Living with Seasons

In their blog post, Mark Williams, Rachel Herrmann, and Keir Waddington talk about their exciting new project together Living with Seasons.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that humans have taken the seasons for granted. Much of the conversation around what we now term climate change has arisen in languages of extremity and severity: hotter summers than ever before, more severe and frequent storms than ever previously recorded, and a deepening sense of collapse among the populations of flora and fauna that have inhabited the planet for centuries or more. History pervades these observations, prompting us as scholars to look to the recent and deep past together to ask the question: was it always this way, and how different will it be?

There are, however, other ways to think about such changes. The Living with Seasons project aims to move our focus away from these questions of historical extremes and instead asks us to think about how climate transitions will challenge patterns of human and non-human resilience in seasonal contexts.  Funded by an AHSS Pathfinder grant, this project – led by Dr Mark Williams, Dr Rachel Herrmann, and Professor Keir Waddington – will draw on interdisciplinary expertise to explore the ways in which seasons shaped and continue to shape aspects of everyday life: in global trade, food systems, travel and migration, health, art and literature, landscapes, and the environment.

For much of human history, interaction with climate was shaped by a sense of regularity and irregularity in shorter temporal periods. Across much of the globe, records relating to weather have been historically limited to sporadic, anomaly-orientated documents setting out (for instance) unexpected freezing of rivers like the Thames or the Venetian lagoon, or indications of early El Niño oscillations in sixteenth-century Latin America. While Chinese records dating back millennia are uniquely rich in gauging precipitation (for instance the Meiyu or East Asian rainy season), the global trend is one of intensive reliance on records from the nineteenth century onwards, predominantly privileging the meteorological-scientific documentation of a European Anthropocene.[1] Otherwise, ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ have been attested to primarily in languages of the exceptional rather than the ordinary.

Yet, weather and climate are everywhere in the historical record when you start to look for the ordinary rhythms of life with the seasons.

Take, for instance, a set of perhaps the most famous paintings to emerge from the ‘Northern Renaissance’ of the 16^th century: Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Seasons series. Brueghel the Elder was known for his landscapes and peasant seasons. Seasons was the culmination of his landscape style and was originally a set of six: they were painted for the home – probably the dining room, a daily meeting space – of the Antwerp merchant Nicholaes Jongelinck. Of these five surviving works (Spring has been lost), The Harvesters and Hunters in the Snow are especially well-known. Each one suggests how the seasons shaped the lives of material communities in sixteenth-century Northern Europe:

Hunters in the Snow confronts us in the first instance with a group of men returning from what must surely be read as an unsuccessful hunt, their lean dogs downcast and lagging, exhausted, behind them. To the left of the party, we see the hard labour of women, caring for childing while preparing a fire in anticipation of food not-yet-seen, and which will now need to come from the community’s reserves of stored, preserved crops or live domesticated animals. Emotionally, this scarcity is offset by the scenes in the distance, where figures skate on a frozen millpond and a toddler takes a careful, preliminary first step on a set of skates. Work continues, though, as the eye is drawn upwards, with berries plucked from trees and wagons carting supplies into the small town below. Wildlife, while scarce in the painting, is found in the birds above, but our eyes are also drawn by them to the jagged and ominous mountains and foreboding skies at the top right. The mountains – wholly out of place in Brueghel’s real-life Netherlandish landscape – call us back to the harshness of a winter season spent in relative isolation from the wider world.

The Harvesters sits in stark contrast to the landscape of Hunters. The peasants in the foreground rest – unashamedly sprawled, in some cases – in the late summer shade of a tree, relishing communal drinking vessels and the fresh apples shaken from the trees in the background. Threshers harvest the wheat, while the bread loaves in the basket at the bottom of the tree trunk indicate that some grain has already been processed and baked for the meal. In the distance, we see connections to the wider world which were absent from the frozen Hunters in the Snow: ships on the horizon, linking Brueghel’s fantastic Belgian landscape to the ports, markets, and travels of the increasingly-globalised world of the sixteenth century.

These paintings tell stories about what the seasons have meant. At one level, they allow us to ask questions about what ‘normal’ was for an observant figure like Brueghel. ‘Normal’ might be read here as a comment on temperature, changes in the foliage, or the migration patterns of birds and ships. It might also mean patterns of work to sustain communities, emotional connections to the landscape, or the comings and goings of people beyond the horizon of those landscapes.

If we think of Brueghel’s original plans for the paintings, our notions of summer and winter become more complex. There are, for instance, paintings for Early Spring (The Gloomy Day), Early Summer (Haymaking), and Late Summer (Harvesters) in addition to Autumn (Return of the Herd) and Winter (Hunters in the Snow). This breaks the seasons in two along lines of the work done and the weather that accompanied it. The two surviving ‘Early’ and ‘Late’ paintings – both depicting Summer – move from haymaking to harvesting wheat, from a clear and nearly-cloudless sky to a portentous haze, from hard labour in the fields to its exhausting effects. Brueghel particularises seasons beyond just ‘Summer’ and ‘Winter’ and instead works within each season, gauging everyday changes along the way.

Living with Seasons will work with the questions raised by sources like Brueghel’s Seasons to think about how research in the humanities into seasonality can respond to the challenges of climate change today. Drawing on contributors from across the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and beyond, Living with Seasons models how to integrate historical sources and historical patterns of living with seasonality to inform how we can respond to the ‘weirding’ of those patterns in the present day. It will create new, interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about our relationships with time and the environment together to imagine what resilience might look like in a world with very different seasons.

[1] Siying Chen, Yun Su, Xiuqi Fang, and Jaia He, ‘Climate records in ancient Chinese diaries and their application in historical climate reconstruction’, Climate of the Past, 16.5 (2020).