Mediaevistik 33 .

2020 143

Adam Oberlin
Princeton University

Weather, Metaphor, and the Lexicon: A Corpus

Study of Medieval German

Abstract: While descriptive and allegorical depictions of actual meteorological phenomena

appear throughout medieval German literary genres and text types, the great bulk of weather
vocabulary is comprised of phraseological and figurative units that make use of weather terms
as a signifier of human, divine, and other qualities This article addresses a broad corpus of
Middle High German texts to outline some of the uses of these units and the variety of their
forms that typify this largely figurative domain of lexis and human experience.

Keywords: Middle High German lexis; weather phraseology, metaphor, and figurative ­language

Neither natural philosophy, theology, historiography, nor legal language exhaust the
most common way of talking – or at least writing – about weather. Apart from small
talk in the face of an impending weather event or while discussing climate change, we
tend not to speak conversationally about meteorology in the scientific sense; our figu-
rative lexical inventory is, however, robust – the wind roars or whispers, it rains fire
and brimstone or cats and dogs, and is colder than ice. There is a pot of gold at the end
of this rainbow, but it does not consist of an arc of refracted light in atmospheric water
droplets. The following essay addresses patterns in the wealth of phraseological units
in figurative weather vocabulary alongside less frequent description and extended al-
legory in medieval German texts, in order to outline the wider semantic domain as an
object of research in ecocritical approaches to medieval literature and in historical lin-
guistic studies of figurative language and phraseological units. If ecocritical approa-
ches to historical texts are to advance our understanding of past human-environmental
interactions and the conceptual frameworks that inform their description, it is vital to
understand their lexical-semantic foundations.
Factors such as continentality, extreme topography and altitude, alluvial geography,
and climate hostility shape settlement patterns and human activity, although they ra-
rely thwart them; the landscape and its location are inherently determinant of patterns
of human organization and life, however much we may wish to avoid determinism.1
Migration patterns, hunting and gathering, predation and defense, agriculture, animal
domestication and husbandry, clothing, architecture, religion, the organization of time,
life and death themselves – these are only some of the facets of life shaped by weather
and its durative expression as climate. For example, Atlantic Europe experiences an
annual temperature amplitude (the difference between the highest and lowest recorded
annual temperatures) around 25° C compared to 90° C in Eastern Central Asia.2 The
regions of Europe that concern us in the present study are temperate and seasonal,
The online edition of this publication is available open access and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

© 2020 Adam Oberlin    https://doi.org/10.3726/med.2020.01.07

144 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020

where rivers may flood their banks and storms roll in from the sea, but wide swings in
meteorological and climatic patterns, phenomena such as the Medieval Climate Ano-
maly notwithstanding, are much rarer in the medieval period than in the prehistoric
past before ca. 6000 B.C.3 As Jean-Claude Schmitt has recently outlined, the rhythm
of cyclical phenomena such as weather belong to the wider organizational patterning
of human life, in which we thrive on regularity; arrhythmia, a cardiac metaphor, leads
to catastrophe and natural disaster and accordingly receives attention as a disturbance
in the operation of vital forces.4 This ultimate significance of weather is a hindrance to
historical lexical and literary studies that take weather for granted because of its see-
mingly prosaic functions. Missing the forest for the trees regarding weather language
has been noted in modernity: to paraphrase a joke told by David Foster Wallace, the
younger fish replies to the elder’s inquiry about the state of their liquid environment
with “What the hell is water?”5 In The Importance of Being Earnest Gwendolen ob-
jects: “Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to
me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And
that makes me so nervous.”6
The twofold use of weather terms, both literally the air we breathe and often so-
mething else entirely, reflects the bifurcated figurative potential of other similarly
outsized areas of human life such as death, sex, and conflict. This something else
permeates language in the premodern world as well: the apparently early develop-
ment of figurative language involving weather may be a linguistic universal, even if
its classification, typology, and expression can differ cross-linguistically.7 Expressions
may appear in myriad forms, including metaphor (particularly as motivating forces in
conceptual metaphor), simile, various phraseological units, proverbs, prognosticative
lore, and charms of protection and abundance.
Before turning to figurative language broadly, several examples will illustrate the
division between ways of talking about weather. As valuable as the rediscovery of
Aristotle was to European thought, the medieval natural philosophical tradition and
other genres were little affected by the dissemination of translations of the Meteoro-
logica,8 which provide information already found in sources from scholars such as
Isidore of Seville and his liberal quotation of antique authors9 to their later adaptati-
on by Thomas of Cantimpré10 and Konrad von Megenberg.11 Transmitted from Greek
through a postulated, or at least possible, Syriac version into Arabic and Hebrew, the
Meteorologica was translated by Gerard of Cremona (1114‒1187; translation around
1170) into Latin as an “exact counterpart of the Arabic,” which itself “reflects the
original Greek clearly in some places, faintly in others.” 12 A majority of the manu-
scripts with the text are followed immediately by De mineralibus (or De congelatione
et conglutinatione lapidum) of Avicenna, falsely attributed to Aristotle, of which the
Latin is a translation of a chapter of Avicenna’s encyclopedia Aš-Šifa’ as a fulfilment
of Aristotle’s broken promise to discuss minerals and metals.13 As opposed to a con-
ceptual interest in the Greek tradition, “[t]he Arabico-Latin part of the tradition is to
some extent a technical report. It is interested in separate cases and it gives the causes
of natural phenomena rather than their analysis. The examples that are given are meant
to be illustrative rather than argumentative.”14 Henricus Aristippus, d. 1162, was the
 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020 145

