from landscapes to seascapes

The mention of "maritime humanities" often makes people ask if I pretend to study dolphins. That is not exactly the idea. Undoubtedly, maritime humanities, as a transdisciplinary area of studies, deal just with humans. Nonetheless, human condition is understood, in the aftermath of the reflection of Hans Blumenberg on the maritime nature of modernity, as a destiny connected to the sea. Yet obviously, the maritime history of European imagination did not start with the great explorations of the 15th and 16th centuries. Also the premodern period, especially late Middle Ages, created their own images and believes related to the sea, the risks of a maritime travel, as well as the other people to be encountered on the opposite shore.
Different seas create separate, distinctive sets of concepts and symbols, their specific seascapes. Just to give an example, the Mediterranean as the southern frontier of Europe was associated with the great divide between Western Christianity and Islam. As an imagined space, it was conceptualised through the lens of pilgrimage and holy war, negotium crucis. It contributed to the development of a significant, coherent set of rules, principles and values associated with the Crusades (that influenced the subsequent, early-modern maritime endeavours of the Europeans, including the conquest of the New World). At the same time, also other, suggestive or even haunting images of the sea were produced, just to mention the strange cartographic fantasy produced by Opicinus de Canistris (1296-1353), an Italian priest and mystic who inscribed in the outline of the northern and the southern shores of the Mediterranean the figures of a man and a woman: Adam and Eve at the moment of committing the original sin. The expanse of water was conceptualised as Diabolicum Mare, the Satanic Sea leading to the fall of the mankind.
On the other hand, the Black Sea was almost an exclusive domain of the Byzantine empire till the fall of the Constantinople. Meanwhile, the Byzantium remained essentially a land power that in time ceded the control and the exploitation of the sea to the Mediterranean maritime states, Venice and Genoa, who helped to revive the commerce that had been thriving in the Antiquity. Apparently, it was, to a greater degree, a “neutral” space of trade instead of war, especially if we compare it with the symbolically and ideologically charged conflict as the Crusades. Nonetheless, the images of alterity to be found on the opposite shore might still be troubling. The Barbarians inhabiting the northern and north-eastern shores of the Black Sea were a constant preoccupation. Also the haunting, macabre factor of the imagination was present, since it was from Kaffa, a city the Genoese purchased in the late 13th century from the Golden Horde, that the great pandemic called the Black Death entered Europe in 1347.
On the other hand, the early-modern Atlantic perspective is naturally proper for someone who comes from the area of Portuguese studies. Since the beginnings of my academic career, I was reading texts that reflected a maritime horizon, the lure of new discoveries, the bitterness and misery of catastrophes on the African shore compiled in História tragico-marítima by Bernardo de Brito. 

Vertical Divider

Vertical Divider

my essays in maritime humanities