British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment Quotes

“(…) If they mentioned their own health at all, it was only when an indisposition led to a lapse in the record. They paid no attention to their own bodily conditions, in some cases keeping up their journals to within a few days of their deaths. They used their bodies instrumentally — in other words, as conditions of observation rather than as subjects of it. Following the recommendations of such individuals as More and Boyle, they disciplined themselves to be passionless and objective. They kept their subjective experiences out of their narratives as a way of assuring readers that what they reported was unbiased by personal involvement.”
― Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment

“(…) The general moral message was driven home in a variety of ways in the stories of particular individuals: the man crushed by a collapsing chimney as he spoke crossly to his wife, the maid dug alive out of the rubble who thanked God for her deliverance, the couple who saw their baby killed but were themselves spared, and so on. It was only by holding to the idea that divine action was implicated in the fate of these individuals that some sense could be made of the disaster that had struck them.”
― Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment

“(…) This author felt the weather passionately, and described it as he felt it. Because his journal was so verbose and emotional, he condemned himself to oblivion in the history of meteorology. But for readers three centuries later, his document has a particular value. It suggests that our perspective for understanding past experiences of the weather may have been too narrow. Rather than looking only at those we recognize as having pursued a scientific approach, we should widen our view to encompass observers such as the man from Worcestershire…”
― Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment