Printing the Weather: Knowledge, Nature, and Popular Culture in Two Sixteenth-Century German Weather Books

Abstract

This article analyzes two vernacular German books that offered learned guidance for how to use natural observation as a means of gaining knowledge of the weather. Published a combined seventy-seven times throughout the sixteenth century, the “Wetterbüchlein” (Weather booklet) and “Bauern Practica” (Peasants’ practica) were commercially successful and widely circulated. Printers marketed the books as being accessible to anyone and reinforced that claim in the paratextual features of the books. In text and image, these books promoted the idea that even common people could participate in the production of knowledge based on the proper observation of nature.