Ralph Josselin's Little Ice Age: Exploring the Climate History of Early Modern Britain, c. 1580-1720

Alastair Bellany (Rutgers) will give a lecture titled "Ralph Josselin's Little Ice Age: Exploring the Climate History of Early Modern Britain, c. 1580-1720."

This paper is an interim report from a project exploring the nature and impact of climatic variation and cooling, unseasonable weather patterns, and extreme weather events in Britain and Ireland during the early modern nadir—c.1560-1720—of the Little Ice Age. Integrating paleoclimatic reconstructions from the “archives of nature” with more familiar historical sources, the project pivots from global and regional to local scales, and from macro- to micro-historical frames of analysis. At the heart of the project is a single individual—a weather-worried seventeenth-century Puritan minister, Ralph Josselin, whose remarkable diary documents and interprets the weather in southeastern England over the course of several decades. Situating Josselin in his local, regional and national contexts, and reading his diary alongside the weather observations and perceptions of his contemporaries, the project focuses on the impact of Little Ice Age weather on agriculture (and thus on subsistence), on politics and social order, and on human well-being. By paying attention to the ways in which contemporaries experienced, perceived and interpreted the weather, the project also emphasizes the degree to which culture (and cultural transformation) conditioned the impact of Little Ice Age weather events. This paper will take as a case study the year 1648, exploring the entangled climatic, environmental and human histories of an abnormally wet and cool summer at the crisis point of the English Revolution.