first translator of the text into Latin directly from Greek, surviving in 96 complete
manuscripts and some fragments, while Book IV and part of the translatio vetus along
with the three first books translated by Gerard of Cremona into Latin from the Arabic
of Yahya ibn al-Batriq (active at the turn of the ninth century), were compiled as the
Liber metheorum, also containing De mineralibus, probably by Alfredus Anglicus
sometime in the late 12th or early 13th centuries.15 Book I, ch. 9 in Willem van Moer-
beke’s thirteenth-century translation shows the continuity between antiquity and the
Middle Ages: descriptions of the water cycle and generation of rain via evaporation
and condensation remain stable.16
Despite additional commentary, for example in the Thomistic corpus,17 and wides-
pread circulation illustrated by the availability of manuscripts in German-speaking
Europe (ten of Henricus Aristippus18 and sixteen from the Arabico-Latin tradition19),
neither the Aristotelian tradition nor that of additional classical authors by way of
Isidore and others left much of a mark in vernacular writing outside of translations of
these texts, which nevertheless remain significant as vernacular sources of the clas-
sical meteorological tradition which animated so much transmission and copying.20
Two examples in Middle High German are Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Na-
tur (1348‒1350), which, like Jacob van Maerlant’s Middle Dutch Der naturen bloeme
(ca. 1270), is a translation of Thomas of Cantimpré’s Liber de natura rerum (between
1225‒1241) with influence from other sources21; and the anonymous astronomical and
computational text called the Mainauer Naturlehre from around 1300.22 Ch. 15‒30 in
Buch der Natur cover the generation and characteristics of the winds, various types
of precipitation, and other meteorological phenomena with a treatise on the rainbow
that diverges significantly from its primary source.23 The Mainauer Naturlehre was
compiled from multiple sources, from the encyclopedic tradition and other medieval
sources to Aristotle (dise lere wiset aristotiles).24 Zodiac signs and associated plane-
tary weather are linked symbolically to the nature of each planet; otherwise, weather is
not discussed.25 Classical and medieval meteorology is premodern in a scientific sense
as well as chronological, fixed firmly within a wider symbolic language that serves as
much to illuminate what is already known, including linguistically, as to produce new
knowledge.26 Yet descriptions, whatever their symbolic meaning, in the natural philo-
sophical/encyclopedic tradition do not offer the only mode of representation found in
the wider theological and literary milieu of medieval texts, in which a twofold symbo-
lic paradigm reigns: the allegorical and the figurative.
With regard to descriptions of biblical weather, one source of later figurative langu-
age, it is worth noting that original meteorological and hydrological conditions of para-
dise in Genesis include no rain, because the water cycle and wet/dry seasons belong to
the punishment of agricultural toil that characterizes human life after expulsion from
the garden, rain being a poor substitute for the nourishing water that wells from Eden
and forms the rivers that divide the world in Genesis. Strikingly, this condition varies
in vernacular adaptations: while it can be found in the relatively faithful paraphrase
of the Old English Genesis A (lines 212‒14) and OE Genesis in the OE Heptateuch,
as well as in later adaptations such as The Historye of the Patriarks,27 one will search
in vain in the Old High German glosses on Genesis or Wessobrunner Gebet,28 as well
146 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020

as in later centuries in Berthold von Regenburg’s sermon on Genesis29 or the entirety

