Abstract

This introduction presents the work's larger argument that fifteenth-and sixteenth-century European sea voyages caused Europeans to re-examine why water did not flood the earth. This introduction also proposes that the topic of water allows for the investigation of several historiographical questions: how Europeans viewed the relationship between the natural, preternatural, and supernatural from the ancient period into the sixteenth century; how Europeans viewed God's connection to the universe from the ancient period into the sixteenth century; and how these overseas voyages in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries influenced Europeans’ dependency on textual authorities for their worldviews. It also suggests that this study is of interest to those scholars working in blue cultural studies.

Keywords: wonder; blue humanities; history of water; religious reformations; overseas voyages

Dixit vero Deus congregentur aquae quae sub caelo sunt in locum unum et appareat arida factumque est ita et vocavit Deus aridam terram congregationesque aquarum appellavit maria at vidit Deus quod esset bonum.

Und Gott sprach: Es samle sich das wasser unter dem himel an sondere orter, das man das trocken sehe. Und es geschach also. Und Gott nennet das trocken Erde, und die samlung der wasser nennet er Meere. Und Gott sahe es fur gut an.

God said againe, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered into one place, & let the drye land appeare. And it was so. And God called the drye land, Earth, & he called the gathering together of the waters, Seas: & God sawe that it was good.

The earth is surrounded by water, just as that is by the sphere of air, and that again by the sphere called that of fire (which is the outermost both on the common view and on ours). Now the sun, moving as it does, sets up processes of change and becoming and decay, and by its agency the finest and sweetest water is every day carried up and is dissolved into vapor and rises to the upper region, where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth. This, as we have said before, is the regular course of nature.