Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Why Water?
- 1 Athens and Jerusalem on Water
- Part I Water in Exegetical, Natural Philosophical, Cosmographical, and Geographical Texts of c.1000–1600
- Part II Why Water
- Afterword : The Redefinition of the Universe and the Twenty-First-Century Water Crisis
- General Bibliography
- Index
Afterword : The Redefinition of the Universe and the Twenty-First-Century Water Crisis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Why Water?
- 1 Athens and Jerusalem on Water
- Part I Water in Exegetical, Natural Philosophical, Cosmographical, and Geographical Texts of c.1000–1600
- Part II Why Water
- Afterword : The Redefinition of the Universe and the Twenty-First-Century Water Crisis
- General Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract This afterword reflects on the implications of the historical study undertaken in the rest of the book for our current water crisis. Without ignoring the different contexts in which these Europeans wrote and twenty-first-century people live, it proposes that the manner in which sixteenth-century Europeans came to rethink water's status and position vis-a-vis the earth's can provide some insight into how twenty-first-century advocates for a different relationship between people and – at least fresh, if not all – water can perhaps awaken people's interest and active intervention into what is already a growing global problem.
Key Words: blue humanities; climate change; water scarcity; water contamination; natural disasters
Living things depend on water, but water does not depend on living things. It has a life of its own.
‒ E.C. Pielou, Fresh Water (1998)This great and excellent wisdom [that God created and governs the world], having been learned through mind, eyes, and hands, as I said, is included in the comprehensive study of the physical world.
‒ Philipp Melanchthon, Initia doctrinae physicae (1549)These quotes from Pielou's Fresh Water and Melanchthon's Initia doctrinae physicae point to some of the major differences in the way the relationship between water, earth, and people as well as water and earth's place in the universe are conceptulized by sixteenth-century Europeans and their late twentieth-and twenty-first-century descendants. For Melanchthon as for many of his contemporaries as we have seen repeatedly throughout this book, water and earth were a part of God's created universe, their ontological and spatial relationships designed ultimately for human needs and human stewardship. For Melanchthon, his textbook, which drew on the accumulated wisdom of ancient scholars such as Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, could teach Europeans to study the physical world comprehensively, and in exploring this created universe through Melanchthon's explanation of these ancient texts, his readers could learn about their relationship to its creator. The quote from Pielou's Fresh Water suggests a radically different notion of the universe and its relationship to water among her late twentieth-century readers.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and BeyondRedefining the Universe through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging, pp. 245 - 256Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020