of the Altdeutsche Genesis tradition.30 In texts as varied as the Altdeutsche Predigten,
sermons of Priest Konrad, Rudolf von Ems’s Alexander, Konrad von Würzburg’s Der
Trojanische Krieg and Die goldene Schmiede, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival,
and Seifrit’s Alexander only the spring-fed rivers of Genesis are of interest as geogra-
phical markers or marvels.31 Finally, the language of vernacular diplomatic sources
offers us only a few binomials – word pairs joined by a conjunction with a fixed or
preferred order of elements – in lists of potential damages for contractual purposes,
such as schûr oder bîsez ‘bad weather or bad harvest’ or von gwalt oder vom schower
‘by violence or by bad weather.’32
Turning to what remains, i.e., overwhelmingly literary and historiographical texts,
reveals ways of talking about the weather that neither describe scientific processes nor
divine providence and justice, but instead apply rhetorical tropes such as simile and
metaphor to meteorological phenomena. The largest extant corpus of Middle High
German is the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank, an ongoing project housed at
the Universität Salzburg containing, as of 26 January 2018, 665 texts from all gen-
res, 10.64 million words, and just over 40,000 differentiated lemmata with slightly
more than 56,000 associated meanings. When using the database’s conceptual system,
the following categories correspond generally to weather words and idioms: Himmel
/Atmosphäre/Himmelskörper and Wetter/Winde, along with their subcategories for
names, current results for which number respectively 3,945, 5,560, and 53 and total
9,558, or .089% of all words in the corpus; compare 41,352 results for verbal and no-
minal morphological variants of ‘rain’ in COCA, which contains 520 million words,
or .007%.33 While relative frequency in the corpus does not necessarily correlate with
relative importance in culture nor the range of idiomatic uses in the semantic field, the
raw numbers allow for typological analysis and their widespread distribution across
time and genre lends weight to their significant place in the corpus of figurative lan-
guage.
Literal, descriptive weather language can be found in the corpus: a common ex-
pression of weather in this sense is the simple list, which, as is common in premodern
language stages, is formed from a binomial that may expand and/or reverse as needed
for prosodic or stylistic considerations. The Phraseologisches Wörtberbuch des Mittel-
hochdeutschen shows these formulas in narrower contexts than the corpus reveals to be
true; not only, for example, ‘weather and wind,’34 but more frequently ‘rain and wind,’
which can be found in all of the syntactic positions afforded by that medieval hallmark
of a low degree of fixity: appositively without a conjunction, with ‘and/or/nor,’ with
or without definite or indefinite articles, coupled with temporal adverbs, with myriad
single or parallel prepositions, and expanded from a binomial to a list of three or four.
In the case of simile, prima comparanda (the first elements being compared) inclu-
de nouns for people, movement, emotions, injuries, life, weapons and battle, and verbs
of motion and weight, as well as entire expressions such as als der wint tuot den boum/
das loup ‘as the wind does to the tree/leaves.’35 Secunda comparata (the elements to
which the first are compared) are distributed unevenly across the lexical inventory of
MHG weather words, yet they are surprisingly regularly in terms of simile percentage
to total appearance in the corpus. Tertii comparationi (the point of comparison bet-
 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020 147

ween the other two elements) are typically obvious and restricted to a relatively narrow
range of concepts, e.g., speed, strength, lightness, heaviness, brightness, darkness, and
emotions, particularly vexation. One comparison is wind in the sense of a trifle, which
mirrors hair in MHG simile, another thunderclap as speed, others fog as a drifting,
swaying thing, sun as shining light, and rainbow as something variegated. There is
nothing particularly difficult to parse, but the simile and metaphor variants of wind in
this category alone account nearly 2% of all meteorological vocabulary in the corpus
from the Wetter/Winde-group; this class of idiom is productive and accounts for large
number similes with the adverbs of comparison als/sam/alsam/gelîch/danne. Very few
similes appear with weather as the primum comparandum, but they tend towards de-
scription: among them is the passage wolken rot wurden als ein flamme und das lant
allumb erlúcht von dem fure ‘the clouds grew red as flame and the land all about was
illuminated by the fire’ in the Prosa-Lancelot.36 The following examples are illustrati-
ve of a large number of similar uses:

