Abstract:
This article aims to present an overview of the historiography about climate change. Our focus is not on the changes themselves, but on how communities reacted to them. This has been the main object of the most recent reflections on the subject and, at the same time, the central point around which the authors of this dossier have written their articles. We intend to show that it is a mistake to attribute great vulnerability to climate phenomena to pre-modern communities, to the same extent that the resilience of contemporary societies to them is exaggerated. The climate emergency and its current impacts show that the old dichotomies between ancient and modern need to be challenged. In this sense, the communities of the Mediterranean basin in the medieval period provide an excellent laboratory for analysis.
Keywords:
Climate change; Vulnerability; Resilience