Sacralidades fluidas: o mar e as fronteiras do conhecimento na ficção medieval

Abstract

Despite its remarkable recurrence in medieval literature, the sea, because of its intrinsic fluidity, is probably one of the most complex and difficult spaces to examine. That is why the maritime space and what happens in it is so often associated with the marvelous and the miracle, as long as we understand these terms as cognitive categories, that is to say, as signs of the irruption of an exogenous element marked by alterity that implies a rupture, a questioning attitude, an opening to the unknown, and a reconfiguration of the worldview. As a place of revelation, conversion and many other transformations, final frontier between the sacred and the profane, the world and other world, heaven and earth, the appeal of transcendence and the specter of submersion in the abyss, unique space of mediation between the universe of topoi and poetic innovation, can the sea represented by fictional narrative appear as a vast metaphor of Knowledge?