商品詳細

This is a study of the 18th-century engagements with the climate, showing how people and scientists made their way in an environment of inclement weather and how they worked to make this inclemency an anchor of their local and national identity. The book's approach is based on the analyses of the religious, political and scientific readings of strange weather. In these appropriations the weather was "up for grabs" as its public accessibility undermined claims to its sole possession by either priests, pamphleteers or philosophers. This study presents meteorological science as part of the English public's emotion, represented by 18th-century spouts, storms and fireballs, and expressed in the language of ordinary men, women and children. As a result, the Georgian weather emerges within the moral landscapes of an outdoor society rather than in the laboratory analyses of atmospheric gases. The book follows the conditions which sustained this perception and shows the ways in which it clashed with - and was eventually displaced by - laboratory analyses and instrumental observations.