Over the last two years, the Tambora eruption in 1815 and the subsequent “year without a summer”(1816) have been the subject of both increased public attention and a lively academic discussion resulting in a series of new publications. The impacts of large volcanic eruptions before 1800 have garnered much less attention, although several of these events appear to have been much more severe than what happened with Tambora or Krakatau. Scientific studies have highlighted events like the Samalas eruption in 1257, the mid-fifteenth century eruption still named after the Melanesian caldera of Kuwae (in the 1450s or 1460s), or the Laki eruption of 1783 in Iceland. Notably these studies have not limited themselves to sketching the short-term climatic effects of the volcanic dust veil but have attributed significant socioeconomic consequences to these eruptions. Often the underlying, rather monocausal explanation of crisis phenomena in the years after such major eruptions leaves historians and social scientists with a certain unease.

And yet recent research has pointed to volcanic eruptions in the mid sixth century alone as the cause of the “Late Antique Little Ice Age”, and the Tambora event has been the topic of a considerable number of interdisciplinary studies. Historians and scholars from neighboring disciplines have yet to adequately address the centuries between these two events, which witnessed many volcanic eruptions of different magnitudes. The traditional humanities, however, can contribute a lot to this discussion by examining written sources—not only from Europe, but also Asia and the Middle East— for chronologically precise information on the direct and indirect impacts of volcanic eruption. In addition, scholars in the humanities and social scientists can offer more nuanced explanations of the symptoms of crises like failed harvests, scarcity, famines, epidemics, and social unrest which often followed major volcanic eruptions. Scholars in these fields can trace contemporary perceptions of extreme meteorological events and atmospheric phenomena and, in rare cases, even reconstruct cultural reactions of societies facing the consequences of a volcanic dust veil. In short, the contributions of scholars with a background in the humanities or social sciences who also draw on the recent scientific research on these events are crucial to a better understanding of the impact of large volcanic eruptions on pre-modern societies.