7 - The Same River Twice

Summary

This concluding chapter showcases the ways that rivers and their stories bound stories and places across the ages, despite very tangible changes to the environmental and urban contexts of Europe post 1000. These stories helped people on the other end of the year 1000 shift to negotiate, as had Ausonius and Fortunatus, between change and continuity, past and present. It starts with a discussion of a thirteenth century artwork, the Metz ceiling, connecting it to Late Antique and early medieval ideas of hybrid animals, hybrid identities, and other kinds of barrier crossing in and around water. It concludes with an exploration of the encyclopedic Liber Floridus (c. 1100) as hybrid/composite text. How did its author use the stories of the past? How did artists and authors in the Central Middle Ages assess and assemble the inherited ideas about rivers and their relation to human identity? Just as rivers are continually reshaped yet (mostly) endure, their stories and uses shift over time, yet persist. There is always a riverscape that is shaping contemporary cultures that are also looking back to the past to find meaning in nature.