IMC 2016: Sessions
Session 1230: Let the Waters Bring Forth: Conceptualising Water in the Early Middle Ages
Wednesday 6 July 2016, 14.15-15.45
Sponsor: | Northern / Early Medieval Interdisciplinary Conference Series |
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Organisers: | Meg Boulton, Independent Scholar Carolyn Twomey, Department of History, Boston College, Massachusetts |
Moderator/Chair: | Carolyn Twomey, Department of History, Boston College, Massachusetts |
Paper 1230-a | Pearls before Paradise: Liminal Spaces, Precious Stones, and Heavenly Waters in Early Christian Mosaics (Language: English) Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Art History - Decorative Arts, Religious Life, Theology |
Paper 1230-b | Swimming for Pleasure and Profit in Anglo-Saxon England (Language: English) Index terms: Daily Life, Maritime and Naval Studies, Social History |
Paper 1230-c | Eanswythe's Water: Landscape, Lore, and Literature in Early Medieval Folkestone (Language: English) Index terms: Archaeology - Sites, Daily Life, Language and Literature - Old English |
Abstract | Alongside food flows water. Like food it is indispensable and life giving, possessed of sacred and secular understandings in the medieval world. Water is both practical and symbolic, deeply liked to social systems and spiritual significances; whether a drop blessed by saintly figures or relics, an image of paradisal waters, or a river running to the sea, water was an integral part of the natural landscape, religious lives, cultural expressions, and physical needs of early medieval men and women. These sessions present a range of the various cultural and religious understandings of water in the early medieval period across disciplines. |