The Floods Overflow Me: Currents of Time and Water in Early Medieval England
Dr Mike Bintley
Mike Bintley is an Associate Professor in Medieval English Literature at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England (2015) and Settlements and Strongholds in Early Medieval England: Texts, Landscapes, and Material Culture (2020), and co-author of Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages (2023).
About the event
How did people living in the early Middle Ages think and feel about the waters that flowed through, across, and around the landscapes they inhabited? What efforts can we make to reconstruct their sensory and intellectual engagements through evidence of medieval experience from textual and material sources? Drawing on documentary evidence from literature, historical sources, and the material environment, this talk will outline a creative-critical approach to recreating an embodied experience of the seas, rivers, and other forms of water that shaped the thought-worlds of early medieval England. We will cross tempestuous oceans, plumb bottomless depths, and paddle between waterlocked landmasses, all to the tune of Old English poetry’s lithe and living waters.