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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
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-aPearls before Paradise: Liminal Spaces, Precious Stones, and Heavenly Waters in Early Christian Mosaics
(Language: English)
Meg Boulton, Independent Scholar
Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Art History - Decorative Arts, Religious Life, Theology
Paper 1230-bSwimming for Pleasure and Profit in Anglo-Saxon England
(Language: English)
Simon Trafford, Institute of Historical Research, University of London
Index terms: Daily Life, Maritime and Naval Studies, Social History
Paper 1230-cEanswythe's Water: Landscape, Lore, and Literature in Early Medieval Folkestone
(Language: English)
Michael Bintley, School of Humanities, Canterbury Christ Church University
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.