ABSTRACT
Nature continued to challenge human communities in a variety of ways, including the general worsening of weather conditions during the Little Ice Age, whose effects are examined here in a selection of climate zones. Logging, farming, fishing, and mining in the early sixteenth century provide case studies of the interaction between nature and human culture, at a time when the range of animals and plants that were vital to the life of human communities underwent a dramatic globalization. The natural environment was understood by contemporaries largely from the perspective of theology, although the outset of natural science may be found, and the Protestant Reform affected European mental maps on this front as well.
