The New Environmental Fall of Rome: A Methodological Consideration

Sessa, Kristina

doi:10.1353/jla.2019.0008

Cited by 29 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Moreover, important attempts were made to link these climatic trends to major socio-economic transformations of the period (Izdebski et al 2016a, Sadori et al 2016, see also Sessa 2019 for an overview). As a result, in the context of the "Fall of the Roman Empire" or, more precisely, the disintegration of Roman hegemony in the western Mediterranean, a significant methodological debate is taking place on the consilience of natural scientific and historicalarchaeological approaches to the study of the recent past (Sessa 2019;McCormick 2011;Izdebski et al 2016b;Haldon et al 2018a).…”

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confidence: 99%

Beyond one-way determinism: San Frediano’s miracle and climate change in Central and Northern Italy in late antiquity

et al. 2021

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Integrating palaeoclimatological proxies and historical records, which is necessary to achieve a more complete understanding of climate impacts on past societies, is a challenging task, often leading to unsatisfactory and even contradictory conclusions. This has until recently been the case for Italy, the heart of the Roman Empire, during the transition between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In this paper, we present new high-resolution speleothem data from the Apuan Alps (Central Italy). The data document a period of very wet conditions in the sixth c. AD, probably related to synoptic atmospheric conditions similar to a negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation. For this century, there also exist a significant number of historical records of extreme hydroclimatic events, previously discarded as anecdotal. We show that this varied evidence reflects the increased frequency of floods and extreme rainfall events in Central and Northern Italy at the time. Moreover, we also show that these unusual hydroclimatic conditions overlapped with the increased presence of “water miracles” in Italian hagiographical accounts and social imagination. The miracles, performed by local Church leaders, strengthened the already growing authority of holy bishops and monks in Italian society during the crucial centuries that followed the “Fall of the Roman Empire”. Thus, the combination of natural and historical data allows us to show the degree to which the impact of climate variability on historical societies is determined not by the nature of the climatic phenomena per se, but by the culture and the structure of the society that experienced it.

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Beyond one-way determinism: San Frediano’s miracle and climate change in Central and Northern Italy in late antiquity

et al. 2021

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“…Recent work has linked palaeoclimatic estimates of global and hemispheric climate change with major crises in the prehistoric, Roman, medieval, and early modern eras (Gill 2000, Parker 2013, Brooke 2014, Cline 2015, Campbell 2016, Harper 2017 Weiss 2017). As engaging as they are, such large-scale analyses can understate the complexity of the causal relationships between climate and society (Haldon et al 2018, Sessa 2019). Indeed, broad-stroke histories of this sort often fail to capture the intricacies of past climate change and the marked disparity, on multiple scales, in societal vulnerability and adaptive capacity to environmental change.…”

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confidence: 99%

Complexity in crisis: The volcanic cold pulse of the 1690s and the consequences of Scotland's failure to cope

D’Arrigo

Klinger

Newfield

et al. 2020

Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research

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“… 2 Among academic reviews, the most detailed and important are those of Haldon et al 2018 and Sessa 2019.…”

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Fates of Romes

Bresson

2020

J. Rom. Stud.

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Kyle Harper's book The Fate of Rome marks the thunderous entry of Nature into the world of ancient history of the twenty-first century. This is not the first book devoted to questions of climate and diseases in the ancient world, but its publication nonetheless represents a turning point. From now on, whether they work on political, social, economic, or even religious history, ancient historians will no longer be able to ignore these factors in their own writings. That is not to say that all the theses of the book, especially its natural determinism, should be accepted uncritically.

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The New Environmental Fall of Rome: A Methodological Consideration

Cited by 29 publications

References 67 publications

Beyond one-way determinism: San Frediano’s miracle and climate change in Central and Northern Italy in late antiquity

Beyond one-way determinism: San Frediano’s miracle and climate change in Central and Northern Italy in late antiquity

Complexity in crisis: The volcanic cold pulse of the 1690s and the consequences of Scotland's failure to cope

Fates of Romes

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