ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Learning to Sense the Skies: Meteorological Practices, Communication, and the Co-Creation of Weather Knowledge (1700–1860)

• In Event: Mediating Meteorology: Communicating Climate and Weather Knowledge from Antiquity to the Present

English Abstract

This paper examines how people learned to read the weather in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on the material and sensory practices that shaped everyday meteorological knowledge. Before professional meteorology became formalized through (funded) institutional networks and observatories, individuals across Europe and North America, like farmers, physicians and botanists, developed observational skills by engaging with instruments, plants, almanacs, and their own bodies. I explore how weather-reading was taught through barometer manuals, botanical guides, and phenological instructions, and how these skills were practiced in daily life. Beyond observation, I trace how people interpreted and shared weather information outside of formalized networks: through annotated journals, pasted clippings from newspapers, and disaster reports. Rather than viewing so-called amateurs as peripheral, I argue that early modern lay observers shaped meteorology by actively blending multiple forms of localized sensing with distant reporting. Consequently, atmospheric knowledge was produced in a co-creative manner through learned habits of perception and interpretation.

Author

• Valentine Delrue, Ghent University