Weather events and climatic shifts leave traces of themselves long after they happen, but it is not just in the annals of disciplined scientists that we find the stories of the climatic past. Human beings, every bit as impressionable as tree rings and ice cores, inscribe experiences of their dynamic environment into works of culture, from songs and stories to paintings and the printed word. Bygone climatic knowledges become preserved, by design or happenstance, in these artefacts, to be pulled out and reflected on in a future time.
In this lecture, Lydia Bauman introduces us to Pieter Bruegel’s depiction of a frigid Flemish winter, ‘Hunters in the Snow’ (1565), and what this painted moment can tell us about rural life in the ‘Little Ice Age’.