(1) der welte vreude ist als ein wint

Rudolf von Ems, Barlaam und Josaphat, 10930
(‘the world’s joy is like a wind’)
(2) Also snel als ein wint Quam sin ors zu geflogen
Herbort von Fritzlar, Liet von Troye, 5546‒47
(‘his horse came flying thus as quick as the wind’)
(3) noch sneller danne ein windes fluc
Konrad von Heimesfurt, Unser vrouwen hinvart, 352
(‘even quicker than the flight of the wind’)
(4) reht als der wilde sturmwint die starken boume neiget
Konrad von Würzburg, Partonopier und Meliur, 20676‒77
(‘just as the wild storm wind bends the strong trees’)
(5) klâr alsam diu sunne
Steinmar, Lied 12.3.4
(‘bright as the sun’)
(6) lieht alsam der sunnen schîn
Rudolf von Ems, Alexander, 5366
(‘light as the sunshine’)
(7) als di sunne uf snewe im Jenner
Albrecht [von Scharfenberg], Der Jüngere Titurel, 2102.4
(‘like the sun on snow in January’)
(8) rehte swebet als ein nebel
Albrecht [von Scharfenberg], Der Jüngere Titurel, 2102.4
(‘drifts just like a fog’)
(9) Daz lîp und guot, fröude und guft als ein nebel und als ein tuft.
Hugo von Trimberg, Der Renner, 2609‒10
(‘the body the property, joy and pride, like a fog and a mist’)
(10) Werltlich êre, lop und guft Ist als ein tou, rîf oder tuft.
Hugo von Trimberg, Der Renner, 22675‒76
(‘wordly renown, praise, and pride are like dew, frost, or mist’)
148 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020

(11) dar durch fuor ez als ein donerslac

Der Stricker, Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal, 5569
(‘it went through like a thunderstrike’)
(12) einen segel wîz als ein snê
Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, 3391
(‘a sail white as snow’)
(13) Da köm vom himel als ain regen Fewr in flammen herab.
Der Wernigeroder Alexander, 4034‒35
(‘then came a fire blazing down from heaven like a rain’)
(14) ir schilte rôt, grüen unde gel wâren als ein Regenboge
Konrad von Würzburg, Partonopier und Meliur, 15292‒93
(‘their shields, red, green, and yellow, were like a rainbow’)
(15) daz half im rehte als ein tou
Hugo von Trimberg, Der Renner, 22675‒76
(‘that helped him just like dew’)
(16) si wonte in dem viure
als sanfte als ûf dem touwe
Hartmann von Aue, Erec, 5181‒82
(‘she dwelt in the fire as gently as on the dew’)
(17) er vreut, alsam di sunne tuot nach kaltem rifen
Albrecht [von Scharfenberg], Der Jüngere Titurel, 214.1
(‘he rejoiced as the sun does after cold frost’)
(18) sin gebende hant vreuwet als ein sueze regen in dem meien
Der Jenaer Meißner, 17.8.3
(‘his giving hand gladdens like a sweet rain in May’)
(19) er druhte nider als der hagel
Wirnt von Grafenberg, Wigalois, 5166
(‘he pressed down like hail’)
(20) Als ob es were ein wilder hagel
Heinrich von dem Türlin, Diu Crone, 13261
(‘as if it were a wild hail’)
(21) Alsam den hanf tuet der schawer
Der Pleier, Garel von dem blüenden Tal, 14861
(‘as a shower does to the hemp’)
(22) dar nâch als ein sneller schûr
Ulrich von Etzenbach, Alexander, 14427
(‘afterwards like a quick shower’)

Tertii comparationi exhibit typical qualities of MHG similes regardless of domain,

for instance ‘transitoriness/Ephemerality’ (1, 8, 9, 10, 15), speed (2, 3, 11, 22), or force
(4, 19, 21). The same comparison quality with wint in the sense of ‘triviality’ can be found
in similar uses of ‘(niht so) grôʒ als umbe ein hâr’ (‘[not as] large as a hair’), with and
without the mention of size.37 Some qualities are not stable, however, and ‘dew’ exhibits
variation between ‘glowing, wet, red’ in collocation with ‘rose’ (see, for example, Gau-
riel von Muntabel, 3571; Der heilige Georg, 956; Pantaleon, 119; Titurel, 110.1; W ­ ilhelm
 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020 149

von Österreich, 15042; and Der Jüngere Titurel, 791.1), but ‘transitoriness/ephemerality,
trifle’ or ‘mildness’ in other contexts. In size they range from two to three-word units
to multiple lines as in (14). These basic qualities extend across text type and genre and,
with regard to weather similes, are relatively frequent in the corpus compared to the total
number of each lexical item – i.e., the meteorological secundum comparatum represents
a large portion of many weather terms. The qualities represented by these numerous we-
ather-based similes correspond to common themes in medieval literature, for example,
the transitoriness of life, the joys of love, spiritual purity, and physical might.
Degree of comparison through simile conjunctions provides another rhetorical stra-
tegy beyond equation, not uniquely though perhaps best illustrated in its full expanse
with the phrase ‘white as snow,’ in MHG a diversely exaggerated or expanded simile.
One can trace degree from a solitary attestation of understatement to hyperbolic nu-
merical expansions:

