Project Website Information: Carina Damm / Weather Perceptions in the Medieval North
Title: Weather Perceptions in the Medieval North
Acronym: POGODA
Principle Investigator: Carina Damm
Contact: carina.damm@us.edu.pl
Funding: This research is part of the project No. 2022/47/P/HS3/01044 co-funded by the National Science Centre and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 945339.
Host: The project is being carried out at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Department of Humanities, Institute of History, in the Centre for Nordic and Old English Studies (http://www.cbns.us.edu.pl/). The researchers working at the Centre for Nordic and Old English Studies of the University of Silesia (CBNS) study medieval societies of these regions by focusing on their history, culture, and literature. The research at the CBNS focuses mainly on political and social changes, the ideology of power, and on Old Norse and Old English literature. Studying the history and culture of medieval England, Scandinavia, and the territories of the Northern Atlantic contributes to a better understanding of the European Middle Ages.
Project Description:
The contemporary challenges associated with human-induced climate change, including floods, droughts, avalanches and other disasters, continue to stimulate an escalating scientific interest in the ways in which human societies responded to analogous crises in premodern times. This project is anchored in the turn of the second millennium CE in the margins of the North Atlantic. In the recently Christianised North, a Latin literary culture developed on the basis of a well-established insular writing tradition, rapidly flourishing in its vernacular form. This emerging corpus of Old Norse texts provides excellent documentary sources that offer insights into human-environmental interactions in the medieval North. These texts hold twofold significance: Firstly, they can contribute to the reconstruction of weather events of the past. Secondly, they can provide insights into the medieval minds of their authors. Ultimately, in addition to their ideological and literary functions, the analysed textual evidence permits to draw conclusions regarding the societal consequences of environmental extreme events resulting in famines, epidemics, as well as epizootic diseases.
The project’s objective is to make a contribution to the reconstruction of the environmental history of Northern Europe in the context of high medieval climate changes (c. 1000–1300), a field of historical climatology that remains understudied. The project poses the following questions: How did medieval women and men adapt to, instrumentalise, and visualise the phenomena they witnessed? And how did environmental changes, famines, and mobility movements affect one another? Furthermore, it attempts to demonstrate how medieval Scandinavians remembered past these changes within their literary and material culture. The relevance of this project for our time is demonstrated by the results gained on how past Nordic societies developed resilience to environmental extremes, which may enable us to anticipate anthropogenic environmental stress in the future.
In contrast with the growing interest and importance of climate-related studies, the Nordic perspective has only played a minor role in the most recent comprehensive overviews of historical disasters, or has been entirely overlooked. Nevertheless, the importance of medieval Northern Europe as a subject of study for environmental and ecocritical research is evident in the increasing number of works examining the relationship between past climate challenges and their societal impacts in the region.
This justifies an analysis of environmental-related sources from medieval Iceland particularly, which builds on and enhances the results presented in recent scholarship conducted in this field. The material is primarily drawn from the extensive medieval Icelandic text corpus, with the addition of archaeological data. A final methodological approach incorporates natural-scientific proxies for historical climate reconstruction, utilising results from tephrochronological and palynological research. This interdisciplinary perspective enhances the literary-based project by incorporating data obtained from the “archives of nature.”
Project Publication Goals
- At least two articles published in Open Access journals dealing with various aspects of human-environmental interactions in the medieval North with particular focus on Iceland
- Preparation of a monograph that analyses the environmental history of medieval Iceland in a comparative perspective
Project News and Updates
Conferences
January 2024: Participation in The 5th CCHRI Intensive Introductory Workshop: Palaeosciences and Environmental history for historians and archaeologists. Princeton University. 15–25 January 2024.
May 2024: Conference presentation, “Volcanic vulnerability in medieval Iceland.” Nordic Climate History at the University of Oslo. 23–24 May 2024.
June 2024: Conference presentation, “(Im)mobile Vikings: environmental stress and resilience in the medieval North.” CRIAS Workshop Climate and Migration at Masaryk University, Brno. 3–4 June 2024.
June 2024: Conference presentation, “Human-Environment Interactions in Haralds saga Sigurðarsonar.” The Eighth International Conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean (SMM) at University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh. 24–27 June 2024.
July 2024: Conference presentation, The Impact of the Black Death in Northern Europe and Poland: Islands of Immunity?” International Medieval Congress at University of Leeds, Leeds. 1–4 July 2024.
August 2024: Conference Presentation, “Medieval globalisation? Following the amber trade between the Baltic, Rus’ and Central Asia.” The 30th EAA Annual Meeting at Sapienza University Rome. 28–31 August 2024.
September 2024: Conference presentation, “(Dis)empowered women? Slavery in the world of Haraldr harðráði.” A Viking in the Sun Symposium 2 at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 8–11 September 2024.
September 2024: Conference presentation, “The dark fourteenth century? Dietary habits in medieval Iceland.” Worlds of the Slavs Conference at IH PAN, Warsaw, 18-20 September 2024.
February 2025: Conference presentation, “Navigating the North: Viking Migrations and Environmental Resilience.” Workshop “Mobility, Migration, and Global Networks” German Historical Institute Warsaw, 27–28 February 2025.
Invited Talks
October 2024: Academic Lecture, “Shaking the earth, shaping society? Impacts of volcanic eruptions in Iceland and China.” Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China, 17 October 2024.
October 2024: Academic Lecture, “Between the Baltic and Byzantium. Economy and ecology in the time of Harald Hardrada (1015-1066).” Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China, 24 October 2024.
April 2025: Academic Lecture, “Feeding resilience: Viking-Age foodscapes and the politics of adaptation in fourteenth-century Iceland.” Masaryk University, Brno, 9 April 2025.
May 2025: Academic Lecture, Sustaining through scarcity: Food politics and adaptive strategies in Viking Age-Iceland.” University of Warsaw, Warsaw, 21 May 2025.
Other Research Activities
August 2024: Participation in the Arnamagnæan Summer School in Scandinavian Manuscript Studies, University of Iceland, Reykjavík. 6–15 July 2024.
