A special issue of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews —entitled “Mediterranean Holocene Climate, Environment and Human Societies”—demonstrates why and how historians interested in premodern environmental history should work collaboratively across disciplinary boundaries to draw conclusions. A series of mini–case studies and a survey of recent scholarship, as prompted by this collection, explores the advantages and challenges of attempting to realize such consilience. Although the special issue focuses on Mediterranean Europe during the late antique–medieval periods, all historians interested in the complex relationship between climate and societal change will find that it yields deeper reflections and issues.

Two independent molecular clock analyses ( mcas ) reveal that measles ( mv ) diverged from rinderpest ( rpv ) c. 1000 c.e. This evidence, when conjoined with written accounts of non-Justinianic plagues in 569–570 and 986–988 and zoo-archaeological discoveries regarding early medieval mass bovine mortalities, suggests that a now-extinct morbillivirus, ancestral to mv and rpv , broke out episodically in the early Middle Ages, causing large mortalities in both species. Tentative diagnoses of an mv – rpv ancestor help to untangle early medieval accounts of human–bovine disease and facilitate an assessment of the consequences of the 569–570 and 986–988 plagues.