Weather and Natural Catastrophes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Storms, Floods, Fires, Earthquakes, and Pandemics
Authors: Classen Albrecht 
Published: August 2021

Ecocriticism and Medieval Natural Catastrophes Literary Evidence?

Ecocriticism in the Humanities has alerted us in the last few years to the considerable potentials of building significant bridges between the Sciences (Meteorology, Atmospheric Sciences, Vulcanism, etc.), on the one hand, and Literary and Historical Studies on the other, and to draw insights from both sides of the equation for an increased understanding of universal phenomena of great importance for all human societies.[1] Climate change, for instance, is not something we can understand today by simply looking at samples or data reflecting current conditions, as if our current situation had emerged only in the last fifty or so years. Major changes in our natural environment are mostly the result of long-term forces impacting our material and cultural world, and weather patterns and significant disruptions have had a huge impact on human society throughout time. Nevertheless, we can probably agree that the current situation of our physical conditions have dramatically deteriorated over the last decades because of human-made factors, if we consider the daunting global warming affecting us all right now in the twenty-first century as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the modern consume society which endangers the survival of our world (Anthropocene).

Long-term and short-term processes and phenomena must be taken into account when we want to pursue cultural-historical ecocriticism, especially within a medieval context. It has thus become mandatory to examine, for instance, the history of the forest or the history of water through a variety of lenses, one of which can be fruitfully provided by chronicles, especially those dating not only from the twentieth or nineteenth centuries, but also those which shed light on medieval and early modern conditions and events. [2] In fact, medieval approaches to ecocriticism prove to be eye-opening for the latest scientific investigations and can lay the foundation for a better understanding of the relationship between humans and their environment, and this already thousand and more years ago. [3] Both weather and natural catastrophes have always been highly impactful on human history and culture, but it continues to be a huge challenge to establish the concrete correlations, such as between the rise of the Gothic age or the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century with the Medieval Warming Period.

A late medieval example, however, might shed some light on this phenomenon, though I will not examine it here at great length. On July 2, 1505, when Martin Luther, the later famous founder of the Protestant Church, returned from his home in Mansfeld to Erfurt, where he was enrolled as a student of law at the university, he was surprised by a major thunderstorm in the hamlet of Stotternheim (a short distance north of Erfurt), which frightened him so deeply that he immediately changed his entire outlook toward life. He begged St. Anne to save him from the lightening, and since that was then the case, he fulfilled his pledge and turned into a monk, joining the Augustinians in Erfurt.  As a monk, however, he began to recognize the evils of the Catholic Church and began with his efforts to reform it from within. This study will attempt to bring to light some parallel cases in the early and the high Middle Ages.