It is one measure of the state of the world that new histories about the importance of climate change have proliferated in recent years. These have given much needed context for our present crisis that highlight the historical long- and short-term instabilities of climate but also, at least by implication, the unprecedented extremes of recent warming. Studies have been supported by the better data and models produced by climate scientists, often themselves working in collaboration with humanities scholars to augment and calibrate their findings. Landmark studies such as Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) and Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) have arrived with much fanfare as timely interventions that put past climate change at the heart of how we might understand major crises and social or political upheaval. Yet such studies have also provoked much criticism, even from scholars sympathetic to the underlying intellectual projects. As Professor Devroey argues in his thought-provoking new book, there is too much of a tendency to make sweeping generalisations and to be overly deterministic or mechanistic. What we need is an understanding of situational variances and proper theories about the intersections of society and the environment. What we need is complexity.
Devroey's entry into the debate is fully consistent with his oeuvre over the past thirty years. In that time, he has produced numerous studies of the Carolingian economy and its social aspects. This has involved producing editions of polyptyques (early manorial records), investigating the often-miserable conditions of the peasantry, and studying the challenges of early medieval crop production and its occasional failure. What this all means for his engagement with palaeoclimatic data and its implications, understandably, is that he considers the ideal place to analyse it to be in the social ecosystem of the countryside. And that social ecosystem, of course, could be very different depending on where one was. Carolingian Marseilles was obviously not much like Carolingian Frankfurt. How could one seriously imagine the impact of environmental change applied equally everywhere? On top of this level of analysis, Devroey stresses the importance of investigating the intelligibility of climatic events, perceptions of the social impact of environmental change, and the choices of actions made by social actors. He is right to do so: culture will, at some level, always shape human response to crisis and change.
The first half of the book critically reviews the developing state of play with regards to evidence and its interpretation. In chapter 1, it seems he has not been satisfied with the way that the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) has been discussed. It has long been suggested that a volcanic eruption(s) around 536 suppressed global temperatures, and this has been given renewed strength by results of new studies published in the past few years. But the way that it was quickly interpreted as having global consequences precisely exemplifies the tendency towards determinism and over-generalisation that Devroey wishes to counter. Setting the stage for his arguments about regional variance, he outlines archaeological evidence that might suggest the effects in Scandinavia were far more devasting than they were in, say, Gaul, where there was little evidence of any major upheaval.
In the next chapter Devroey turns to the Century of Charlemagne. He shows that dendrochronological evidence suggests that Northern Gaul cooled slightly in the first half of Charles' life up to ca. 789/90, after which it warmed a little and precipitation increased. There is a lack of directly comparable evidence for the south of the Frankish kingdoms, but the sedimentation of the Lac du Bourget might suggest that precipitation was weaker there in the second half of the period. Correspondingly, summer temperatures seem to have dropped slightly across the whole period in the Bavarian Alps, but increased in the Swiss Alps. For none of these trends, however, is the evidence perfectly linear or indeed always certain in what it means. How such conclusions square with written evidence is the subject of the next two chapters.
In chapter 3, Devroey roughly surveys some of the standard chronicle evidence for assessing variation in climate. He uses chronicle evidence from outside the Carolingian Empire, too, which is useful for comparative purposes. The problem acknowledged is that the authors were not all looking for the same things, so one can generate interesting and suggestive statistical breakdowns of what people thought notable, but not be sure that the record is complete or even often to where exactly is applies. Such issues carry through to chapter 4, in which Devroey sets out what will be a crucial issue for him: the assessment of famine. Again, the chronicles can quickly be shown to be inconsistent and incomplete when it comes to which famines they mention, how severe they were, and where they affected. Drawing particularly on work by Bonnassie and Newfield, and making use of comparison with nineteenth-century famine, Devroey calls again for an appreciation of complexity. Famine can be long or short term, it can be widespread or local, it can be caused by human or climatic factors, and its effects are greatly determined by issues such as rights to produce.
Chapter 5 sets the scene for considering the governmentality (in the Foucauldian sense) of Charles. Devroey here uses an extended consideration of Louis XIV's responses to the seventeenth-century Little Ice Age. This works better than it might initially sound, as advisors and historians in Louis' time looked to the example of how Charles dealt with famine to help shape the practical and ritual strategies of their own day. Charles, from this perspective, can be seen promoting a blend of pastoral and coercive authority that drew on biblical and Roman models, placing the king as an intermediary between microcosm and macrocosm. And with that, the principal methodological sections conclude, and we move to a more focused look at the Century of Charlemagne for Part Two.
