Working Together for Better Climate Pasts: Consilience, Crises, and Cherry Picking in Premodernity

• In Event: Towards Better Histories of Climate and Society: Investigating Late Antique and Medieval Climate Change

Abstract

Not all historians interested in past climate are concerned with making climate history relevant for today and tomorrow. Few historians now, however, would challenge the idea that to understand past climate change and human responses to it, scholars from different disciplines must work together. Collaborative interdisciplinarity is paramount today in the study of historical climate and its effects in all periods and regions, especially when and where written evidence and instrumental data for climate is thin — or nonexistent. Unsurprisingly, many of the remarkable advances in this interdisciplinary space over the last two decades have been premodern in focus. This paper surveys progress made in that scholarship and identifies some challenges ahead, highlighting in particular the scholarly fixation on crises and ‘bad’ climate change and the tendency in so-called ‘consilient’ histories of climate to cherry pick evidence that makes for tidy case studies but obscures the complexities and unknowns inherent to climate’s influence on people in the past. To tease out these issues, the paper looks briefly at climate change’s alleged role in triggering ninth-century food shortages and medieval plague pandemics.

Author

• Timothy Newfield, Georgetown University