Climate and the Little Ice Age

An ever-increasing “natural archive” of historical climate proxy data has allowed for the recent emergence of a new historiography of climate change. This chapter reviews the significance of recent titles in climate history focused specifically on the Little Ice Age – the period of deteriorated global weather conditions from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries that witnessed frequent, destabilizing episodes of drought, cold, famine, and disease across both eastern and western hemispheres. Prior to the broad availability of historical climate data this century, academic historians were able to ignore issues of climate and environment within an anthropocentrist framework for historical analysis. The new climate history of the Little Ice Age, by contrast, advocates an improved understanding of climate instability as a key driver of social change at both local and hemispheric scales, in ways that radically revise canonical narratives of the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. The chapter concludes with consideration of two other new climate change paradigms relevant to current historiography: deep time and the Anthropocene.