Water and cognition seem unrelated things, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The essays in this book show how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the “extended mind” and distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book aims to think “water” and “cognition” as distinct critical modes and also to combine them in what we term “watery thinking.” Water and Cognition brings together cognitive science and ecocriticism to ask how the environment influences how humans think, and how they think about thinking. The collection explores how water — as element, as environment, and as part of our bodies — affects the way early modern and contemporary discourses understand cognition.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments and Dedication
- Introduction: Watery Thinking: Minds and Water In and Beyond the Early Modern Period
- Nic Helms and Steve Mentz
- Part 1: Drowning on Stage
- 1. Muddying the Waters: Thinking Thinking in Watery Context with Hamlet
- 2. Ophelia with Spectator: Hamlet and Watery Cognition
- 3. Monsters of the Deep: What Watery Dreams May Come in Shakespeare’s Richard III
- 4. Stink or Swim: Knee-deep in Marlowe’s Edward II
- Part 2: Fluid Metaphors
- 5. Richard of Gloucester’s Elemental Thinking: Water and Sovereignty in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy
- 6. The Sea of the Mind in Early Modern Poetry
- 7. Tears, Rain and Shame: King Lear, Masculine Vulnerability and Environmental Crisis
- Part 3: Forms of Water
- 8. Flake: The Shapes of Snow in Early Modern Culture
- 9. “No darkness but Ignorance”: Thinking Foggily in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama
- 10. Speaking Water and Seeping Memory in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion
- Part 4: Submersive Tendencies
- 11. Estuarial Rage and Resistance in Pulter’s “The Complaint of Thames”
- 12. Jurisdiction: Oceanic Erasure and Indigenous Subjection in Dryden’s Amboyna
- 13. Thinking with the Ocean as Decolonial Strategy: Memory, Loss and the Underwater Archive in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
- Afterword: Thinking Water
- Index
- List of Illustrations
- Figure 4.1: Everard Digby, De arte natandi (1587), G3v. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London.
- Figure 4.2: De arte natandi, I3v. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London.
- Figure 4.3: Frontispiece from the anonymous Treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle (1496). Facsimile edition of 1880, published by Elliot Stock. Image courtesy of University of Toronto Libraries.
- Figure 4.4: A torpedo from Guillaume Rondelet’s De piscibus marinis (1554), p. 358. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica).
- Figure 4.5: Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586), p. 52. Image courtesy of Penn State University Libraries.
- Figure 4.6: Rondelet’s “swallow,” De piscibus marinis, p. 284. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica).
- Figure 8.1: “De variis figuris niuium.” Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555).
- Figures 8.2 and 8.3: Glass plate negatives from the Bentley Snow Crystal Collection. Used by permission of the Buffalo Museum of Science.
- Figure 8.4: “The many sorts of snow that fall in Spitzbergen.” Frederick Martens, Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise-Beschreibung, gethan im Jahre 1671 (Hamburg, 1675).
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