Both the Christian Bible and Aristotle's works suggest that water should entirely flood the earth. Though many ancient, medieval, and early modern Europeans relied on these works to understand and explore the relationships between water and earth, particularly sixteenth-century Europeans were especially concerned with why dry land existed. This book investigates why sixteenth-century Europeans were so interested in water's failure to submerge the earth when their predecessors had not been. Analyzing biblical commentaries as well as natural philosophical, geographical, and cosmographical texts from these periods, Lindsay Starkey shows that European sea voyages to the Southern Hemisphere combined with the traditional methods of European scholarship and religious reformations led sixteenth-century Europeans to reinterpret water and earth's ontological and spatial relationships. The manner in which they did so also sheds light on how we can respond to our current water crisis before it is too late.

Hydrocriticism and Colonialism in Latin America is organized around the critical and theoretical “turn” known as hydro-criticism, an innovative approach to the study of the ways in which bodies of water (oceans, seas, rivers, archipelagos, lakes, etc.) impact the study of history, culture, and society. This volume proposes a hydro-critical approach to issues related to the colonial period. The analysed texts demonstrate not only the presence of water and oceanic trajectories as metaphorical devices, but the inherent implication of navigation, ports, islandic territories, drainage systems, floodings and the like in configuration of collective imaginaries, from colonial times to the present. This book encompasses studies of the decisive role water played in the world view from/about the “New World” since the discovery, both for the monarchy and the church, and the impact of oceanic journeys for the advancement of colonization and slavery. In chapters that combine historical, linguistic, literary and ethnographic approaches, this volume constitutes an attempt to expand the scope and methodology of colonial studies. At the same time, the continuity of maritime perspectives reaches the analysis of contemporary literature, thus demonstrating the importance of this critical paradigm for the study of Caribbean cultures. In this respect, studies particularly illuminate the connection between popular beliefs and oceanic dimensions, as well as on issues of gender and ethnicity.

Indigenous Science and Technology focuses on how Nahuas have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods.

The science/faith discussion is often hindered by a fundamental misunderstanding of the role and function of science. This misunderstand was made most evident, with tragic consequences, during the recent pandemic. The ways that science has gone wrong, and the underlying causes of how it goes wrong, will be illustrated here with a series of historical essays describing ideas about the universe, planet Earth, and the evolution of life that were all based on ideas that were reasonable…but ultimately wrong. Some are amusing in retrospect; others are tragic. Theology, philosophy, or even mathematics may lay claim to eternal truths, but in science our very cosmologies change. Just as the major religions have adapted in the face of changing cultural cosmologies, so too has science adapted in the face of challenging new observations and new ideas. Religions and science are strengthened by experiencing a shift in our assumptions; that’s where we find out what’s essential, and what is cultural baggage. Ultimately, the point of our science is not to come up with the “right answer.” Both as scientists and as human beings, we know that sometimes we learn the most by encountering ideas that challenge us. When we say, “I know that can’t be right; so, where did it go wrong?” we gain a greater insight into what we do believe, and what it really means.

This groundbreaking 2007 volume gathers an international team of historians to present the practice of translation as part of cultural history. Although translation is central to the transmission of ideas, the history of translation has generally been neglected by historians, who have left it to specialists in literature and language. This book seeks to achieve an understanding of the contribution of translation to the spread of information in early modern Europe. It focuses on non-fiction: the translation of books on religion, history, politics and especially on science, or 'natural philosophy', as it was generally known at this time. The chapters cover a wide range of languages, including Latin, Greek, Russian, Turkish and Chinese. The book will appeal to scholars and students of the early modern and later periods, to historians of science and of religion, as well as to anyone interested in translation studies.

Martha Pollak offers a pan-European, richly illustrated study of early modern military urbanism, an international style of urban design.

This book features articles contributed by leading scholars and scholar-translators in Translation Studies and Chinese Studies from around the world. Written in English, the articles examine the translation of classical Chinese literature, from classics to poetry, from drama to fiction, into a range of Asian and European languages including Japanese, English, French, Czech, and Danish. The collection therefore provides a platform for readers to make comparative and critical readings of scholarship across languages, cultures, disciplines, and genres. With its integration of textual and paratextual materials, this collection of essays is of potential interest to not only academics in the area of Translation Studies, Chinese Studies, Literary Studies and Intercultural Communications, but it may also appeal to communities outside the academia who simply enjoy reading about literature.

In early modern England, wood scarcity was a widespread concern. Royal officials, artisans, and common people expressed their fears in laws, petitions, and pamphlets, in which they debated the severity of the problem, speculated on its origins, and proposed solutions to it. No Wood, No Kingdom explores these conflicting attempts to understand the problem of scarcity and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England's earliest colonies. Popular accounts have often suggested that deforestation served as a "push" for English colonial expansion. Keith Pluymers shows that wood scarcity in England, rather than a problem of absolute supply and demand, resulted from social conflict over the right to define and regulate resources, difficulties obtaining accurate information, and competing visions for trade, forestry, and the English landscape. Domestic scarcity claims did encourage schemes to develop wood-dependent enterprises in the colonies, but in practice colonies competed with domestic enterprises rather than supplanting them. Moreover, close studies of colonial governments and the actions of individual landholders in Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados demonstrate that colonists experimented with different, often competing approaches to colonial woods and trees, including efforts to manage them as long-term resources, albeit ones that nonetheless brought significant transformations to the land. No Wood, No Kingdom explores the efforts to knot together woods around the Atlantic basin as resources for an English empire and the deep underlying conflicts and confusion that largely frustrated those plans. It speaks to historians of early modern Europe, early America, and the Atlantic World but also offers key insights on early modern resource politics, forest management, and political ecology of interest to readers in the environmental humanities and social sciences as well as those interested in colonialism or economic history.

1. Goes beyond understanding shipwrecks as "dead ships" or "underwater cultural heritage" and challenges the assumptions upon which these common tropes are based. 2. Integrates art practice with archaeological and art historical theory to provide - at last - a critical assessment and theoretical backbone for the middle-aged discipline of nautical archaeology. 3. Combines art historical, archaeological, and artistic epistemologies to formulate new ways of conceptualizing and visualizing the uncanniness of shipwrecks. 4. Includes original artworks produced by the author published for the first time.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.