It‘s general known as a bad sign if you start talking about the weather, right? Still, I had to ask my witch how the weather was back in her days, and in this post, I will tell you why!
As I am writing this post, I am truly bothered by the heavy rain that has been pouring against my window for far too long already. And no, I don‘t want to complain about not getting to wear my most lovely summer dresses while other parts of the earth are on fire. I just want to mention the extremes I am sitting in while writing this. I‘m worried about the environment and climate from a rational point of view, but this post is about something else.
It‘s about asking my depressed 17th-century housewife gone rogue: „How‘s the weather back there?“
If you have followed my writing journey so far and have read previous posts on the historical background for my witching novel, you may wonder how this question even came to be. Aren‘t two big wars raging around her as well as waves of disease and famines already a detailed explanation for her living conditions?
Yes, they are.
But to understand them, I want to shed some light on one important factor that made these very special conditions possible – The little ice age.
If you have followed my posts with attention, you will remember that I already once mentioned it as I summed up why the 17th century deserved a place high up on the list of the worst times to be alive . The 1600s in Europe are accepted as a time of constant crisis. The outbreaks of the black death that found a regularity since the big one in the 14th century, the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that threatened to take centuries old empires apart as well as crop failure dominated life. It is known as one of the deadliest periods in European history.
To understand why it all worsened at once and so quickly, we have to take a look at the sky.
Something must have happened there to cause certain changes that had it all getting so bad so very suddenly. Are we looking for unlucky formations? For Saturn doing …something?
Not quite, don’t worry.
Some explanations point to Volcanic activities limiting the solar radiation the earth is exposed to, some point to fluctuations the earth‘s axial tilt as well as orbit around the sun it experiences over the cause of time (thought in big, cosmic periods, or course).
But what was this the cause of?
A phenomenon called „The little ice age“.
If my depressed 17th century housewife described the weather to you, she would probably tell you that the winter was rough and those much older than her tend to remember times when it was not as bad. She will also mention years without summer, or summers that were too dry. If you let her rant, she will end up complaining about grain prices and the number of people begging in the corner growing increasingly.
And she will have been right with all of her observations, but let‘s walk through this step by step.
The little ice age is a period that lasted from the 14th to the 18th century, but had the worst consequences in the 17th century. It was a time of colder climate and growing ice sheets, although not a full ice age.
And here, I already have to stop myself: It was part of an ice age. Of the same one we still live in. We still have ice sheets, at the poles, right? So, per definition, we still live within an ice age. There have been times, several million years ago, before we humans existed on our current form, when those sheets did not exist at all.
What we usually call an ice age, as a much colder period of time over several millennia, is a cold or glacial period within an ice age. The last glacial period ended about 12 000 to 10 000 years ago. We live in a warm period. For now.
These changes within an ice age, as well as the ending or beginning of ice ages in general, come to be through fluctuations in our orbit around the sun. If the winters are cold and long enough for ice sheets to grow more than they can lose in summer, the process is started.
So, of course the little ice age was not a full blown colder period, but why is it worth mentioning?
Because the climate was 1,5°C colder than today.
Remember: Climate is not the weather, but the trend of the weather over a longer period of time, usually 30 years.
Some of you may wonder how only 1,5° can be of such importance, and although I really do not write this to argue with climate change denial right now, I will try to explain.
Just think of a society relaying on harvest and the grain that comes from it. Certain rules of agriculture, as in when to seed which kind of grain etc., have been passed to the next generation for thousands of years. If the spring suddenly is much colder and there is even late frost, crop failure will increase the risk of famines.
This is exactly what happened very regular in the 16th and 17th century. It did not cause famines immediately, but it increased the prices for grain and flour, causing food riots and destabilizing society immensely. If the most basic needs to survive are suddenly under such a threat, societies tend to fall apart.
There is a direct connection between waves of inflation and an increase in witch hunts, especially in the south of the holy roman empire. Also, a starving population made it easier for mercenaries on both the Catholic as well as the Protestant side of the 80-years-war as well as the 30-years-war to gather soldiers to fight in their war. The military promised a stable income and supplies to survive on.
So, asking my witch for the weather is never boring. It shows how much we rely on the world around us to function and be the least but predictable. Humans became farmers about 10 000 years ago, and have been relaying the rhythm of their farming activities on the change of seasons and the formations of stars marking them. When this stopped working and food became rare, wars were easier to start and escalate and a desperate population needing an explanation killed more of their own kind.
My witch definitely lived in times of struggle. And I think we can learn a lot from looking at that. It‘s not that there were people in her time fully understanding what had happened. After all, climate changes so slowly that people who remembered a „before“ were not alive anymore when the real disaster showed its face. Maybe it was not easy to point of what was wrong, although something was.
We relay in the world around us to function.
So, let‘s summarize!
The little ice age was a period of 1,5°C colder climate as well as extreme weather that caused crop failure and threatened the food security of millions of people. This caused inflation, poverty, famines that killed countless of people (which is actually not easy to estimate in a number), as well as a general decrease in health! These severe consequences are accepted by historians to play a major part in the dramatic wars of the 1600s as well as the witch hunts reaching their climax, at least in Europe.
I don‘t know how to end this post, because that already was a lot of complicated stuff to think about.
We relay on the world around us and have to treat it that way?
The depressed housewife complaining about the weather might have a point?
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/earths-changing-climate/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/111003-science-climate-change-little-ice-age
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379122001627
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/how-the-little-ice-age-changed-history
Mistress witch writes 