Elements in the Medieval World : Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Water

The thirteen essays and the final poem contained in this volume reflect the fundamental importance of water across the whole breadth of medieval endeavour and understanding, as both source of life, and object of scholarly fascination, whose manifestations were the source of rich symbolism and imaginings. Ranging geographically from Ireland to the Arab world and from Iceland to Byzantium and chronologically from the fourth century CE to the sixteenth, the essays explore perceptions and theories of water through a wide range of approaches.
Contributors are Michael Bintley, Tom Birkett, Laura Borghetti, Rafał Borysławski, Marilina Cesario, Marusca Francini, Kelly Grovier, Deborah Hayden, Simon Karstens, Andreas Lammer, David Livingstone, Luca Loschiavo, Hugh Magennis, Colin Fitzpatrick Murtha, François Quiviger, Elisa Ramazzina, and Karl Whittington.

Marilina Cesario holds a Ph.D in medieval studies from the University of Manchester (2009). She is currently Reader in the Earliest Writings in English at Queen’s University, Belfast. She has published in the fields of early medieval weather and astronomy, prognostication, reception of classical mythology in the early Middle Ages, and on manuscript studies. She is the editor with H. Magennis of Aspects of Knowledge: Preserving and Reinventing Traditions of Learning in the Middle Ages (2018).
Hugh Magennis is Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published widely on Old English and related literature, specialising particularly in saints’ lives, translation and poetic tradition. Among his publications are The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Translating Beowulf (both 2011) and, most recently, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library edition and translation Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints (2020) (with J. Kramer and R. Norris). Hugh Magennis is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the English Association.
Elisa Ramazzina received her doctorate in Germanic Philology from the University of Paiva. Her research focuses on medieval landscape and natural world, particularly water, and has published in the fields of early medieval English poetry, meteorology, monster studies, medieval medicine and ecocriticism.