Day

September 4, 2025

Arcticologies: Early Modern Actions for Our Warmer World

McIntyre Amy

By Lowell Duckert. University of Minnesota Press, 2025.

Do we really know what cold is? In Arcticologies, Lowell Duckert delves into early modern European texts to trace how representations of frigidity from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have contributed to historical understandings of climate and contemporary debates on climate change. Arguing that human culture and science are, in fact, indebted to the cold, Duckert suggests that these early depictions offer critical terms for advancing the aims of climate-change activism and assisting in counterapocalyptic thinking.

An ...