Linnéa Rowlatt’s Weathering the Reformation: Climate and Religion in Early Modern Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg explores the relationship between climate change and the appeal of religious reform in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Alsace. Rowlatt explains that the Spörer Minimum was a trough in the Little Ice Age that lasted from 1420 to 1570 CE and caused unreliable and unstable weather conditions as well as an atypical number of extreme weather events. She argues that this environmental instability and the economic problems it caused contributed to Alsatians’ embracing of what we now know as the Protestant Reformation whose views of nature as designed specifically for human beings both provided explanations for the instability and allowed for people’s active shaping of their unreliable environments, all while contributing to the attitudes that led to today’s climate crisis.

While exploring the links between culture and climate, Rowlatt is careful to avoid any talk of a direct causal relationship. She instead builds on the work of Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Helga Weisz, adopting their hybrid, interactive model of socioeconomic metabolism. This model posits that though nature and culture are separate spheres and, therefore, changes can arise in each of the spheres that might not impact the other, human beings both develop culture and live in and are affected by the natural world, indicating that each sphere has the capability of indirectly contributing to changes in the other. For example, the extreme weather events of the Spörer Minimum had the potential to shape new understandings of nature because as late medieval and early modern Europeans experienced these extreme weather events and their economic consequences despite partaking in traditional Christian rituals to improve the weather, the lack of any kind of change in the weather after performing these rituals influenced them to develop and turn to different views of nature that helped explain why the instability was happening and offered steps to alleviate it.

Resonating with her use of this model, Rowlatt draws her evidence to track extreme weather events and human responses to them from twentieth- and twenty-first-century scientific studies of the Upper Rhine region and from chronicles written in Alsace or nearby from 1473 to 1540, most of which she accesses through nineteenth-century reproductions of manuscript sources, the original manuscripts having been destroyed in a fire in 1870. After an opening chapter describing Alsace’s physical geography, forests, vineyards, agriculture, and a general overview of Alsatian society around 1500, the rest of the work is divided into three different case studies that explore three different Christian views of nature – the Roman Catholic, the radical, and the Reformed. Each case study covers a different chronological period, describing the weather events that took place during that period and pairing that description with an analysis of the views of nature that emerge from a particularly influential text or texts written in or near Alsace alongside a discussion of the intellectual, socioeconomic, and cultural background in which its author or authors lived. The first case study focuses on weather events from 1473 to 1509 and offers a reading of Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg’s Die Emeis (Johann Grüninger, 1516) in the context of the study of natural philosophy and theology at medieval universities. The second case study focuses on the period of 1509–1525 pairing the analysis of this period’s weather events with the Strasbourg gardener and influential preacher Clemens Zyegler’s pamphlet Ein fast schon büchlin (Johanem Schwan(?), 1525) and the Twelve Articles in the context of peasant culture in Alsace and the Peasants’ War. The third case study explores the weather events from 1525 to 1541 and does a close reading of Wolfgang Capito’s Hexemeron Dei opus (Wedelin Rihel, 1539) in the context of Reformed thought and the development of educational institutions in Strasbourg.

Rowlatt’s careful scholarship, her application of her methodology, and her joining of Reformation history with climate history are the strengths of the book. Together they provide strong supporting evidence for her first claim that the extreme weather events of the Spörer Minimum contributed to Alsatians’ embracing of radical and Reformed visions of Christianity and society. She draws on the extensive body of scholarship on the Reformation in Strasbourg while making this claim and contributes to the critiques of Max Weber’s thesis, finding that the Protestant Reformation did not lead to a disenchantment of the world for Europeans.

Though there is much support for this aspect of Rowlatt’s thesis, her second claim about the Spörer Minimum and its influence on the development of attitudes that led to the current climate crisis is more tenuous. Case study 3 concludes with the assertion that Reformed Christians viewed nature as created by God specifically for human beings to exploit, and Rowlatt argues that, therefore, her work supports Lynn White Jr.’s thesis about the link between Western Christianity and modern environmental degradation. However, the world was also a place in which God communicated with human beings and one that he actively conducted through his providence for Capito and Jean Calvin – one of the men whose works she uses to contextualize Capito’s. Rowlatt does acknowledge that this Reformed notion “creates some confusion” for their claims that God meant the world for human exploitation (196), but at no point is this confusion or complication explored in depth. Rowlatt also does not analyze in any detail how these ideas developed from the 1530s were able to influence later Europeans’ notions of nature and, therefore, how they contributed to the contemporary climate crisis.

Despite Rowlatt’s overstating of the strength of the evidence for the link between the Spörer Minimum and our current climate crisis, there is a great deal about this book that will appeal to climate historians and historians of the Reformation.