The Restless Sea: Storm, Shipwreck and the Mediterranean, c.1000–1700
- Autores: Amy G. Remensnyder
- Localización: A Plural Peninsula: Studies in Honour of Professor Simon Barton / coord. por Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, 2023, ISBN 9789004425460, págs. 15-69
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Pre-modern mariners knew the Mediterranean as a seascape of risk, where certain stretches of water anchored memories of past disasters and harboured configurations of current, coast, wind, wave, and sea-bottom warning of potential dangers in the present. Experienced by humans sometimes as opportunity, but more often as emergency or crisis, storm and shipwreck were complex manifestations of the Mediterranean as an other-than-human natural force in history, which could delay, re-orient, or thwart human maritime movement and thus change destinies. Storm and shipwreck also plunge the sea into the history of emotions and of disaster communities. Evanescent emotional communities of fear formed aboard ships confronting extreme weather and other marine emergencies. Storm and shipwreck also highlight the marine environment as a hitherto unrecognised participant in the politics of religious difference so significant to the history of the Mediterranean in this half millennium. Maritime emergencies could precipitate interfaith tensions among people on board or cause crises leading to conversion. Shipwreck even sent waves to land that broke against the shore’s religious and political antagonisms and eddied through the geography of Mediterranean slavery.
