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
7 - Sea Voyages and the Water-Earth Relationship
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 argues that it was fifteenth-and sixteenth-century sea voyages especially to the southern hemisphere that ultimately explain why particularly sixteenth-century Europeans re-evaluated the ontological and spatial relationships between water and earth. Though certainly there were some medieval scholars who argued differently, the most prevalent spatial model of the world's landmasses and waterways in the late middle ages positioned the dry land in the northern hemisphere and placed a large amount of water in the southern hemisphere. As Europeans sailed down the west coast of Africa and to South America, the water that carried them and the texts that circulated about these voyages disproved many of the basic earlier assumptions about the water-earth spatial and ontological relationships.
Key Words: voyages of discovery; encounters; Amerigo Vespucci; Gerard Mercator; southern hemisphere
[That land has been discovered (invenio), which ought to be called a new world] contradicts the opinion of our ancient authorities, as most of them claimed that there is no continent south of the equator, but rather a great sea, which they called the Atlantic. And if they affirmed that there was a continent there, they denied that it was habitable land for many reasons. But my last voyage revealed their opinion is false and that the contrary is entirely true, since I discovered a continent in those southern regions that is inhabited by more numerous people and animals than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa.
‒ Amerigo Vespucci [?], Mundus novus (1504)Claiming to be the text of a letter from Amerigo Vespucci about his third voyage to the Western Hemisphere, the widely circulated Mundus novus reveals the major influence behind sixteenth-century Europeans’ reclassification of the water-earth relationship and their reconceptualization of the spatial arrangement between the world's landmasses and bodies of water. Late fifteenth-and sixteenth-century European sea voyages and what these voyages showed and suggested about the locations of earth and water influenced this reclassification and reconceptualization. They also helped lead Europeans in this period to apply their bookish methods to this relationship‘s ontological status and spatial arrangement and to use it as a topic in which to think through God's connection to the universe and what people should learn from that connection, as we have explored in Chapters 5 and 6.
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- Information
- Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and BeyondRedefining the Universe through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging, pp. 217 - 244Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020