(1) Etwa wiz als ein sne

Herbort von Fritzlar, Liet von Troye, 7235
(‘somewhat white as snow’)
(2) wiz sam der sne
Der Junge Meißner, 2–1.5.8
(‘white as snow’)
(3) Rechte wiz als der sne
Herbort von Fritzlar, Liet von Troye, 1827
(‘just as white as snow’)
(4) wisser denne ein sne
 Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, Vol. 7,
p. 259, 2.23
(‘whiter than snow’)
(5) di sint noch wizer danne der sne
Nibelungenlied (B), 506.4
(‘they are yet whiter than snow’)
(6) noch wîzer dan ein snê wîz
Rudolf von Ems, Der guote Gêrhart, 3734
(‘yet whiter than snow is white’)
(7) wîzer danne kein snê.
Herzog Ernst (B), 3009
(‘whiter than any snow’)
(8) noch wîzer zên stunt danne ein snê.
Christan von Luppin, 5.3.5
(‘yet ten times whiter than snow’)
(9) wîzer tûsentstunt dan snê.
Christan von Luppin, 7.2.8
(‘one thousand times whiter than snow’)

In (1‒9) the progression from equivocation to hyperbole shows the range of variant
forms possible with such a simple simile, indeed a greater range for ‘white as snow’
150 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020

than is found with most similar phrases. The first degree (1) – an expression of ambi-
valence – is rare in the corpus, where it also describes something somewhat green as a
clover and offers several other equivalent color comparisons; typically, such equivoca-
tion or understatement occurs in non-phraseological contexts such as this line from
Der arme Heinrich, “sî kusten ir tohter munt / etewaz me dan drîstunt” (‘they kissed
their daughter’s mouth somewhat more than three times,’ 1417‒18). Within degrees are
slight lexical variations that typify stylistic tendencies in MHG verse, for example, the
addition of noch from (4) to (5) and the reduplication of the secundum comparatum
in (6).
A database query with the most restrictive criteria, namely specific character strings
that leave out variant orthography to a certain extent as well as semantic similarities
that nevertheless belong to the wrong word class, reveals an interesting pattern. As
a consequence of the search parameters, these results are conservative; while some
false positives are thereby avoided, more correct forms are overlooked. Similes with
comparative adverbs and the words hagel ‘hail,’ nebel ‘fog,’ regen ‘rain,’ snê ‘snow,’
schûr ‘shower/storm/hail,’ tou ‘dew,’ and wint ‘wind’ account for respectively 10%,
7%, 10%, 25%, 16%, 16%, 6.5% of the total tokens of each type. A sample set of
control terms from outside the weather domain reveals that these percentages are on
average higher than in the rest of the lexicon: compare wîp ‘woman’ at 4%, kint ‘child’
at 5%, stein ‘stone’ at 4.6%, swert ‘sword’ at 3%, boum ‘tree’ at 5.8%, tiuvel ‘devil’ at
4.4%, and a few more frequently occurring examples such as mensch ‘person’ at 8.6%
and not surprisingly tier ‘animal’ at 11.5%. While the nature of the MHDBDB preclu-
des certainty about numbers and percentages within large datasets, it is nevertheless
intriguing that adopting a more generous search criteria results in an increase of nearly
85% for wint similes at 11.9% of all tokens.
Rhyme unsurprisingly shapes word choice and collocative proximity in the context
of the written literary language, and weather terms are no exception; in the MHG
corpus metaphorical combinations with hagel-zagel ‘hail-tail,’ hagel-nagel ‘hail-nail,’
and hagel-zagel-nagel ‘hail-tail-nail’ occur 63 times, the productive factor clearly rhy-
me rather than a logical point of comparison for ‘tail,’ while a case could be made for
‘nail’ regarding sharpness, a comparison that is indeed made at least once – a line from
Walther von der Vogelweide reads ‘in his sweet honey hides a poisoned nail, his cloud-
less laugh brings cutting hail; wherever one senses this it turns his hand and becomes a
swallows’ tail’ (Walther Tonvariation 2, 1.11.9‒11 – In sîme süezen honge lît ein giftic
nagel. / sîn wolkenlôsez lachen bringet scharpfen hagel. / swâ man daz spürt, ez kêret
sîn hant und wirt ein swalwen zagel.). Not one instance of ‘hail’ ends a line without
this rhyme, but the metaphor can be found, albeit rarely, line-internally in contexts
such as ‘rage is a hailstone [i.e., a vexation] to proper comportment’ (Rudolf von Ems,
Alexander 1815 – zorn ist ein hagel rehter zuht) and ‘their joys [became] hail and their
sweetness showers’ (Ulrich von Etzenbach, Alexander 13532 – ir fröiden hagel, ir
süeze schûr). This same pair in a paroemial line in the Göttweiger Trojanerkrieg illus-
trates tendency of this rhyme to span couplets: ‘whoever draws a sword against you, to
him you will be shower and hail’ (Göttweiger Trojanerkrieg ms. 2v col. 2 1918‒1920 –
Wer gegen dir enbertt sin schwertt, / Dem wirstu schur und hagel. / Uss helme du noch
mangen nagel.) is followed by a line ending with ‘nail’ that introduces another clause.
 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020 151

