Coventry Premoderns

Premoderns Winter Lecture: ‘Solastalgia and Climate Change in Early Modern England’

The Coventry Premoderns Group are delighted to announce that our Annual Winter Lecture for 2024 will be delivered by Professor Madeline Bassnett (Western University) on 12 December 2024, 2-3pm. This Lecture will be delivered on Microsoft Teams. For further information and to register see here, or contact Dr Ben Dew: benjamin.dew@coventry.ac.uk.

Abstract: Solastalgia, a recently coined word, describes the grief and despair we experience when our familiar environments no longer feel like home. As storms, floods, and droughts become more common because of global warming, this term encapsulates our longing for more stable conditions and reminds us that climate change happens, not elsewhere, but on our own doorsteps. In this paper, I suggest that solastalgia is not a new affect; it can equally be discovered in historical accounts of climate change. Sixteenth and seventeenth century diaries, weather pamphlets, and even chronicle records, are seldom objective in their weather reportage. Instead, they communicate personal and collective responses to the extremes of the Little Ice Age, revealing the distress of living in a world of increasingly unreliable weather.

Madeline Bassnett is a Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, Canada.  Madeline’s teaching and research focuses on the poetry and prose of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. She is the author of Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2016), and the co-editor of an essay collection with Hillary M. Nunn, In the Kitchen, 1550-1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad (Amsterdam UP, 2022). Madeline is currently completing a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project entitled: Weather Networks: Climate Change and Community in England’s Little Ice Age.

All welcome!