• Complain

Blom - Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present

Here you can read online Blom - Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: Europe, year: 2019, publisher: Pan Macmillan UK;Picador, genre: History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Blom Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present
  • Book:
    Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Pan Macmillan UK;Picador
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2019
  • City:
    Europe
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Europe where the sun dares scarce appear
For freezing meteors and congealed cold.
Christopher Marlowe

In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe.

While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and frost fairs were erected on a frozen Thames with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city.

Recounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this Little Ice Age, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass...

Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Fifth is the race that I call my own and abhor O to die or be later born or - photo 1
Fifth is the race that I call my own and abhor O to die or be later born or - photo 2
Fifth is the race that I call my own and abhor O to die or be later born or - photo 3

Fifth is the race that I call my own and abhor.

O to die, or be later born, or born before!

This is the Race of Iron. Dark is their plight.

Toil and sorrow by day are theirs, and by night

the anguish of death; and the gods afflict them and kill,

though theres yet a trifle of good amid manifold ill.

HESIOD, Life and Days

This is the terrible century about which Scripture speaks so clearly. It is the Iron Age, which breaks and subdues all things. The seven angels have emptied their vials over the earth, and they contained blasphemy, terror, massacres, injustice, treason.... We have seen and continue to see how realm rises against realm, nation against nation, plagues, famines, earthquakes, terrible floods, signs in the sun and the moon and the stars; the sufferings of nations through storms and thunderous waves.

JEAN-NICOLAS DE PARIVAL, 1654

CONTENTS
Guide

Europe where the sun dares scarce appear

For freezing meteors and congealed cold.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
London, 1578

The lights and windows in the vault of the heavens often grow dark and will no longer shine and shed light on the worlds larceny / and they are longing with us for our salvation... the sun / the moon / and other stars / shine / less brightly than before / there is no true and lasting sunshine / no steady winter and summer / fruits and things growing from the earth no longer ripen as well / or are as healthy as they most likely used to be.

REVEREND DANIEL SCHALLER, Stendal, in Prussia, 1595

Twas a harsh cold winter here / you could catch birds and game with your hands.

Twas a hot and arid summer / and the crickets devoured everything in the field / which caused great price increases.

CHRISTOPH SCHORER, Memmingen, in Germany, 1660

PROLOGUE
Winter Landscape

HOW HAPPY THEY ALL SEEM moving across the ice with the greatest of ease. They are either gliding on skates or luxuriously ensconced in horse-drawn sleighs sailing across the rivers polished parquet. Some huddle together in groups, talking among themselves; others are playing games. Wealthy gentlemen have their coats slung elegantly across their shoulders, and the ladies are wearing lace caps or wigs, or both. The simple folk are moving about in short jackets. There is no fire to warm their freezing limbs, but on this perfect winter day, no one appears to feel the cold.

The swarming, antlike image of life amid the frost seduces the eye; the landscape dissolves into a panorama of individual scenes. The villagers appear in all kinds of situationsfrom the two lovers in the haystack (are they both men?) to the naked behind poking out of a broken boat and a second bottom whose owner is half hidden by a willow tree; from the mother with her child in the foreground to the men playing golf, the reed cutter with his enormous load, and the young couple gliding hand in hand across the hard surface. A woman drinking from a beaker is one of the few figures whose face is revealed. Most of the villagers are moving away on their wooden skates with thin steel bladestoward the horizon, into a future that is little more than a sketch.

Slightly to the right of center stands an important-looking group in elegant, gold-embroidered garbladies with hoop skirts and tall wigs, gentlemen with precious ostrich feathers adorning their hats. A gray beggar attempts to stir their pity, but they show no interest. What are they doing on the ice in some godforsaken villagewithout a coach, without servants? How did they get here? And what exactly are all these people doing? They are not celebrating any special event or feast day, not Christmas and not Carnival. It is not even Sundaythe church looming in the background is eerily dark.

The longer one examines this panorama the less plausible it becomes The - photo 4

The longer one examines this panorama, the less plausible it becomes. The initial impression of realism grows into an understanding of allegory. A whole society is on the same ice hererich and poor, men and women, children and the elderly, masters and servantsall equalized by frost and cold but seemingly untouched by it. Only the animal cadaver in the left corner hints that death will leave its mark on this idyll; the bird trap made from an old door is ready to snap shut and crush its next victim, reminding the viewer that earthly pleasures are transient Carpe diem (Seize the day). An empty beehive stirs latent memories of lazy summer afternoons with blazing, colorful blossoms. Soaring above this busy miniature world, exactly in the middle of the sky, a large bird seems to fly higher and higher. Is it an ordinary bird or the last memory of the presence of the Holy Ghost?

The creator of this landscape, Hendrick Avercamp (15891634), specialized in winter scenes. He painted them year-round in his workshops in Amsterdam and later in Kampen, in the Netherlands. Depicting bustling crowds socializing while apparently not feeling the cold may have been an expression of his own longing to be part of a greater world. He was born deaf and mute, lived quietly with his mother, and followed her into the grave within a few months of her death. The happy scenes he painted were always the lives of others.

Like all painters of his time, Avercamp created his compositions not from direct observation but from sketches and memory. Artists worked in their studios with paints that were freshly prepared, and it would have been a major technical challenge to transfer an entire studio outside. According to the ideas of the time, it would have seemed meaningless simply to paint what happened to be there. Not nature itself, but its symbolic meaning was of greater interest to artists and their patrons. A landscape was a skillful composition of disparate elements, not merely the documentation of reality. Avercamps sketches were assembled into a whole, an image of the social world in a deceptively natural settinganother reason why his landscapes consist of many individual scenes.

Detail birds fly overhead Avercamp and his colleagues composed and - photo 5

Detail, birds fly overhead.

Avercamp and his colleagues composed and constructed communities on the ice, creating an underlying sense that we must all share the same resources, we are all exposed to the same circumstancesa message characteristic of the Netherlands, where collective and cooperative work had been long established among farmers for maintaining dykes, draining marshes, and managing fishing. The aristocracy had never been strong here, and the convictions that everyone shared the same stretch of land and that people swim or sink together had deep roots in cultural practices and attitudes.

The people on the ice were assembled there by Avercamps imagination. The evocation of the season, however, was entirely realistic. Winter landscapes had only recently become a fashionable subject for artists, who sold their paintings mainly to wealthy urbanites. Avercamp created his little masterwork in 1608, a year that had suffered particularly severe frosts. Half a century earlier, winter landscapes had been almost unknown in European painting. Since then, however, winters had been unusually long and grim, snow fell more abundantly than before, rivers and seaports remained frozen until the spring. Word had it that in Eastern Europe, birds dropped out of the sky, frozen to death.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present»

Look at similar books to Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present»

Discussion, reviews of the book Natures mutiny: how the Little ice age transformed the West and shaped the present and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.