As expected, descriptions of natural phenomena outside of natural philosophical

texts such as Buch der Natur are scant, but weather-based figurative language and
phraseological units occur more frequently in the corpus than one might anticipate
from available lexicographical resources. A relatively high frequency within various
semantic fields and ubiquity across genres and text types reveal typical aspects of
non-fixed collocation, e.g., syntactic variation, expansion, reduction, and prosodic re-
strictions, that correspond to wider patterns of idiomatic language in MHG. Moving
forward, cross-linguistic comparison of these units among neighboring languages
(e.g., medieval/pre-modern stages of French, Dutch, English, and Czech) and dialects
(e.g., Middle Low German), as well as a greater diachronic scope from OHG through
NHG would strengthen arguments for or against high frequency in corpora, semantic
correspondence or divergence across time and space, and the possible routes and di-
rections of transmission. In premodern German, as now, “talking about the weather” is
most often talking about ‘something else’ – joy, pain, life, death, love, time, movement
– both as rhetorical and literary strategies and as a series of phraseological units and
other linguistic formulae into which weather terms fit readily, perhaps more so than in
other domains because of the vital role weather plays in shaping human life.38

Adam Oberlin
aoberlin@princeton.edu
208 East Pyne
Department of German
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08540
USA

Endnotes

1 Barry Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2015, 7.
2 Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean (see note 1) 1, 7.
3 Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean (see note 1), 37.
4 See Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les Rythmes Au Moyen Âge. Paris: Gallimard, 2016, Ch. 21;
“Arythmie» est une terme médicale d’origine aristotélicienne, qui désigne l’irregulatité
des contractions du muscle cardiaque,” 642.
5 David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion,
about Living a Compassionate Life. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009, 1. Water
itself has, however, been the object of ecocritical attention in medieval studies to a greater
extent than weather. See Albrecht Classen, Water in Medieval Literature: An Ecocritical
Reading, Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Weather
has also been the focus of scientific approaches to the possible influences of past climatic
processes on literary as well as social and political developments in the medieval period:
for a study focused on social change from a literary perspective, see Albrecht Classen,
“Globalerwärmung im Mittelalter als Grundlage für die Entstehung der höfischen Lie-
be?,” Wandlungsprozesse der Mentalitätsgeschichte, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Friedrich
Harrer. Baden-Baden: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Bachmann, 2015, 121‒46; for a paleocli-
152 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020

