Review

Reviewed Work(s): Times of Feast, Times of Famine. A History of Climate since the
Year 1000 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Review by: M. W. Flinn
Source: The Scottish Historical Review , Oct., 1973, Vol. 52, No. 154, Part 2 (Oct., 1973),
pp. 202-203
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25529027

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The Scottish Historical Review

This content downloaded from

163.117.64.11 on Thu, 03 Nov 2022 09:43:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 202 REVIEWS

the Vatican archives the survey is inconsistent and cannot be co

definitive.
To end on such a note, however, would be to deny the undoubted merits
which this survey possesses. The coverage of the series is not only greater
than that of any previous guide, noting such items as the Dataria Miscel
lanea, 1576-1908, which even Fink omits, but the general bibliography,
although avowedly only intended to introduce the beginner to the 'names
and writings of many of those who have laboured ... to make the
medieval holdings of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano better known', provides
in practice an indispensable guide to writings on every aspect of papal
administration. With this volume in hand, and the reservations expressed
above firmly in mind, any future researcher can confidently present him
self at the Vatican archives; but this he would be well advised not to do
at 8.15 a.m. as he is bidden, because the archive, ever mindful of its
secrets, has since the completion of this book decided to curtail its
already severely restricted hours of opening by yet another fifteen minutes.

IAN B. COWAN

Times of Feast, Times of Famine. A History of Climate since the

year iooo. By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.
Pp. xxii, 428. London: Allen & Unwin. 1972. ?7.35.

There are two historically significant aspects of climatic ch

variations in the short and in the long run. Until very recently, histo
have tended to focus their attention wholly on the effects of sho
climatic change, noticing how variations in temperature and rainfa
year to year have determined the plenty or scarcity of the food su
In ages when socio-agricultural systems rarely budgeted for more
very small surplus even when the weather was kind, normall
weather could lead to shortages, while abnormally bad weather b
famines which devastated Scotland in the 1620s and the 1690s
recently, however, meteorologists and geographers have been draw
attention of historians to the influence of long-run climatic cha
societies and economies. Professor Ladurie's book is the first majo
by an historian to discuss this important inter-relation. His work
appeared in French in 1967 under the title Histoire du Climat depuis r
and it is strange, indeed positively misleading, that for the E
translation he has chosen a title which implies the study of sho
fluctuations. The original French title, now relegated in translat
sub-title, is more accurate. In spite of a tendency to confuse the i
reference from time to time to short-term change, it is very clear th
book is intended to be about long-term climatic change.
The data for the study of secular climatic change are time-seri
temperature readings kept by individual amateur and profes
meteorologists in different countries from the eighteenth century on
measurements of tree rings in both living trees cut down and

This content downloaded from

163.117.64.11 on Thu, 03 Nov 2022 09:43:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIEWS 203
timbers from datable buildings (this is now called 'dendrology'); annual
series of the agreed dates for certain harvests such as those of the vine (the
vendanges) in certain parts of France; and measurements of the advance
and retreat of glaciers. In his masterly study, Les Paysans de Languedoc
(1966), Professor Ladurie has already made us familiar with his study of
the variations over long periods of the dates of the vendanges, and in this
later work he gives us the fruits of his detailed study of the movements over
the whole of the modern historical period of a number of Alpine glaciers.
What does the substantial corpus of scientific work that Professor
Ladurie surveys permit us to say now about secular climatic movements ?
Not a great deal, it must be admitted, if only because the changes that
have occurred are very, very small, and the indications given by the
differing techniques of measurement do not always agree. Meteorologists
have recently, for example, started to attach the label 'little Ice Age',
originally applied to the whole of the last four millennia, to the much
shorter period 1600-1850. This is done largely on the strength of the
history of a few Alpine glaciers: elsewhere in western Europe the evidence
for clearly definable secular climatic phases is far more equivocal.
The case for economically-significant secular climatic change is not yet
firmly established, and it is possible that Professor Ladurie's book is really
premature. In the event, he has not served very well the cause for which
he has so much enthusiasm. His book is ill-arranged, rambling, repetitious,
confusing and long-winded. Possibly Annales-style French does not translate
well: in English it is too often pretentious and wordy. Climatic historians
will certainly in time to come make a very important contribution to the
study of secular economic and demographic change: when they do it is to
be hoped that their insights will be communicated and interpreted to
historians more directly and laconically than Professor Ladurie, for all his
enormous gifts, has succeeded in doing in this preliminary foray.

M. W. FLINN

Henry VIIPs Scottish Diplomacy 1513-1524: England's Relations with th

Regency Government of James V. By Richard Glen Eaves.
Pp. 197. New York: Exposition Press. 1971. $6.50.

James V, King of Scots 1512-1542. By Caroline Bingham.

Pp. 224. London: Collins. 1971. ?2.50.

A considerable gap in our knowledge of sixteenth-century Scotland

the twenty-nine year reign of James V. Although all the other mona
have received close attention (even if their equally important minor
have not), no satisfactory study of the son of James IV and the fath
Mary, Queen of Scots, exists. Certainly his reign was eventful enough
aftermath of Flodden, Albany's regency, the struggle for control of
government between 1524 and 1528 and the growth of the Reforma
all merit careful study. So do James's policies, particularly those concern

This content downloaded from

163.117.64.11 on Thu, 03 Nov 2022 09:43:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms