A Dark and Stormy Age? Weather and Climate in the Frankish Imaginary

Abstract

This dissertation examines the traces left in writing of early medieval observers’ perceptions and interpretations of—and reactions to—the atmospheric phenomena we typically regard as weather, as well as to longer-term averages or norms. Its geographic focus is the Frankish world. Chronologically, it spans the early post-Roman centuries through to the heights of the Carolingian Renaissance, ca. 850. In surveying complex shifts in thought and perception across time, it recognizes the utility of today’s paleoscientific data, but also its limitations for reconstructing past environmental conditions. The dissertation argues that contemporary efforts to reconstruct early medieval climate with ever-greater precision require a nuanced understanding of the complex meteorological observations and interpretations of medieval people themselves. Chapter one reviews the very latest evidence for natural climate variability in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It explores some of the problems with paleoclimate data and its application to historical questions, including a propensity to reaffirm existing historiographic narratives tying political, economic, and social disorder to climatological deterioration. Chapter two in contrast explores the meteorological theories of the Middle Ages. Contrary to common perceptions, late antique and medieval thinkers from Augustine to Rabanus Maurus were keenly attuned to atmospheric phenomena. In combining classical knowledge with Christian analysis, they advanced novel ideas about the workings of the atmosphere as a medium bearing divine messages, and a demonstration of the beautiful complexity of God’s mechanism, creation. Chapter three surveys weather miracles in which Frankish holy men and women of the sixth to eighth centuries altered atmospheric conditions, intervened to save crops, and created zones of protection to keep destructive meteorological forces at bay. Storms with their own will, demonic weather, and saintly weather miracles all highlight the diversity of actors granted meteorological agency during this period. Chapter four describes the development of ideas concerning weather magic in the Frankish countryside, arguing for a widespread and syncretic tradition that found strident opposition in a ninth-century treatise by the bishop Agobard of Lyon. By Agobard’s time, as chapter five argues, attitudes toward meteorological agency were shifting; the concept of cosmic kingship, which took hold at Carolingian courts, connected atmospheric disquiet with political disorder or misrule. The meteorological agency of the ruler began to eclipse that of saints, magicians, demons, and other sinners, as cosmic conditions became caught up in the Carolingian articulation of power. Frankish descriptions of weather thus prove that early medieval epistemological frameworks belong front and center in reconstructions of that era’s climate, and call into question long-standing assumptions linking weather, climate, and history, not least in the modern imaginary.