matic approach to socioeconomic change, see Elena Xoplaki et al., “The Medieval Climate
Anomaly and Byzantium: A Review of the Evidence on Climatic Fluctuations, Economic
Performance and Societal Change,” Quaternary Science Reviews 136 (2015): 229‒52.
6 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, ed.
Samuel Lyndon Gladden. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2010, 82.
7 One study on the Old Testament with widespread applicability in other languages is Jo-
nathan Charteris-Black, Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 209‒14, which demonstrates the presence of an extensive
conceptual metaphor system of evaluative oppositions, summarized as “DIVINE JUDG-
MENT IS A WEATHER CONDITION motivates the conceptual metaphors DIVINE PU-
NISHMENT IS A HOSTILE WEATHER CONDITION and DIVINE BLESSING IS A
FAVOURABLE WEATHER CONDITION” (214; capitalization follows the conventions
of the author). The Old Testament also contains other conceptual weather metaphors, such
as spiritual fickleness is wind, that mirror those discussed below in German. One example
is Ephesians 4.14, “That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, carried
about with every wind of doctrine […]” (214), another Psalm 51.7, “Purge me with hyssop,
and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”
8 For an overview of authors and transmission history, see Craig Martin, “Meteorology,”
Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, eds. Thomas Glick, Ste-
ven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis. New York and London: Routledge, 2005, 342‒44.
9 See Book XIII, De mundo et partibus, in W. M. Lindsay, ed., Isidori Hispalensis Episco-
pi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911; and
Stephen A. Barney et al., ed., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2006; likewise, ch. 29‒38 in Jaques Fontaine, ed., Traité de la
nature. Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 2002; and Calvin B. Kendall and Faith
Wallis, trans., Isidore of Seville: On the Nature of Things, Translated Texts for Historians,
66. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
10 Helmut Boese, ed., Thomas Cantimpratensis, Liber de natura rerum. Editio princeps se-
cundum codices manuscriptos, vol. 1. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973.
11 Konrad von Megenberg, Das „Buch der Natur“, eds. Robert Luff and Georg Steer, vol.
2, Kritischer Text nach den Handschriften. Texte und Textgeschichte, 54. Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer, 2003.
12 Pieter L. Schoonheim, Aristotle’s Meteorology in the Arabico-Latin Tradition: A Critical
Edition of the Texts, with Introduction and Indices. Aristoteles Semitco-Latinus, 12. Lei-
den and Boston: Brill, 2000, xvii and xv, respectively.
13 Schoonheim, Arabico-Latin Tradition (see note 12) xix.
14 Schoonheim, Arabico-Latin Tradition (see note 12), xx.
15 Elisa Rubino, ed., Aristoteles Latinus: Meteorologica Liber Quartus, Translatio Henrici
Aristippi. Corpus philosophorum Medii Aevi. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, vii‒viii.
16 Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem, ed., Aristoteles Latinus: Meteorologica, Translatio Guillelmi
de Morbeka, vol. 2. Corpus philosophorum Medii Aevi. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008, 28.
Schoonheim, Arabico-Latin Tradition (see note 12), 34‒36 corresponds well to the content
of this chapter, though the language differs significantly.
17 Thomas Aquinas, “In Meteor., lib. 1‒2, l.,” in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Opera omnia iussu
impensaque Leonis XIII P. M. edita, vol. 3. In libros Aristotelis Meteorologicorum exposi-
tion. Rome: Typographia Polyglotta S. C. de Propaganda Fide, 1886, 323‒421.
18 Rubino, Aristoteles Latinus (see note 15), ix‒xix.
19 Schoonheim, Arabico-Latin Tradition (see note 12), 175‒82.
 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020 153

20 For more on the wider medieval tradition of prognostication, see Anne Lawrence-Ma-
thers, Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac.
­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
21 Peter Burger, Het boek der natuur. Jacob van Maerlant, samenstelling en vertaling.
Amsterdam: Querido, 1989.
22 Martin Mosimann Die »Mainauer Naturlehre« im Kontext der Wissenschaftsgeschichte.
Basler Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 64. Tübingen: Francke, 1994, 24‒25;
edition in the Beiheft.
23 See Dagmar Gotschall, Konrad von Megenbergs Buch von den natürlichen Dingen. Ein
Dokument deutschsprachiger Albertus-Magnus-Rezeption im 14. Jahrhundert. Studien
und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 83. Leiden and Brill, 2004, 323‒39.
24 Mosimann, Beiheft to Die »Mainauer Naturlehre« (see note 22), 297b, 25‒26.
25 Mosimann, Beiheft to Die »Mainauer Naturlehre« (see note 22), 300b‒301b, 294c‒d.
26 This division is marked in the disciplinary history of meteorology itself and in general
studies of its historical development. For example, in the 8 issues of the journal History of
Meteorology one finds only three contributions on premodern topics: Ioannis G. Telelis,
“Historical-Climatological Information from the Time of the Byzantine Empire (4th ‒15th
Centuries AD),” History of Meteorology 2 (2005): 41‒50; Adriaan M.J. de Kraker, “Recon-
struction of Storm Frequency in the North Sea Area of the Preindustrial Period, 1400‒1625
and the Connection with Reconstructed Time Series of Temperatures,” History of Mete-
orology 2 (2005): 51‒70; and Craig Martin, “Experience of the New World and Aristote-
lian Revisions of the Earth’s Climates during the Renaissance,” History of Meteorology 3
(2006): 1‒16. The 11 volumes in the series Geschichte der Meteorologie in Deutschland
from the Deutscher Wetterdienst (German Weather Service) cover the period from the
seventeenth through the twentieth centuries with one exception: Klaus Wege, Die Ent-
wicklung der meteorologischen Dienste in Deutschland. Geschichte der Meteorologie in
Deutschland, 5. Offenbach a. M.: Selbstverlag des deutschen Wetterdienstes, 2002, 14‒19,
which presents a brief historical overview from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Re-
ports of committee meetings of the same organization reveal the same (see, e.g., Cornelia
Lüdecke, “Bericht über die 5. Tagung des Fachausschusses Geschichte der Meteorologie,
11. und 12. Oktober 2005, Lindenberg,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 29 (2006):
161‒62). A recent collection of essays on meteorology in German literature and thought,
Urs Büttner and Ines Theilen. eds., Phänomene der Atmosphäre: Ein Kompendium Lite-
rarischer Meteorologie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017, begins in the eighteenth century, while
some historical studies, e.g., Kristine C. Harper, Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of
Modern Meteorology. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, begin as late as the twentieth century.
27 A. N. Doane, Genesis A, rev. ed. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renais-
sance Studies, 2013 and Richard Marsden, ed., The Old English Heptateuch and Ælfric’s
Libellus de veteri testamento et novo, vol. 1, Introduction and Text. EETS o.s., 330. Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 10 (Gen. 2:5; Mayumi Teguchi, ed., The Historye of
the Patriarks edited from Cambridge, St. John’s College MS G. 31 with Parallel Texts of
the Historia Scholastica and the Bible Historiale. Middle English Texts, 42. Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010, 27 (ll. 1‒3).
28 Elias von Steinmeyer, Die kleineren althochdeutschen Sprachdenkmäler. Hildesheim: Ge-
org Olms, 1916, 16; and Herbert Thoma, Althochdeutsche Glossen zum Alten Testament:
Genesis, Deuteronomium, Numeri, Josue, Judicum. London: Institute of Germanic Stu-
dies, 1975, 1.
29 Dieter Richter, Berthold von Regensburg: Deutsche Predigten. Kleine deutsche Prosa-
denkmäler des Mittelalters, 5. Munich: Fink 1968, 49‒50.
154 Mediaevistik 33 . 2020

