Nic Helms and Steve Mentz. Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024. 314 pp. ISBN 9789463724791. $160.00 hardback.
A reader of Edmund Spenser’s writing will be familiar with the notion that water is a medium to think with and through, bound as it is to many of the ways in which the author articulates his own capacities as a maker. Spenser’s recurrent tracing of fluvial and maritime forms speaks of a long-lived fascination with how the movement of water gives shape not only to understandings of place and topography in a physical sense, but also to the processing of lived experience, encoding the passing of time and memory. His riverine poetics in works such as “The Ruines of Time” (1591) and Prothalamion (1596) position the poet’s song in parallel with water’s flux and flow, speaking of sources, influences, and poetic inheritances carried by literary tributaries passing in and out of mind. In “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe” (1595) and The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596; 1609) descriptions of bodies of water – and voyages across them – inform a speculative imagination complicit in colonial violence. Watery dynamics, for Spenser, lend themselves to meditations on nationhood, gendered embodiment, self-knowledge and control. Most distinctively, they channel Spenser’s ruminations on creation and the poetic process: an accommodation that famously culminates in Spenser’s representation of the marriage of the Thames and Medway, attended by the waters of the world, in the fourth book of The Faerie Queene. “O what an endlesse worke have I in hand, / To count the Seas abundant progeny” Spenser writes, acknowledging the labor required to collaborate with the watery element in the course of fashioning his epic.1 Whether fresh or salt, standing or in motion, water is charged by Spenser to speak of variety and change, discord and harmony. Acting as a medium though which thought is given form, water, for Spenser, supports and tracks the undertows of an imagination, “eterne in mutabilitie”.2
Readers of The Spenser Review are thus very likely primed to enjoy the collection of essays edited by Nic Helms and Steve Mentz, Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature. The volume builds on recent work done by scholars in the blue humanities – a direction of study pioneered by Mentz himself – and approaches to literature that have developed from studies of embodied cognition, to bring “together cognitive science and ecocriticism to ask how the environment influences how humans think, and how they think about thinking” (13). The collection will be of interest specifically to scholars working with early modern literature and culture, theories of extended mind, and environmental humanities approaches but also speaks in fascinating ways to those interested in the workings of metaphor, the histories of affect and emotion, and the new materialisms. As Helms and Mentz note, water is a generative medium: “watery thinking,” they write, supplies self-consciously fluid figurative language and “a tool to craft literary forms,” offering “a theoretical model, both contemporary and early modern, for how cognition flows” (13). In attending to the materialities of water – its ability to change state, to reflect, absorb, or refract light, and to offer a continual play of surface and depth – such a project follows in the wake of a classic work by Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942; trans. 1983); however, in its thirteen original essays, this volume brings its focus into dialogue with recent ecocritical concerns, which bridge the aesthetic and the environmental, the local and global, and the early modern and the present.
Of particular value are the ways in which the authors of the individual essays investigate the “affordances and limits of water as metaphor and material” (18); many of the essays in the volume reference the work done by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980) to sound how our conceptual systems are both shaped by, and in turn give shape to, metaphorical navigations of the relationship between mind, self, and world. Spenser’s Amoretti 75 (1595), for example, is given by the editors as a working model of how a poem can be animated by “the juxtaposition of the material impact of the sea on human structures and the metaphoric connections between the ocean and dissolution” (18) and in each of the case studies to follow, individual authors track the material and imagined implications of particular watery kinds. Throughout, the plays of William Shakespeare supply key touchstones, reflecting the origins of the volume in a research seminar at the 2020 Shakespeare Association of America Conference; however, its coverage extends beyond the usual literary entanglements favored by modern scholars working in the blue humanities and includes work on Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, and John Dryden, among others, both canonical and lesser known.
The volume is divided into four sections, the first of which, “Drowning on Stage,” is characterized by its focus on the drama of the early modern period. Water, the authors in this section demonstrate, is brought into the theatre in language and imagery but also threatens to exceed its bounds. In the first of two essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Muddying the Waters: Thinking Thinking in Watery Context with Hamlet,” McKenna Rose offers a reading of the play that focuses on its humoral, noxious fluidities, seeing its “liquid metaphors of mind as distributed across not only playtexts, bodies of actors and audiences, stage properties, and theatres, but also the natural world of early modern London” (34). In this light, Hamlet is a play of vapors, tears, dew, and poison in which channels of thought and perception are contaminated, serving to hold a mirror up to the “toxic condition of early modern waterways” (32). Lianne Habinek’s complementary “Ophelia with Spectator: Hamlet and Watery Cognition,” puts the liquid and the solid in tension, probing the extent to which pleasure can be created by philosophical distance from the fraught scene of drowning. In a reading of Ophelia’s death that draws on Lucretius’ contemplation in De rerum natura of the satisfaction that can be derived from watching a shipwreck, and Hans Blumenberg’s sustained engagement with the motif in Shipwreck with Spectator (1979), she examines the ways in which Gertrude’s speech raises questions concerning agency and accountability. Habinek invites readers to contemplate “stopping a moment in this liminal space, straddling pleasure and fear, stability and uncertainty, observation and responsibility, life and death” (58).
