On Monday, April 8, millions of Americans were watching the sky as darkness fell over the earth during the total eclipse of the sun. But then we went back to our daily chores inside homes and businesses and office buildings. Not so, the medieval monks of Europe. The rural countryside of England, Ireland and western Europe were dotted with monasteries which became the centers of Catholic Christianity. These Benedictine monks took diligent notes of their world, from battles of war to the deaths of kings and popes to cats visiting their garden! But they also kept meticulous records about natural events all around them – the timing of early buds in the spring, the dates of the first frost each year, and the darkening and shape of the moon. In the book of Revelation, the end of times is described as when “… the full moon became like blood …” (Rev. 6:12-14). Therefore, the monks paid particular attention to the color of the moon. Scientists today have studied these journals from the 12th and 13th centuries and compared them to ice core and tree ring data. From these records they believe that there were many volcanic eruptions that introduced ash particles into the Earth’s atmosphere blocking out the sun’s solar radiation. These ashes contributed to a Little Ice Age in which temperatures were colder than normal. Rivers and canals were frozen over, glaciers expanded into farmlands, and famine was more common in areas with shorter growing seasons.  The violinmaker Antonio Stradivari produced his instruments during the Little Ice Age. The colder climate may have caused the wood that was used in his violins to be denser than in warmer periods and to contribute to the exquisite tone of his instruments. In the words of St. Paul, God has “fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek him…though indeed he is not far from any one of us.” (Acts 17). – – – Fr. Jim