Library › Latin: Early Christian Writings › De Grandine et Tonitruis
De Grandine et Tonitruis, on hail and thunder, is a treatise by Agobard, archbishop of Lyon, against a popular belief of his region. He reports that almost everyone, noble and common, townsman and peasant, old and young, believed that hailstorms and thunder could be raised at will by men called tempestarii, weather-makers, and that people spoke of such storms as an aura levatitia, a raised wind. Agobard sets out to test the belief against Scripture, and argues in sixteen short chapters that to attribute God’s work to men is a double lie, since it gives humans a power that belongs to God alone and denies that God does what he does.
The work is one of the most frequently cited sources for popular belief and magic in the Carolingian world. Beyond its theological argument, it records vivid details of rural practice, including payments made to weather-makers and the story of people who believed that crops beaten down by hail were carried off in ships from a land called Magonia. Historians of folklore, religion and peasant society use it as rare testimony to what ordinary people believed, filtered through the eyes of a learned and sceptical bishop.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 104, Parisiis 1851), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.