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Water As Medieval Intellectual Entity

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Water as Medieval Intellectual Entity Case Studies in Twelfth-Century Western Monasticism James L. Smith 10406629 BA(Hons) W.Aust (2008), GCRC QUT (2010) This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History of The University of Western Australia School of Humanities Discipline of History 2013 ii ABSTRACT In this thesis, the imagery of water serves as a point of focus for an inquiry into the composition of medieval abstract space. As a ubiquitous element of human life with distinct properties and connotations across time, water touches, and has ever touched upon, both what is historically and culturally unique and what is ongoing within environmental imagination. This study examines the significance and the deployment of environmental imagery in the composition, narration, and recollection of organised thought in the Middle Ages. I argue that images of environment in systematic ecological arrangement perform a key role in revealing medieval spaces of thought. The intellectual and imaginative uses of water in medieval thought merge mind and environment, and bind intellection and phenomenon within the spaces of the inner world. This thesis suggests that the medieval logic of these patterned spaces links us intimately to the internal structures of sense-making in a distinct intellectual milieu—that of monastic, twelfth-century, Northern European Christendom—and to the understanding of environment that it implied, be it cultural, religious, or quotidian. In this thesis, I analyse the imagery and the rhetoric of water in various texts as a means to explore the potential meanings of water as an abstract entity in medieval thought. Through literary case studies of water in various expressive forms—diagrammatic representation, poetry, landscape narrative, and epistolary communication—I trace its existence as a thought system within the history of ideas that is both uniquely medieval and suggestive of broader sense-making patterns. The thesis opens with the interpretation of water as complex metaphor, both in terms of its longue durée and generalised use, and in a specifically medieval context. The second chapter delves deeper into the medieval properties of water metaphor through an exploration of three key themes: the role of water metaphor in the metaphysical, salvific and intellectual world of Western Christendom, the elemental properties of water and their metaphorical resonances, and the role of water metaphor in the shaping of rhetoric. The third chapter focuses on the diagrammatic representation of Pierpont Morgan M. 982, a manuscript leaf depicting Lady Philosophia nourishing the Seven Liberal Arts with streams of knowledge. In this diagram, it is the thematics of water that give the representation a flow of energy and a sense of motion within an imagined hydrological cycle. The fourth chapter comprises a reading of the Fons Philosophiae, a didactic poem by the Regular Canon Godfrey of Saint-Victor. In the poem, a river system pouring fourth from a lofty mountain flows across the plains of knowledge, providing a space for the poet‘s pilgrim-like persona to iii pass through and parse the Seven Liberal Arts, assessing the respective qualities of their rivers in a quest for their head waters in theology. The fifth chapter interprets the epistolary style of the Benedictine Abbot Peter of Celle, a notable letter writer and Churchman. Within Peter‘s letters, small parables and metaphorical flourishes demonstrate the compressed power of complex water metaphor by intermingling scripture and aqueous imagery to enliven the moral message, using the properties of water as an aide. Furthermore, the use of aqueous metaphor suggests a hydrological imagining of intellectual and epistolary community. The sixth and final chapter explores the anonymous Description of Clairvaux, a ‗mirror‘ of monastic life in which moral and salvific meanings are imbued in a quotidian account. Descriptions of the landscape, hydrological practices and moral mission of Cistercianism merge within a seemingly simple scene of paradisal locus amoenus and virtuous labour, making water the channel connecting daily experience and a grander metaphysical purpose. This thesis provides a contribution to a new understanding of environmental imagination and knowledge visualisation in twelfth-century monasticism, coupled with insights of wider relevance to the study of relationships between water and intellectual culture. By revealing links between the shaping of inner space and the composition of word and image, it enables a reading of primary sources and textual media rooted in the imaginative processes of their creators. The intellectual entity of water, through metaphor, becomes an image of the vital principle, the vis naturae or élan vital, in intellectual life. Furthermore, this intellectual life is ordered through a fundamental pattern of organised distribution, a flow of life source to its manifold manifestations. *** iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to begin by acknowledging everyone who has given me the inspiration and advice to finish this PhD thesis. I would like to thank my mother Diane for her unceasing support and patience during these last four years, and my family in Australia and the United Kingdom. This thesis is also dedicated to the memory of my grandmother Margaret and my aunt Carolyn, long supportive of my academic career but sadly no longer with us. I would like to thank my girlfriend Debs for cheering me up and for believing in me. It was during the course of this thesis that we came together, and it was through her kindness, humour, and advice that it was completed. The list of friends that I have made, enjoyed the company of, worked with, argued with, built with, and experienced PhD life with is too great to list in full here. They span the globe, and have made my life, and my thesis, richer. I would especially like to thank (in no particular order) Chris Lin, Rebecca Rey, Colin Yeo, Phil Kierle, Brett Hirsch, Ruth Morgan, Aisling Blackmore, Imogen Forbes- Macphail, Charmaine Fernandez, Andrew Broertjes, Danau Tanu, and Jo Hawkins of UWA for enriching my academic and personal life during my PhD. I would also like to thank Jane Héloïse- Nancarrow and Kats Handel in particular for their friendship, both individually and together with their fellow PhD students at the University of York. Finally, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my school friends from Helena College for keeping me in touch with the comings and goings beyond the academic world. The encouragement, advice, and inspiration that have shaped and nourished both this thesis and its author came from many, for which I am eternally grateful. I offer special thanks to my supervisors Professors Philippa Maddern and Andrew Lynch for their generous advice, careful reading, rigorous interrogation of drafts, and personal support. Sadly, Philippa is no longer with us as of the final revisions for this thesis, but saw the entire process of its production through to the end with inexhaustible compassion, enthusiasm, and attention to detail. I will remember you always, and seek to follow your good example in life and in research. Vale. I offer my thanks to the staff and students of the school of Humanities at the University of Western Australia for their assistance in matters personal, professional, and practical. I offer particular thanks to the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group, the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotion, the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, the Postgraduate Student Association, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia for providing frequent and well-conceived opportunities for inspiration and training. I would like to thank all of those who have generously supported my doctorate and career, with special thanks to the Australian Research Council. I would like to thank the Graduate Research School, the School of Humanities, and Convocation at UWA for v travel funding. I also would like to thank the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the Centre for the History of Emotion, the New Chaucer Society, and the George Washington Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute for conference support. Finally, I am pleased to thank the many overseas members of the academic community who have enriched this thesis over the years. I offer thanks to the staff and students of the university of York for their hospitality and support for the duration of my 2011 Worldwide Universities Network exchange to the United Kingdom. I also offer thanks to new friends from the medievalist community of the United States for their insights, collegiality and hospitality during three conference visits to Kalamazoo, Portland, and Washington, D.C. in 2012 and 2013. Thank you, one and all. *** vi Candidate‘s Declaration: This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for publication. *** vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................................................ III TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................................................................... VIII FIGURES .............................................................................................................................................................................
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