"Histories of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change and Climate Extremes in European History, c.1300-1850"
January 24, 2025
9a - 2:30p
Alastair Bellany, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
This seminar will explore the environmental, social, political, and cultural impact of a centuries-long phase of fluctuating climatic cooling usually known as the Little Ice Age, c.1300-1850. We will explore arguments about the role of non-human nature as an agent of historical experience and change; learn about the ways that historians are collaborating with paleoclimatologists to reconstruct the history of past climatic fluctuations using evidence from both ?the archives of society? and ?the archives of nature?; and look at recent scholarship debating the role that climatic extremes may have played in subsistence crises (dearth and famine in the 1590s and 1690s) and political conflict (the general crisis of the seventeenth century). We will end with a detailed case study of how volcanic eruptions may have disrupted global climate and thus put heightened stress on societies, cultures and polities; here we will focus, in particular, on the climatic and historical impact of the 1783 eruption of the Icelandic volcanic fissure at Laki.
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