The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Kelly ◽  
Cormac Ó Gráda
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Little Ice Age ◽  
Temperature Series ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
As Effects

The supposed ramifications of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures straddling several centuries in northwestern Europe, reach far beyond meteorology into economic, political, and cultural history. The available annual temperature series from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century, however, contain no major breaks, cycles, or trends that could be associated with the existence of a Little Ice Age. Furthermore, the series of resonant images, ranging from frost fairs to contracting glaciers and from dwindling vineyards to disappearing Viking colonies, often adduced as effects of a Little Ice Age, can also be explained without resort to climate change.

Debating the Little Ice Age

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Kelly ◽  
Cormac Ó Gráda
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Little Ice Age ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Temperature Series ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Europe

The commentaries of White and of Büntgen and Hellmann in this journal fail to prove that Europe experienced the kind of sustained falls in temperature between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries that can justify the notion of a Little Ice Age. Neither of them adequately addresses the cogency of the anecdotal or statistical evidence as presented in Kelly and Ó Gráda's article, “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe,” especially with regard to the spurious peaks and troughs created by the smoothing of temperature series—the so-called Slutsky Effect.

scholarly journals THE MAKING OF THE EARLY MODERN BRITISH FAIRY TRADITION

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 1135-1156 ◽  
Author(s):  
RONALD HUTTON
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
British Culture

ABSTRACTThis review is intended to examine the development of representations of elves and fairies in British culture between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. It will argue that a very clear two-stage evolution in those representations can be found in literary sources, from an inchoate range found in different kinds of text, with no apparent collective identity, to a coherent sense of a kingdom, to which the common word ‘fairy’ could be applied, to an intense interest in, and discussion of, the nature of fairies. The first development occurred in the late middle ages, and the second after the Reformation, and both were pan-British phenomena. These literary changes were, moreover, paralleled at each stage, and perhaps responsible for, changes in perception in culture at large. The alterations in representations of these non-human beings, with no clear status in Christian theology, may have wider implications for an understanding of late medieval and early modern cultural history.

STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING THE EXPERIENCE OF EARLY MODERN EUROPEANS

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAYMOND A. MENTZER
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Geographic Concentration ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Relationship

Archives of the scientific revolution: the formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe. Edited by Michael Hunter. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 216. ISBN 0–8511–553–7. £45.00.The peasantries of Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Edited by Tom Scott. London: Longman, 1998. Pp. xi + 416. ISBN 0–582–10131-X. £19.99.Civil society and fanaticism: conjoined histories. By Dominique Colas. Translated by Amy Jacobs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xxx + 480. ISBN 0–8047–2736–8. £14.95.The quest for compromise: peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna. By Howard Louthan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 185. ISBN 0–531–58082-X. £35.00.Each of the four volumes at hand examines a different yet vital aspect of European society between the late middle ages and the beginnings of industrialization. The field is far too diverse and the approaches too complex to expect a commonality among these works, excepting a shared temporal and geographic concentration. Still, the themes and subjects reveal some of the issues that have captured recent attention and show how scholars propose to go about exploring them. They suggest the interests of historians of early modern Europe, their distinctive perspectives, and varying methodologies. The collective reach extends from deciphering the papers and manuscripts left by participants in the scientific revolution to an exploration of the immense yet largely reticent peasant world, an attempt to establish the origins and trace the development of today's ongoing discussion over civil society and fanaticism, and finally a study of four peacemakers who urged religious moderation at the imperial court of Counter-Reformation Vienna. Put slightly differently, these studies raise fundamental questions about the sources upon which scholars depend, the nature and utility of historical models, and the relationship between contemporary concerns and our collective past, whether they be issues of civil society or irenic accommodation.

Thinking with the Saint: The Miracle of Saint Januarius of Naples and Science in Early Modern Europe

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Paolo de Ceglia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
North And South

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the way in which early modern science questioned and indirectly influenced (while being in its turn influenced by) the conceptualization of the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, a phenomenon that has been taking place at regular intervals in Naples since the late Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century, a debate arose that divided Europe between supporters of a theory of divine intervention and believers in the occult properties of the blood. These two theoretical options reflected two different perspectives on the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. While in the seventeenth century, the emphasis was placed on the predictable periodicity of the miraculous event of liquefaction as a manifestation of God in his role as a divine regulator, in the eighteenth century the event came to be described as capricious and unpredictable, in an attempt to differentiate miracles from the workings of nature, which were deemed to be normative. The miracle of the blood of Saint Januarius thus provides a window through which we can catch a glimpse of how the natural order was perceived in early modern Europe at a time when the Con­tinent was culturally fragmented into north and south, Protestantism and Catholicism, learned and ignorant.


Testing the Limits of Climate History: The Quest for a Northeast Passage during the Little Ice Age, 1594–1597

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagomar Degroot
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Little Ice Age ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Human History ◽  
Climate History ◽  
Local Environments

Although interdisciplinary scholars have firmly established the existence of an early modern Little Ice Age, methodologies that link climate, weather, and human history remain in their infancy. Journals kept during three Dutch expeditions to find a northeast passage through the Arctic between 1594 and 1597 demonstrate the complexity of establishing relationships between climate and human affairs. They confirm scientific reconstructions of the Little Ice Age in the Arctic, but they also record counterintuitive relationships between regional climate and local environments. These local manifestations of climate change shaped the course of the Dutch quest for a northeast passage in the 1590s, with important ramifications for Dutch economic and intellectual history. The journals reveal that historians must carefully establish distinct relationships between shifting environmental conditions and human activities across different scales before attempting to tie climate change to human history.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

Climate-induced treeline mortality during the termination of the Little Ice Age in the Greater Yellowstone Ecoregion, USA

The Holocene ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 095968362110116
Author(s):  
Maegen L Rochner ◽  
Karen J Heeter ◽  
Grant L Harley ◽  
Matthew F Bekker ◽  
Sally P Horn
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Tree Ring ◽  
Little Ice Age ◽  
Climate Changes ◽  
Frost Damage ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Variability ◽  
Whitebark Pine ◽  
Engelmann Spruce ◽  
Greater Yellowstone

Paleoclimate reconstructions for the western US show spatial variability in the timing, duration, and magnitude of climate changes within the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, ca. 900–1350 CE) and Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. 1350–1850 CE), indicating that additional data are needed to more completely characterize late-Holocene climate change in the region. Here, we use dendrochronology to investigate how climate changes during the MCA and LIA affected a treeline, whitebark pine ( Pinus albicaulis Engelm.) ecosystem in the Greater Yellowstone Ecoregion (GYE). We present two new millennial-length tree-ring chronologies and multiple lines of tree-ring evidence from living and remnant whitebark pine and Engelmann spruce ( Picea engelmannii Parry ex. Engelm.) trees, including patterns of establishment and mortality; changes in tree growth; frost rings; and blue-intensity-based, reconstructed summer temperatures, to highlight the terminus of the LIA as one of the coldest periods of the last millennium for the GYE. Patterns of tree establishment and mortality indicate conditions favorable to recruitment during the latter half of the MCA and climate-induced mortality of trees during the middle-to-late LIA. These patterns correspond with decreased growth, frost damage, and reconstructed cooler temperature anomalies for the 1800–1850 CE period. Results provide important insight into how past climate change affected important GYE ecosystems and highlight the value of using multiple lines of proxy evidence, along with climate reconstructions of high spatial resolution, to better describe spatial and temporal variability in MCA and LIA climate and the ecological influence of climate change.

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