Weather and Climate in the Early Middle Ages

What did weather mean to people in the past, and who did they believe controlled it? In this cultural history of the early medieval Frankish world, David J. Patterson argues that the medieval atmosphere was a contested arena in which saintly, royal, demonic, and human authority met and often clashed. Engaging with paleoclimate proxy evidence alongside cultural and religious texts, he illuminates the complex political, metaphorical, and theological underpinnings of medieval descriptions of weather, complicating modern attempts to reconstruct past climate conditions using documentary sources. In particular, Patterson reconstructs how medieval communities built "circles of protection" against storm, drought, and frost, considering how they imagined the tempestarii - the weather-makers - who lived among them. Refusing both environmental determinism and pastoral nostalgia, he offers a new historical perspective on approaches toward protection, blame, and authority, exploring past human relationships with the weather in ways that still resonate today.