Meteorological events such as severe storms, floods or droughts are often referred to as extreme events. The impact of such events on society is immense and numerous efforts have been devoted to study them. Many proxy indicators in paleoclimate variability reconstructions are sensitive to such extremes, and a careful quantification of their link to environmental parameters is indispensable. In this paper we determine the relationship between typical states of the atmospheric circulation over and around the North Atlantic, on the one hand, and extreme events, on the other. We apply a novel statistical approach to associate extremes and weather regimes. This study enables us to infer the atmospheric conditions that prevailed in the North Atlantic region during key periods of the recent past.