Chapter 6 concerns the "great, hard winter" (hibernus grandis et durus) of 763/4, when Charles was still a young man and his father Pippin III was king. As a test case within Devroey's framework it provides much food for thought. Frankish annals note little beyond the fact that it was a bad winter. There is one exception in the southernMoissac Chronicle, which recorded the destruction of olive and fig harvests in Gaul, Illyricum and Thrace in an usual great frost. It is difficult to pinpoint a volcanic trigger for this sudden cold but comparisons with other Mediterranean freezes might suggest a powerful Siberian anti-cyclone that affected regions in different ways.
The second natural crisis, in chapter 7, was Charles' first as king: a serious famine in 779. Charles' response was principally to encourage liturgical observation, supported by encouragement for those that could to give more money to the church for the support of alms. Devroey connects this to a wider struggle to embed the church in the popular imagination when it came to interpretation and control of nature, a move he illustrates well with a long discussion of the complaint of Agobard of Lyon (d. 840) about weather tricksters, even though it does not directly pertain to 779.
The story then jumps to the early 790s, when another famine (or possibly two in quick succession) affected the kingdoms. This time the source material is more plentiful, but the fact that many chroniclers including those at court failed to mention anything might suggest that the impact was more specific to particular regions. There is a useful comparison of the record of the Synod of Frankfurt and a reference to famine and cannibalism in the Annales Mosellani which leads into a (slightly scattergun) appreciation of biblical schemes for tribulation, particularly from Exodus and Deuteronomy. This is important because it begins to amplify the idea that people experience culturally-framed versions of crisis. Devroey suspects that this environmental crisis was caused by locusts and he takes us on a mini-tour of Latin knowledge of insects, which turns out to be surprisingly slight and mostly allegorical, but with some realism creeping in around the edges, particularly in a representation of locusts in the Stuttgart Psalter. This is all developed further in the subsequent chapter which adds further interpretative context by considering the importance generally of insects, bacteria and fungus in destroying crops and granary stores. Devroey also brings in a useful comparison with famine in the 750s described in the Syrian chronicle of Zuqnīn which had two parts: a cold winter that destroyed crops in the north one year and insects devouring the crops the next. Importantly, it is difficult to tell exactly how crops fared or how insects responded, because it is difficult to map how they have adapted to different conditions over time.
Chapter 11 turns to the first three decades of the ninth century when, Devroey argues, climatic instability hit hardest. The two biggest crisis points were famines whose effects were felt across 805-9 and 820-4--longer, deeper disasters than had been faced before, nestled within a long spread of conditions annalists felt remarkable (excessive rain, dry winters, hot summers, and more). The social response to these conditions included increased brigandage and migration, the latter leading to some manorial reorganisation. The cultural and intellectual consequences may have been dramatic too, to judge by some Charles' inquests from 809 or the struggles of Louis the Pious, but these are not explored in detail.
The final two chapters concern how everything encountered so far might reframe ideas of moral and political economies. In chapter 12, Devroey turns to a meditation on the insights of Thompson, Scott and Weber into the concepts more generally. For most Carolingianists, the take-home point is that royal interventions were not coherent enough to be described as 'politics', while Charles' paternalism was born of necessity rather than altruism. Then, in chapter 13, Devroey considers how environmental crises in the context of moral and political economies led to Carolingian efforts to regulate markets for goods as part of wider programmes of moral and religious reform.
La nature et le roi is a rich, ambitious, and wide-ranging study. The analysis of palaeoclimatic data, archaeological evidence, and more traditional historical sources in a framework that embraces complexity within a comparative framework will undoubtedly help to stimulate further investigation in the field. As a study of the effect of famine on the early medieval social-economic sphere, in particular, Devroey's work has much to recommend it. The book is nevertheless frustrating on a few fronts. For a start, the examination of "cognitive lenses" ends up being rather superficial despite the stated centrality to the overall argument. There is a wealth of Carolingian biblical exegesis and natural philosophy one could invoke that frame understandings of nature, but we do not get much past discussions of key biblical models plus a bit of Isidore. There were also other significant crises throughout Charlemagne's reign, from invasion and revolt, to theological and political conflict with the Byzantine Empire; if we were to embrace complexity properly, one might want to consider how these matters affected or were affected by the socio-economic issues that concern Devroey. As interesting as the conclusions about moral economy are, it feels as if the material and models compiled in La nature et le Roi could have been used to sketch a much more significant reappraisal of the Century of Charlemagne on more fronts. And if that would have demanded too many more pages, maybe some of the many learned digressions could have been reined in. Well, few books are perfectly to everyone's taste. The important thing is that Devroey takes seriously the complexity involved in how climate and environmental change intersect with developments in human politics, society, and culture. As more early medievalists start to look at such issues, Devroey's book makes a timely and thoughtful contribution to the developing debate.