The politics of weather in early modern England

An exercise in a cultural history of early modern weather that focuses on contemporary understanding of the meaning of weather events, this article seeks to extend how historians can read the ‘political’ in early modern England. Since talking about the weather was an everyday activity, it argues that weather talk was a political resource open to all and anyone could offer an opinion about the meaning of unseasonal or extreme weather events. This could give rise to an everyday politics, participation in which required neither literacy nor print. Weather talk troubled successive early modern English monarchs. That God spoke through the weather made weather talk political. Post-Reformation, the confessionalization of responses to the weather meant that competing providential explanations for the weather–catholic, protestant, puritan–could be used to assert or attack the legitimacy of the regime in church and state.