Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Why Water?
- 1 Athens and Jerusalem on Water
- Part I Water in Exegetical, Natural Philosophical, Cosmographical, and Geographical Texts of c.1000–1600
- Part II Why Water
- Afterword : The Redefinition of the Universe and the Twenty-First-Century Water Crisis
- General Bibliography
- Index
5 - Water in Newly Rediscovered Ancient and Medieval Texts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Why Water?
- 1 Athens and Jerusalem on Water
- Part I Water in Exegetical, Natural Philosophical, Cosmographical, and Geographical Texts of c.1000–1600
- Part II Why Water
- Afterword : The Redefinition of the Universe and the Twenty-First-Century Water Crisis
- General Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter explores how Ptolemy's Geography and medieval Jewish exegesis helped reshape sixteenth-century European views on water and the relationship between the world's landmasses and waterways. Whereas Ptolemy's Geography argued that there was more land and less water in the world than medieval Europeans typically thought, medieval Jewish scholars explained the dry land's existence through God's more direct intervention into the world than their medieval Christian contemporaries. It argues that the method through which sixteenth-century European scholars studied the world in which they lived meant that the books they read shaped the ways in which they conceptualized the arrangement of the world's landmasses and bodies of water, and the ontological status of that relationship.
Keywords: Ptolemy's Geography; Jewish exegesis; humanism; Nicholas of Lyra; Biblia Rabbinica; Christian Hebraism
Previously there were more troubles, since it was disputed whether the heaven had a spherical shape, as there were those who asserted that the earth's orb swims in the Ocean, just as a ball swims in water, thus: with its top sticking out to such an extent and with all the rest being covered by water; and in many other things they likewise have erred, who spread this art (artem) in writing. Now, since by many others, especially by Ptolemy, the thread is stretched out by whose lead anyone is easily able to free themselves from this labyrinth, the way is laid out through which you come quickly to the summit of this art without losses – a way that they ignore, to whom it is proper to ramble frequently in the explication of good authors.
‒ Erasmus of Rotterdam, dedication letter to the 1533 Basel edition of Ptolemy‘s GeographyIn the dedication letter he wrote to a Greek edition of Ptolemy's Geography that the Froben press produced in Basel in 1533, Erasmus of Rotterdam credited Ptolemy's work especially with changing the way his contemporaries conceptualized the spatial relationship between water and earth. According to Erasmus, prior to the recovery of Ptolemy's Geography in the current period, some Europeans had assumed that the earth floated in water much like a ball with its dry part sticking out in the Northern Hemisphere and with water submerging its Southern Hemisphere.
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- Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and BeyondRedefining the Universe through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging, pp. 165 - 190Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020