This project has received funding via the EUI ESR call 2026, dedicated to Early Stage Researchers, with the contribution of the EUI Widening Europe Programme. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
How did weather notation in eighteenth-century calendars constitute distinctive forms of environmental knowledge, and what can the patterns, frequencies, and functions of these observations reveal about the relationship between everyday experience and epistemological change in early modern Europe?
This question drives our investigation into an extraordinary but overlooked archive: the weather observations inscribed in calendar margins across the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth between 1700 and 1750. While environmental historians have extensively studied weather recording in London coffeehouses, early modern scientific societies and Dutch trading ports, the vast territory from Poznań to Lwów – encompassing present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine – remains largely absent from our understanding of early modern meteorological knowledge. This absence is particularly striking given that this region, covering over 800,000 square kilometres at its height, contained diverse climatic zones, agricultural systems, and cultural traditions that produced distinctive approaches to understanding weather.
In uncovering everyday environmental knowledge in Europe’s borderlands, this project contributes to long-standing debates about humanity's changing relationship with nature. Historians have enriched these debates, for instance, through careful analysis of how the nature/culture divide emerged historically. The shift from organic to mechanical metaphors not only enabled new forms of scientific investigation but also legitimised the exploitation of both nature and women by removing ethical constraints that had previously governed human intervention in the natural order. This project builds on these insights by examining how the nature/culture divide emerged – or failed to emerge – in the overlooked yet vast region of Europe's eastern borderlands. Evidence from Polish–Lithuanian calendars suggests that communities from Poznań to Lwów maintained integrated knowledge systems where weather, providence, and social life remained fundamentally entangled, offering a crucial counterpoint to narratives of uniform mechanisation across early modern Europe.
Through landscapes, sounds, and weather conditions that explore the practices of weather inscriptions found in Polish–Lithuanian calendars, this project will animate research that provides a glimpse into thousands of individual historical weather observers creating collective knowledge through parallel but uncoordinated practices.
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