Tony Perrello’s “Monsters of the Deep: What Watery Dreams May Come in Shakespeare’s Richard III” – a chapter that also pays generous attention to 3 Henry VI – focuses on how “Shakespeare’s early histories repeatedly deal with dreams transmogrified into various oceanic forms – these metaphorical systems especially serving to capitalize on the lived experience of the island-dwelling English people, and perhaps, as well, saturated with their author’s memories of life on the shores of the Avon and his abiding interest in maritime culture” (67). Particularly interesting is how Perrello traces Richard’s “revealing daydreams of toxic aspiration” (66) and how he positions Clarence as the “object of a very localized cognitive ecology” (69) that generates misconstruals. It is also striking that the above essays conclude with presentist thought experiments: for Rose, Hamlet’s preoccupations with muddied selves and waters “resonates with contemporary ecological thought” and can “teach us to perceive oceanic contamination as distributed” (44). For Habinek, who closes her essay with two “redrafting[s] of the Ophelia-shipwreck-spectator alignment” (61), referencing a recent essay by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, “The Muddy Death of the #MeToo Movement” (2022), and a poem by Grace Tiffany called “Gertrude and Ophelia” (2016), Ophelia’s emblematic watery afterlife plays out in contemporary anxieties concerning consumption and appropriation. Her essay’s focus on the complexity – and often compromised, even complicit, nature – of spectatorship is ultimately also shared by Perrello, for whom Clarence, Hastings, and Richard are all confronted with dreams that challenge each man’s – typically illusory – sense of self and security. Making a turn to our contemporary moment, “one may wonder how much ground we will have left to stand upon,” Perello writes, “once the real of the planet and its complex systems have had their say” (87).
The final, gorgeously written essay in this section, Myra E. Wright’s “Stink or Swim: Knee-deep in Marlowe’s Edward II,” opens with the image of Marlowe’s abject king “standing in sewage” (91). Holding together detailed close readings of aquatic bodies and paying attention to the engineered waterways – the moats, trenches, and puddles – of the play, the essay is punctuated with illustrations chosen from books of emblems, natural history, and technical instruction. Everard Digby’s swimming manual, De arte natandi (1587), for example, aids Wright in illuminating Marlowe’s fascination with bodily position and is used to draw out a hermeneutics of “body verticality” which informs how water, in her words, “might allow the immersed body some temporary escape from the usual confinements of species and gender alike” (98). In the “ups and downs and side-to-sides” of the language of the play, she observes, “Edward II might elucidate the complexity of a concept like dignity” (99).
The next section of the volume, “Fluid Metaphors,” opens with Benjamin Bertram’s “Richard of Gloucester’s Elemental Thinking: Water and Sovereignty in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy,” and returns to 3 Henry VI in order to read Richard’s transformation in light of theories of “4E cognition” and understandings of the mind as “embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended” (115): an approach inspired by the work of critics such as Miranda Anderson, Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton, and the volume editor Nic Helms, that brings cognitive theory into dialogue with early modern studies.3 Bertram’s focus on what he calls Richard’s “furnace-burning heart” speech (2.1.79-88) inaugurates an investigation of how the play presents subjectivity and how the “watery thinking of would-be sovereigns” (128) channels the elements to mediate political power: “For Richard, Edward, and Henry, the three competitors for the crown,” he writes, “water is a twofold source of energy flowing through the bodies they would like to rule: bodies of water – rivers, lakes, oceans – and the bodies of their subjects” (126). Yet, bodies of water are, notoriously, subject to fluxes and flows that defy even the most robust designs, and Douglas Clark’s chapter, “The Sea of the Mind in Early Modern Poetry,” addresses the way in which early modern poets “conceived of mental distress as a form of liquid perturbation” (152). The chapter first considers Arthur Warren’s poem The Poore Mans Passions, and Poverties Patience (1605) before looking at a popular ballad, “My minde to me a kingdome is” (c. 1581) and its receptions, and tracks the precedents set by biblical literature for using water to think about transience, vulnerability, passion, and distress. Emotion and affect are then brought to the fore in Jennifer Hamilton’s “Tears, Rain, and Shame: King Lear, Masculine Vulnerability, and Environmental Crisis,” a chapter that extends the arguments of her 2017 monograph This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear. In offering a sensitive reading of how tears and rain signify in distinctly different ways in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamilton’s chapter has its sights firmly set on how water reveals a need for care in the play, reading King Lear “as a fable for our times in terms of how the human affective drama intersects with the political and ecological one” (158).
