While reading “Facing Floods in the Middle Ages”, I noticed a particular perception of weather that I found interesting. The article discussed the records of a series of different natural disasters that humanity endured during the Middle Ages. There were documentations of things ranging from floods to droughts. The thing that stood out to me, although it wasn’t the main focus of this article, was the way that people attempted to comprehend these disasters.
In the Middle Ages, mankind faced storms, droughts, floods, and comets. Many of these events were devastating, and took many lives. The destructive force of these events are what caused people to perceive these scenarios as anomalies or unnatural forces. In the article, there was a specific event in which an annal noted the sight of a comet to be a “sign of the people’s sinfulness”. This is further emphasized with the Great Flood, a flood that caused emended devastation to people in earlier times. This flood’s destructive force was determined to be the work of God, and the people at that time may have pushed that to be the determined cause of it. Interestingly, this is how they processed these events. And this makes sense, because it was the easiest way to fathom such destruction. Even in the Middle Ages, mankind could tell that they were dwarfed in scale to the power that nature held. Despite this knowledge, they knew that humanity could only rebuild after these events. It was the resilience of people that allowed them to recover from such devastation, with a knowledge that they’d have to face another disaster in the future. People pushed past the inevitability of nature, in order to grow as a whole.