Symposium: Exploring the Medieval and Renaissance Maritime Humanities

The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies will host its annual symposium on Friday, February 21 and the morning of Saturday, February 22. This event brings together six scholars from OSU and around the country to discuss this emergent field of study.  Papers from historical, literary and environmental perspectives will address such topics as underwater archaeology and the ethics of recovering historic shipwrecks; evolving patterns of fishing and consumption; shipboard entertainers; and the representation of the sea in the poetry of Dante.  A day of talks on Friday will be followed by a roundtable discussion on Saturday morning. All are welcome to participate. 

The keynote speaker will be Dr. Roberta Morosini (European Languages and Transcultural Studies, UCLA), presenting “Between Discordant Shores: Mobility, Blu Humanism and the Futures of Europe, from Dante to Petrarch."

Morosini continues her research on the Mediterranean in Dante’s Commedia as both a literary and geopolitical space, exploring it through a cartographic lens. In this paper, she examines the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, emphasizing the significance of a "sea-level" perspective, or Blu Humanism, as envisioned by Paul Gilroy. She argues that these authors share a common maritime perspective on humanism and shows how what Édouard Glissant calls "archipelagic thought" is rooted in their works, offering a framework for thinking beyond traditional, fixed geographies. The talk specifically explores the advantages of thinking through water in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio’s works, and particularly how Dante’s forced mobility—his exile—compelled him to prioritize Mediterranean crossings and migrations, including Europa’s navigation, taken against her will on the back of the bull. Morosini terms this a Mediterranean-centric perspective, which rethinks Europe from the vantage point of the water. This cartographic approach challenges geocultural notions of ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ while reimagining spaces of alterity

More information, including the location and schedule is coming soon. For more information, email moriarty.8@osu.edu and request to be added to one of the CMRS mailing lists. 

Speakers

Ellen Arnold (History, OSU)

Richard C Hoffmann (History, York U, Canada)

Roberta Morosini (European Languages and Transcultural Studies, UCLA)

Amanda Respess (History, OSU Marion)

Sara Rich (Assistant Professor, Coastal Carolina U.)

James Seth (Associate Professor, English, Central Washington University)

Schedule

9:30-9:45: Welcome

 9:45-11:15: Session 1- Ellen Arnold, "Saints by the Sea: Faith, Fear and Forgiveness" and  Amanda Respess, "Sea Change: An Indian Ocean Case Study of Continuity and Rupture"

11:15-11:30: Break

11:30-12:15: Session 2- Richard Hoffmann, “All the Fish in the Sea?”

12:15-2:00: Lunch

2:00-3:30: Session 3- James Seth, "World Upside Down: Early Modern Maritime Theatre and the Carnivalesque" and Sara Rich,  title TBA. 

3:30-4:00: Break

4:00-5:15 Keynote: Roberta Morosini:  “Between Discordant Shores: Mobility, Blu Humanism and the Futures of Europe, from Dante to Petrarch."

Abstracts

Ellen Arnold: "Saints by the Sea: Faith, Fear and Forgiveness"

This talk will look at miracle stories told about coastal monastic communities, arguing that the liminal spaces inhabited by coastal monasteries offered both opportunities for successful monastic life and a series of human and environmental risks unique to sea-side communities.

Richard Hoffman: “All the Fish in the Sea?”

Europeans spent the medieval millennium gradually finding their course to capture, trade, and consume oceanic fishes.  Knowing how to navigate across a sea is not knowing how consistently to find and catch fish in it.  That takes generations of practical experience on the water.  For five centuries the catch was almost exclusively creatures from fresh, estuarine, anadromous or inshore habitats: eel, salmon, sturgeon, herring and some flatfishes. Diverse written sources exhibit more fear than familiarity with the sea.  Even after what has been labeled the marine fisheries revolution of 1000CE reflected regional startups of what would become major 12^th-13^th century commercial fisheries -- herring, cod, hake and sardine -- scholastic natural philosophers still knew Aristotle better than they did any marine species.  Only the experience and expertise of mostly illiterate fishers and traders enabled late medieval expansion offshore to bring more cod, herring, tuna and other fishes, all in preserved form, to fewer but often wealthier consumers far from the productive waters. 

Amanda Respess: "Sea Change: An Indian Ocean Case Study of Continuity and Rupture"

This talk considers the consequences of the escape by sea of the survivors of the 1366 massacre of the Muslim community of Quanzhou, China for globalized Southeast Asia. The destruction of the port city’s Muslim community and radical shifts in Chinese maritime policy after the fall of the Yuan dynasty led to a dramatic reconfiguration of Indian Ocean trade routes that saw the development of major commercial centers in Ayutthaya and Malacca. A sequence of fifteenth-century shipwrecks recovered from Southeast Asian waters demonstrate the emergence of alternate routes of tried-and-true products, while the mimicry of Islamicate and Asian drug jars by Spanish and Italian ceramicists signaled a growing globalized lust for Eastern drugs and medical materials that would have lasting consequences. As the Islamization of the Strait of Malacca intensified in the mid-fifteenth century and the Bosporus strait came under Muslim control with the Fall of Constantinople, Muslim maritime Southeast Asia took on added global significance. Artifacts recovered from period shipwrecks, including Chinese and Southeast Asian ceramics and gunpowder weapons, demonstrate the complicated but enduring nature of movement and exchange across these routes in an era of ever-changing maritime realities.