30 See Akihiro Hamano, Die frühmittelhochdeutsche Genesis. Synoptische Ausgabe nach

der Wiener, Millstätter und Vorauer Handschrift. Hermaea N.F., 138. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 2016, 48‒53, Wiener 463‒514, Millstätter/Klagenfurter 470‒525. It contains
the Wiener Handschrift, ÖNB, Cod. Vind. 2721 (1r‒129v); Millstätter/Klagenfurter ms.,
Kärntner Landesarchiv, Hs. 6/19 (1r‒84v); and Vorauer Sammelhandschrift, Vorauer
­Augustiner-Chorherrenstift Sammelhandschrift 276 (78rb‒87vb), a fragment which does
not begin until Gen. 37.
31 Respectively Altdeutsche Predigten 33.6‒12; Priester Konrad 41.10‒15 and 88.9; Rudolf
vcn Ems, Alexander 10786‒87 and 10868‒71; Konrad von Würzburg, Der Trojanische
Krieg 10658‒59 and Die goldene Schmiede 536‒37; Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival
481.19‒22; and Seifrit, Alexander 6229‒39 All MHG sources cited henceforth from Klaus
M. Schmidt, Horst P. Pütz, and Margarete Springeth, Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdaten-
bank, Paris Lodon Universität Salzburg, updated January 26, 2018, http://mhdbdb.sbg.
ac.at:8000/ (last accessed on Oct. 27, 2020).
32 Kurt Gärtner and Andrea Rapp, Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden bis zum
Jahr 1300, Universität Trier, updated 2007, http://tcdh01.uni-trier.de/cgi-bin/iCorpus/
CorpusIndex.tcl (last accessed Oct. 27, 2020), respectively 2429. Moosburg 1296 Mai
14 (III.2429.502.11), 2933. 1298 Februar 26 (IV.2933.224.22), and 3248. 1299 März 6
(IV.3248.416.35); and 3204. Laibach 1299 Januar 30 (IV.3204.387.17). The word vngewidere
‘storm’ appears outside of such a pair in N 223 (560a). 1282 November 23 (V.N223.170.16).
33 Mark Davies, Corpus of Contemporary American English, Brigham Young University,
updated December 2007, https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (last accessed on Oct. 27, 2020).
34 Jesko Friedrich, Phraseologisches Wörterbuch des Mittelhochdeutschen: Redensarten,
Sprichwörter und andere feste Wortverbindungen in Texten von 1050‒1350. Reihe Germa-
nistische Linguistik, 264. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006, 456.
35 Eckenlied 15.7 and Konrad von Würzburg’s Partonopier und Meliur 16789 (boum); Ulrich
von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst ch. 2, 118 and Wolfdietrich 398.4 (loup).
36 PL I.1.5.127.15.
37 Friedrich, Phraseologisches Wörterbuch (see note 34), s.v. “hâr,” 201‒04.
38 For a summary of approaches and themes in the ecocritical study of modern German li-
terature, including meteorological metaphor, see Caroline Schaumann and Heather I.
Sullivan, “Introduction,” in Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan, eds., German
Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, 7‒21. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. On weather
metaphor in political and journalistic discourse, see Matthias Bode, Traumsommer und
Kriegsgewitter: die politische Bedeutung des schönen Sommers 1914. Frankfurt a. M.:
Peter Lang, 2016.