustering of geniuses. They could also enter the realm of religious thought, through hypotheses on "geological times" or the universal decline of the earth's ability to support life, as well as daring interpretations of some key episodes of the Scriptures; those, on the contrary, who argued the immutability of climate opened the door for more enlightened plans for improving lives. The same period also marked the beginnings of a more systematic and more scientific interest in recording weather patterns. This trend made clear the need for more reliable thermometers and other instruments and heralded the eventual science of meteorology, although, as is common during the early modern era, cultural groups other than the elite of princely scientific societies remained active in their own ways. The interest in climate, like that in many other aspects of nature, helped mark social and regional identities. Late in the period, attention turned to the potential impact of human activities upon the natural environment and climate. Large-scale or particularly acute instances of deforestation fueled the theory of desiccation, predicated upon the idea that forests attracted, retained, and redistributed atmospheric moisture. Some applied it on a grand scale, speculating, for instance, on the decline of Classic societies or the future of the North American climate after settlement. Others turned to the small but revealing scale of tropical islands. In these settings, free of some of the traditional bounds that had developed in Europe, novel measures emerged that may be seen as forerunners of the science of ecology and the protectionist measures that would grow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Research in climate history is an established component of environmental history. Like other aspects of this new field, it calls for decidedly multidisciplinary approaches, and it struggles to overcome the fundamental objections associated with the ever-recurrent temptation of deterministic interpretations of history. In the context of an early modern era rich in sources, it greatly enriches our understanding of material and social life and contributes to the development of ever more refined models of the links between nature and culture.

See also Agriculture ; Environment ; Forests and Woodlands ; Scientific Instruments .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blaut, James M. "Environmentalism and Eurocentrism." Geographical Review 89 (July 1999): 391–408.

Flohn, Hermann, and Roberto Fantechi, eds. The Climate of Europe, Past, Present, and Future: Natural and Man-Induced Climatic Changes, A European Perspective. Dordrecht and Boston, 1984.

Jankovi'c, Vladimir. Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820. Chicago, 2000.

Jones, P. D., et al., eds. History and Climate: Memories of the Future? New York, 2001.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10, nos. 2 and 4 (1979–1980).

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000. Translated by Barbara Bray. Garden City, N.Y., 1971.

Pfister, Christian, Rudolf Brázdil, and Rüdiger Glaser, eds. Climatic Variability in Sixteenth-Century Europe and Its Social Dimension. Dordrecht and Boston, 1999.

Pierre Claude Reynard