The politics of weather in early modern England
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: An exercise in a cultural history of early modern weather that focuses on contemporary understanding of the meaning of weather events, this article seeks to extend how historians can read the ‘political’ in early modern England. Since talking about the weather was an everyday activity, it argues that weather talk was a political resource open to all and anyone could offer an opinion about the meaning of unseasonal or extreme weather events. This could give rise to an everyday politics, participation in which required neither literacy nor print. Weather talk troubled successive early modern English monarchs. That God spoke through the weather made weather talk political. Post-Reformation, the confessionalization of responses to the weather meant that competing providential explanations for the weather – catholic, protestant, puritan – could be used to assert or attack the legitimacy of the regime in church and state.
Source: The Seventeenth Century
Author: John Walter
Institution: University of Essex
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4408951496