Jan 29, 2025 07:30 AM
(This post was last modified: Jan 29, 2025 07:40 AM by C C.)
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/his...ate-change
EXCERPTS: Environmental historians and climate scientists now recognise the 17th century as a period of intense climate change, the peak of the Little Ice Age – a period of severe cooling between the 16th and late 18th centuries – in which average yearly temperatures in the northern hemisphere plunged by as much as two degrees Celsius. While such a number might seem small, it had massive local effects. [...] The global tumult of the 17th century was clearly the result of the climax of a period of catastrophic climate change.
For many, these weather phenomena were fundamentally religious events that called for a godly interpretation. The popular religious writings of 17th-century Europe reveal ordinary people’s experiences of their environment and their attempts to make sense of it. [...] interpretations of climate change during the period led to tragic instances of scapegoating. In southern Germany in 1626, a spring hailstorm followed by sudden Arctic temperatures prompted the swift and horrific torture and execution of 900 men and women, accused of creating the storm by witchcraft.
[...] perhaps no author was more popular (at least among Protestants) than Johann Arndt ... Arndt, for his part, did not attempt to blame vulnerable groups. Instead, he presented an ecological vision in which humans and the cosmos were in intimate interrelation, suffering together even as they did so as a result of human moral failure...
[...] These radical religious writings, and their intense popularity ... transformed Protestant Christianity and its relationship with the physical world by shuttling Hermetic perspectives on the divinity of the cosmos into a Europe that was desperate for a religious understanding of their changing climate... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: Environmental historians and climate scientists now recognise the 17th century as a period of intense climate change, the peak of the Little Ice Age – a period of severe cooling between the 16th and late 18th centuries – in which average yearly temperatures in the northern hemisphere plunged by as much as two degrees Celsius. While such a number might seem small, it had massive local effects. [...] The global tumult of the 17th century was clearly the result of the climax of a period of catastrophic climate change.
For many, these weather phenomena were fundamentally religious events that called for a godly interpretation. The popular religious writings of 17th-century Europe reveal ordinary people’s experiences of their environment and their attempts to make sense of it. [...] interpretations of climate change during the period led to tragic instances of scapegoating. In southern Germany in 1626, a spring hailstorm followed by sudden Arctic temperatures prompted the swift and horrific torture and execution of 900 men and women, accused of creating the storm by witchcraft.
[...] perhaps no author was more popular (at least among Protestants) than Johann Arndt ... Arndt, for his part, did not attempt to blame vulnerable groups. Instead, he presented an ecological vision in which humans and the cosmos were in intimate interrelation, suffering together even as they did so as a result of human moral failure...
[...] These radical religious writings, and their intense popularity ... transformed Protestant Christianity and its relationship with the physical world by shuttling Hermetic perspectives on the divinity of the cosmos into a Europe that was desperate for a religious understanding of their changing climate... (MORE - details)