Iberian Weather Soundings: Climate Knowledge in the Repertorio de los Tiempos

Abstract

Despite the centrality of weather to early modern life, little is known about how Iberian thinkers conceived the atmosphere during the Little Ice Age. The repertorio de los tiempos, a widely circulated genre that blended religious thought and scientific inquiry with the rhythms of daily experience, provides a unique window into investigating weather prediction and climate knowledge in the Iberian world. This article draws on close textual analysis of Spanish and Portuguese repertorios to reconstruct how early modern authors integrated Aristotelian meteorology, astrometeorology, and empirical observation into adaptive systems for theorising and forecasting weather under volatile climatic conditions. Incorporating environmental knowledge gathered through the transatlantic expansion, figures such as Rodrigo Zamorano, Jerónimo Chaves, Andrés de Avelar, and Enrico Martínez reinterpreted classical ideas of the atmosphere to account for regional variability, hemispherical asymmetries, and an emerging sense of global climatic interconnection. Situating this corpus within the broader history of climate knowledge, the article demonstrates that Iberian weather theorists developed a pluralistic and anticipatory meteorology that transformed natural philosophy into a pragmatic framework for understanding and navigating past climate change.