Studies in the Medieval Atlantic [Paperback]

This collection of essays offers fresh analysis of topics in the exciting area of Atlantic World studies. Challenging standard assumptions, the essays advance the argument that the Atlantic Ocean was a region that encompassed ethnic and political boundaries, in which a sub-community shaped by culture and commerce arose.PART I: TRANSNATIONALISM AND ENVIRONMENT Desert Islands: Europe's Archipelago as Ascetic Landscape; A.Siewers Subsistence Whaling and the Western North Atlantic: Norsemen, Basques, and Whale Use; V.Szabo Greenland Norse Knowledge of the North Atlantic Environment; T.Haine PART II: COLONIALISM The Manx Sea Kings and the Western Oceans:The Late Norse Isle of Man in its North Atlantic context, 1079-1265; A.McDonald More Savage than the Sword?: Logistics in the Medieval Atlantic Theatre of War; D.Beougher Into the Atlantic or Into the Mediterranean: Spanish Military Choices in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries; K.DeVries

This remarkable collection of essays offers unusual and thought-provoking vistas onto medieval Europe's history. It recasts familiar narratives of medieval conversion, colonization, and conquest by situating them in the Atlantic Ocean's special connectivity. Its welcome expansions of medieval maritime history range from discussions of Irish monks' 'liquid desert' to precocious Norse 'save the whales' tendencies, passing through Manx sea kings' sustained predation and more fleeting Atlantic hegemonies, like those of late medieval Iberian rulers. It nicely outlines a medieval Atlantic made of inter-related environmental, cultural, and political currents. - Paolo Squatriti, author of Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy

'Hudson's finely crafted opening essay effectively frames the six essays that, together, from different angles and using varied sources, illustrate how the environmental fact of the Atlantic was a force in shaping aspects of the thinking and practices of medieval Europeans.' - Rlƒs