Introduction : Watery Thinking: Minds and Water In and Beyond the Early Modern Period

Abstract

Water and cognition would seem to be unrelated, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The animating claim of this book shows how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the “extended mind” and other forms of distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book contains contributions by influential voices in both early modern cognitive studies and the blue humanities, but its central project aims not only to think “water” and “cognition” as distinct critical modes, but also to combine them in what this introduction terms “watery thinking.”