 James Seth: "World Upside Down: Early Modern Maritime Theatre and the Carnivalesque"

Early modern European exploration, trade, colonization, and privateering transformed the sea into a space of work, commerce, and play. While music has historically been a favorite pastime for seafarers, sea theatre was another important form of recreation in this period. Shipboard performers staged plays and mock ceremonies for diversion as well as for commemorations. Owing to the title, I draw on Bakhtinian theory of carnival to engage with historical examples of maritime theatre, comparing and distinguishing the world of carnival on land and that which existed and thrived at sea. A significant focus of my talk will be on one of the most well-known traditions in maritime culture, “crossing the line,” an initiation ceremony signifying the ship’s crossing the equator or a similar oceanic threshold. This initiation ceremony is arguably the most theatrical event aboard ship; a senior officer performs the role of Neptune, tasking novice sailors with a series of difficult, demeaning, or disgusting tasks. I will bring together examples of various types of play-acting from English, French, and Dutch sources that subvert the social, hierarchal, and behavioral rules of the landed world. Together, these performances evoke important questions about the culture and sociology of shipboard life, the ritual preparations of extensive voyages, and the way that seafarers created their own carnival at sea.

Bios

Ellen Arnold, a Senior Lecturer at the Ohio State University as of 2024, is an environmental historian with a specialization in medieval religious history, cultural history, and water history. Drawn to the study of the past for its capacity to explore complex and multifaceted human relationships with each other and the natural world, Ellen finds that stories about the past offer both unique perspectives and deep connections to contemporary life. Her notable publication, Medieval Riverscapes: Environmental Meaning and Memory in Northwest Europe, ca. 300-1100, examines the profound religious and cultural history of medieval Europe's interactions with rivers. Utilizing the concept of "environmental exegesis," Ellen delves into medieval narrative sources to reveal how authors depicted rivers, linking them to saints, morality, and cultural values through various forms of literature including poetry, miracle stories, histories, chronicles, artworks, and law codes. Her other significant works include Water In World History (2025), part of Routledge’s Themes in World History series, and Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes (2013). 

Richard C. Hoffmann is a professor emeritus and senior scholar in the Department of History at York University, Toronto. His most recent book is The Catch. An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries, published in May 2023 and available in several formats from Cambridge University Press. trained at Wisconsin and Yale in interdisciplinary medieval studies/economic history and spent his entire career (1971-2009 retirement) at York University in Toronto, evolving into a pioneer of medieval environmental history. He has authored 70 articles and chapters; 3 prize-winning books in the field, including An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2016); and now The Catch. An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries (Cambridge, 2023). A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 2017, he has taken equal pride from mentoring undergrads, post-grads, postdocs, and others who obtained tenured positions in a dozen North American and European universities. 

Roberta Morosini is a professor in the department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA. Her research interests lie in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Culture and Literature in a pan-Mediterranean perspective, with a sea level approach and a strong belief in the  Archipelagic thought, for a geo-philology of the sea.  These interests include studies of the Mediterranean, metaliterary and geocritical studies, and spatial and cartographic writings from Dante to Renaissance island books. Part of her pan-Mediterranean research evolves around the study of Christian-Muslim Relations and mis-representations of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam as in her forthcoming book Boccaccio and the Invention of Islam. Writing Otherness and Crossing Faiths in the Mediterranean  (De Gruyter).

In her approach to the sea as a network of knowledge and a space of crossings of people as well as stories, she blends scholarship in the visual arts with transcultural investigations of slavery, mobility, and identity“ as in the recent “Transgressing Periphery, Dressing Otherness. Locating Geo-Cultural Spaces of Diversity in the Medieval Mediterranean.” In  Cultures of Exchange, eds. S. Barsella. W. Caferro, G. Maifreda, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming.

Amanda Respess is an assistant professor of history at the OSU Marion Branch. Specializing in the exchange of medicines, technology, and long-distance trade goods on the Maritime Silk Road, her work examines the material culture of premodern trade networks in the Persian Gulf, South China Sea, and Java Sea and investigates the long duration of Persianate presence in the eastern Indian Ocean region.  She is particularly interested in the intersections between the lived experience of maritime travel, the material culture of medicine and technology, the development of Islamicate science, and Traditional Chinese Medicine. Her work engages a critical museum studies approach to trace the afterlives of long-distance maritime trade artifacts from the Indian Ocean World and decolonizes heretofore-segregated histories of global science.  Her current book project draws from an archive of shipwreck artifacts recovered from the seafloor between the 9th and 16th centuries to examine the premodern exchange of medical goods and technology between Iran and China, and how Islamicate artifacts have been represented in Western museums. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology & History (2020) and Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies (2020) from the University of Michigan.

James Seth is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University. He teaches courses on Shakespeare, early modern drama, maritime literature and culture, poetry and poetics, and gender and sexuality. He is also a faculty member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at CWU. As a researcher, he has published on topics including early English shipboard performance, Shakespeare and oceanic folklore, and early modern maritime visual art. His first book, Maritime Musicians and Performers on Early Modern English Voyages: The Lives of the Seafaring Middle Class, was published by Amsterdam University Press in June 2022. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, Carnival at Sea: The Topsy Turvy World of Early Modern Maritime Theatre. 

The Humanities Institute and its related centers host a wide range of events, from intense discussions of works in progress to cutting-edge presentations from world-known scholars, artists, activists and everything in between.

We value in-person engagement at our events as we strive to amplify the energy in the room. To submit an accommodation request, please send your request to Megan Moriarty: moriarty.8@osu.edu