Hamilton’s interests in the dynamics of shelter and exposure continue to resonate through Water and Cognition’s third section, “Forms of Water.” Lowell Duckert’s chapter, “Flake: The Shapes of Snow in Early Modern Culture,” offers a playful meditation on what is at stake in “flaking out” (181): a dynamic he anchors in readings of Johannes Kepler’s The Six-Cornered Snowflake (1611), Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1555) and Frederick Martens’s account of his 1671 voyage to Spitsbergen (1691). The “physics and phenomenology of snowflakes,” Duckert observes, both “then and now, exceed the limits of human knowledge” (182), prompting acts of curious looking that persist from the earliest acts of microscopy to those of experimental photography. This kind of cognitive labor, he argues, engenders a kind of alert precision and wonder that must acknowledge its edges, and this notion sets up a sharp contrast with the forms of thought explored by the subsequent chapter, Gwilym Jones’s “‘No darkness but Ignorance’: Thinking Foggily in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama.” Here, Jones considers the humoral and meteorological states represented in Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night (1594) and Thomas Middleton’s mayoral pageant The Triumphs of Truth (1613), feeling out the indistinct qualities of foggy obscurity, and observing, in relation to a condition that will be as familiar to a modern reader as an early modern one, that “Brain fog, that is, a literal mist of previously congealed vaporous melancholy […] begins, as ever, in the liquescent body” (203). Jones’s discussion of the manner in which “the mind is shown intermingled with surroundings” (204) is indebted to Paul Joseph Zajac’s article “Reading through the Fog: Perception, the Passions, and Poetry in Spenser's Bower of Bliss” (2013). In building on previous studies of metaphor and allegory and putting them into dialogue with studies from experimental cognitive linguistics, Jones puts particular pressure on the “brain’s tendency to confuse the metaphorical and the literal” (208). In the final chapter of this section, “Speaking Water and Seeping Memory in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion,” William Kerwin offers a reading of Drayton’s riverine ecopoetics as complaint: an approach that will be of particular interest to Spenserians, and which traces the affordances of a tradition of writing that will also be familiar to readers of Alice Oswald’s poem Dart (2002): “The lands and rivers, if listened to, offer up a system of human cognition, and that cognition is distributed,” he writes, prompting readers to “think about where our memories come from, where our memories are kept, and how water can think, remember, and protest” (220).
Particularly noteworthy in Kerwin’s chapter is his analysis of the literary techniques of personification – and its anthropomorphizing tendencies – when used in relation to the more-than-human world. Readers principally interested in the ethics of this may find further food for thought in Robert Macfarlane’s most recent book-length publication, Is a River Alive? (2025). In a manner that anticipates Macfarlane’s study, questions concerning personhood, jurisdiction, and decolonization are used to shape the final grouping of chapters, “Submersive Tendencies,” and Dyani Johns Taff’s “Estuarial Rage and Resistance in Pulter’s ‘The Complaint of the Thames’” opens the section with an essay that connects riverine voice to environmental justice. In reading Hester Pulter’s 1647 poem about the imprisonment of Charles I she attends to marshy spaces, waste, and monstrosity, arguing that such a text offers a way “to more fully understand, resist, and find alternatives to the logics of European heteropatriarchal colonialism with which we are still grappling” (239). Benjamin D. VanWagoner’s “Jurisdiction: Oceanic Erasure and Indigenous Subjection in Dryden’s Amboyna,” focuses on Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English (1673), tracing “a form of oceanic cognition developing at the intersection of geopolitical and economic spheres” (258). The geographical imaginaries of John Dryden’s play, which was dedicated to the naval commander and ex-Lord High Treasurer of England, Sir Thomas Clifford, produces two forms of jurisdiction, VanWagoner argues: the “oceanic and embodied – that, while interdependent, are realized differently as erasure and subjection respectively” (266). Narratives of violation and extraction are brought to the foreground once again in Sandra Young’s piece, “Thinking with the Ocean as Decolonial Strategy: Memory, Loss, and the Underwater Archive in Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” which looks to the “hermeneutics of the ocean” to consider what “an oceanic imaginary might offer Shakespearean scholars alert to the theatre’s capacity to confront histories of violence, enslavement, and dispossession” (285). Critical touchstones include Édouard Glissant and Kamau Brathwaite and The Tempest is offered as a medium for contemplating how theatre might “enable an imaginative encounter with the ghostly archive of the unburied dead” (292).
In collaborating on this volume, the editors and individual chapter authors can be seen to respond to the call issued by the editors of the 2013 ecocultural essay collection Thinking with Water to produce work that contemplates the possibility of “a sea change, a hydrological turn,” that pays heed to “urgent questions concerning how we dwell [and] the flows of power caught up in the currents of our planetary watercourses.”4 The turn to the present made by many of the volume’s contributors, and that typically emerges out of close literary or historicist analysis, disturbs any sense that the watery thinking of the early modern period might have a still or distant surface. At the heart of the collection is a shared commitment to recognizing the manifold ways in which water, whether polluted, riverine, tidal, salt, standing, atmospheric, or abyssal, creates entanglements that turn questions concerning how we dwell into those that also include how we think, and why that matters. As Evelyn Tribble observes in her tautly instructive “Afterword: Thinking Water,” “if the mind seeps into the world, the world in turn engages in a sort of tidal backflow with thought” (304). The literature and culture of the early modern period is shown to offer no easy binaries between land and sea, fixity and flux, the clean and the polluted: as an archive of accommodations and resistance, both mental and physical, it offers evidence not only of sources and origins, but also of ways of doing, and thinking, things differently.
Tamsin Badcoe
University of Bristol