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Environments - The Little Ice Age

4 important questions on Environments - The Little Ice Age

What was the climate like in early modern Europe?

In the early modern period, Europe was generally slightly cooler than it is today. Between the late Middle Ages and across the early modern period, the world experienced a 'Little Ice Age' (LIA), so named for the advance of glaciers across the world to their greatest extent in the last 6000 years.
Scientists vary in the exact dates they give to this period, but start dates range from 1300 to 1550, and end dates from 1800 to the mid-twentieth century.

What climate was there during the Little Ice Age?

Europe experienced some its hottest and coldest moments during the LIA: the summer of 1540 was so hot that in the streets of Besancon, France, people took refuge in basements from early in the morning, and forests and grassland self-ignited in Switzerland, Alsace, and Germany, while the coldest winter came in 1709.

What was the Christmas Flood? What was it an example of?

Other LIA crises were more immediately manifested: a violent storm surge caused the Christmas Flood of 1717, killing more than 11000 people on the North Sea coast from Groningen to Schleswig.
Such crises were often climatic in origin but could only become social crises as they played out through the arrangement and distribution of power and resources within societies.

What is the Maunder minimum?

The inclusion of Asia, the Americas and parts of the Middle East and West Africa coincided with new climate reconstructions for the period which show the mid-to-late seventeenth century to be a low point for global temperatures, as the Little Ice Age reached its coldest point during the Maunder Minimum.
This environmental stimulus, for Parker, contributed to a 'fatal synergy' of conditions which precipitated crisis: low temperatures and shorter growing seasons placed stress on food supply, bad weather was interpreted providentially and contributed to political unrest, and centre-periphery relations became strained amidst a generally less favourable climate.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

Early Modern History

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