The Elements in the Medieval World

The fourteen chapters and poem of this volume reflect the centrality of the element Earth in medieval thought and life, a centrality inherited from classical antiquity, and fundamental too in Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions. The chapters also reflect the multifarious nature of the ways that Earth was experienced and understood in the Middle Ages.
Contributors are Sophie E.D. Abrahams, Daniel Anlezark, Marilina Cesario, Catherine Clarke, James Davis, Stephen J. Davis, Virginia Iommi Echeverría, Andrew Fear, Danielle B. Joyner, Hugh Magennis, Francesco Marzella, Tom C.B. McLeish, Patrick Naeve, Bernard O’Donoghue, Sinéad O’Sullivan, Alexandra Paddock, Elisa Ramazzina, Hannah E. Smithson, Sigbjørn O. Sønnesyn, Sinéad O’Sullivan, and Margaret Tedford.

Marilina Cesario is Professor of Early Medieval Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. She has published in the fields of early medieval weather and astronomy, prognostication, reception of classical mythology in the early Middle Ages and on manuscript studies. She is the editor with H. Magennis of Aspects of Knowledge: Preserving and Reinventing Traditions of Learning in the Middle Ages (2018).
Hugh Magennis is Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published widely on Old English and related literature, specialising particularly in saints’ lives, translation and poetic tradition. Among his publications are The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Translating Beowulf (both 2011) and, most recently, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library edition and translation Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints (2020) (with J. Kramer and R. Norris). Hugh Magennis is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the English Association.
Elisa Ramazzina received her doctorate in Germanic Philology from the University of Pavia. Her research focuses on medieval landscape and the natural world, particularly water, and she has published in the fields of early medieval English poetry, meteorology, monster studies, medieval medicine and ecocriticism.