Natural encounters: climate, weather and the Italian Renaissance

Abstract

This paper examines a key issue in the history of the climate in the pre-instrumental period, that is, how to use narrative sources which make frequent references to weather events, but which need contextualised interpretation. The paper follows an argument that climatological techniques for deriving temperature indices from chronicles, though they have become increasingly elaborate and refined, nevertheless leave out much that is of interest to the social historian. This paper explores the area of the what-is-leftbehind when chronicle narratives are reduced to numerical indices. Investigating a broad range of Latin and Italian chronicles from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italy, the paper draws three main conclusions: that sensitivity to weather events not only varied greatly among writers (as one might expect) but so too did their use of severe weather to serve the purposes of narrative (through sequencing, metaphor and analogy); that sensitivity to meteorological anomaly changed during the period, especially in the fifteenth century with the spread of prognosticating verses; and that the broadening of chroniclers' interests in weather, both ordinary and extraordinary, and in its effects on everyday, material life may allow a connection to and re-evaluation of the Burckhartian idea of the Renaissance 'discovery of the world'.

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

“…However insightful such endeavours are, they leave much crucial information on the perception of how nature impacted the wellbeing of communities (Vyazov 2019). For instance, as Trevor Dean (2011) argues, to many chroniclers and authors of travelogues prior to the seventeenth century, extreme weather, sudden increased mortalities and environmental disasters served as moral indicators: for sins committed, or a potential sign of adversity yet to come. Giving meaning to environmental or even cosmic events thus influenced writers' perceptions of anomalies and their description of such events.…”

Italy in the Renaissance: a leading economy in the European context, 1350–1550

“…See, in particular, Loehle, ‘2000‐years global temperature reconstruction’; Loehle and McCulloch, ‘Correction’. See the comments on narrative sources of climatic events and Renaissance history in Dean, ‘Natural encounters’. The topic has been examined by Alfani, ‘Climate’.…”