The author, a student of Fernand Braudel, is undoubtedly one of the greatest French historians in the twentieth century. He is the author of works such as Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966), Montaillou, village occitan (1975), Le Territoire de l'Historien (2 vols., 1973, 1978), L'Ancien Regime (1991) and Le Siècle des Platter (1995). In particular, L. is one of the few historians who is at the same time acknowledged in the fields of environmental and cultural history. His path-breaking “Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil” was published in 1967 and translated into English in 1971. The book became a source of inspiration for generations of historical climatologists.

After his retirement L. decided to update his history of climate for the francophone world where such a survey is indeed badly needed. In this way, L. once again returned to his roots. Despite the fact that historical climatology had expanded rapidly in the wake of the discussion on global warming since the late 1980’s – the recent state of the art provided by Rudolf Brazdil et al. (2005) lists more than 400 titles – L. succeeds in obtaining a general idea in the field and taking most recent results into account. In 2004 he submitted the first part of a two-volume work which provides an extended narrative of the history of weather and climate in Western and Central Europe during the last millennium. Regarding the significance of climatic changes for human societies, the author comes to somewhat different conclusions. His Histoire du climat (1967) fit perfectly into the Braudelian scheme of “long duration”. From evidence concerning glaciers and vine harvest dates, Le Roy Ladurie drew a picture of long term changes in climate to which the label of a “Little Ice Age” seemed to be appropriate. Consequently, L. was also looking for impacts of long-term average climate on human societies. Considering the small deviations in the historic means compared to the twentieth century he concluded that “in the long term [emphasis added by the reviewer] the human consequences of climate seem to be slight, perhaps negligible, and certainly difficult to detect” (p. 119). Moreover, he maintained that in the long term people may adapt their way of living to a changing climate. Innovations that are better suited to the new will become accepted, whereas older outdated practices may tacitly disappear. For several decades Le Roy Ladurie’s view served as a key argument against further attempts to assess the human significance of past climate change.

In his recent book the French historian focuses on the “durée moyenne” and even on the “courte durée”. In these time-scales he demonstrates impacts of weather and climate on humans along the lines drawn by such Annales School classics as Jean Meuvret and Ernest Labrousse. Consequently, Le Roy Ladurie uses subsistence crises as his battle horse throughout the book, disregarding unrefined counter arguments brought forward by Nobel laureate Fogel (1992). In addition, the focus on crises allows L. to investigate how authorities coped with subsistence crises over time. This serves as a bridge between climate history on one side and institutional and political history on the other.

France is always the starting point of L’s considerations. However, he also includes neighbouring Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and, in one instance, (1696/97) Finland in his presentation, whereas the situation in Scandinavia, Slavonic Europe and the Mediterranean is only rarely addressed. Besides glaciers, vine harvest dates and hemispheric dendrochronological data (Briffa et al. 2003), the millennial Dutch summer and winter temperature indices provided by Shabalova and van Engelen (2003) serve him as the primary yardstick for temperature. As a consequence conditions in spring and autumn are not adequately taken into account.

Over the last millennium, L. distinguishes three cold episodes which are the basis of the major glacier advances in the Alps: In the late fourteenth century, from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries and in the early nineteenth century. Swiss climatologist Heinz Wanner named these episodes “Little Ice Age Type Events”. Besides the well-known effect of cold and wet summers (July!), L. also diagnoses heat-waves in early summer as a cause of subsistence crises, the best known case being the episode of 1788 which is mentioned among the factors which led to the bad harvest in that year and the consequential dearth of 1789. The narrative is close to the facts and saturated with exiting details. The part devoted to the High and Late Middle Ages ably combines different threads of recent research into a new picture of the climate during these centuries which goes beyond the findings of the classic Medieval history of climate written by Pierre Alexandre (1987). On the other hand, it is regrettable that L. does not include dissenting opinions into his narrative. For example, Chester W. Jordan (1996) concluded that the crisis of 1315 was a consequence of a succession of several bad harvests whereas L. assumes that the famine was the result of one single climatically outstanding year (1315).

L. takes care in getting around the blame of determinism. He attempts to distinguish between “climatically caused crises” and those where other factors such as (civil) wars or the forced removal of grain from rural areas to feed the rapidly growing capital Paris in the late seventeenth century were important causes of regional crises. For example, L. argues that the origin of the religious wars in France in the late sixteenth century had nothing to do with the climate, but the crisis of the years 1569 to 1574 aggravated the consequences of the civil war. Likewise, the bad harvests of the late 1640’s added to the widespread discontent with the central authorities in the forefront of the Fronde. Besides economic and political consequences of subsistence crises he mentions the witch-hunts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

With more than 700 pages, the book is undoubtedly too lengthy for hasty readers and perhaps also for many professional historians. There would have been possibilities to somewhat reduce the text. I do not understand why the publisher has not assisted his famous author with professional editing. In this way, repetitions of arguments could have been avoided and tables, numbers and narrative descriptions could have been converted into attractive graphs, and inconsistencies in the bibliography and in the footnotes could have been avoided. Moreover, pictures are few and of low quality, whereas illustrations of historic and actual glaciers had been a strong point of the original “History of climate”. In summary, this volume is less suited for undergraduate students or people in search of a rapid survey on the history of climate. Rather, it is a gold mine for all those who want to go deeper into the history of climate and its manifold social and political implications. Undoubtedly, the issue will remain with us throughout the twenty-first century.