• This book represents the first collection of essays to join blue humanities ecocriticism to cognitive approaches to early modern and modern thought • By extending scholarship on cognition into the material realm of blue humanities ecocritism, the collection transforms the important concept of “distributed cognition” into a full collaboration between watery environs and cognitive processes. • By bringing cogntive approaches to early modern literature and culture into the larger conversations around the blue humanities and ecocriticism, the book aims to shape these thriving discourses in early modern studies. Water and cognition seem unrelated things, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The essays in this book show how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the “extended mind” and distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book aims to think “water” and “cognition” as distinct critical modes and also to combine them in what we term “watery thinking.” Water and Cognition brings together cognitive science and ecocriticism to ask how the environment influences how humans think, and how they think about thinking. The collection explores how water — as element, as environment, and as part of our bodies — affects the way early modern and contemporary discourses understand cognition.
Introduction: Watery Thinking: Minds and Water In and Beyond the Early
Modern Period
Part 1: Drowning on Stage
1. McKenna Rose, Muddying the Waters: Thinking Thinking in Watery Context
with Hamlet
2. Lianne Habinek, Ophelia with Spectator: Hamlet and Watery Cognition
3. Tony Perrello, Monsters of the Deep: What Watery Dreams May Come in
Shakespeares Richard III
4. Myra Wright, Stink or Swim: Knee-Deep in Marlowes Edward II
Part 2: Fluid Metaphors
5. Benjamin Bertram, Richard of Gloucesters Elemental Thinking: Water and
Sovereignty in Shakespeares First Tetralogy
6. Douglas Clark, The Sea of the Mind in Early Modern Poetry
7. Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Tears, Rain, and Shame: King Lear, Masculine
Vulnerability, and Environmental Crisis
Part 3: Forms of Water
8. Lowell Duckert, Flake: The Shapes of Snow in Early Modern Culture
9. Gwilym Jones, No Darkness but Ignorance: Thinking Foggily in Shakespeare
and Early Modern Drama
10. William Kerwin, Speaking Water and Seeping Memory in Michael Draytons
Poly-Olbion
Part 4: Submersive Tendencies
11. Dyani Johns Taff, Estuarial Rage and Resistance in Pulters The
Complaint of Thames
12. Ben VanWagoner, Jurisdiction: Oceanic Erasure and Indigenous Subjection
in Drydens Amboyna
13. Sandra Young, Thinking with the Ocean as Decolonial Strategy: Memory,
Loss and the Underwater Archive in Shakespeares The Tempest
Afterword Evelyn Tribble .
Nic Helms is Assistant Professor of English at Plymouth State University. They are the author of Cognition, Misreading, and Shakespeares Characters (Palgrave, 2019) and of sundry articles and book chapters on cognition, disability, and tragedy, the most recent of which is Seeing Brains: Shakespeare, Autism, and Self-Identification in Redefining Disability (Brill, 2022). Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. Johns University in New York City. He is the author of An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (Routledge, 2023), Ocean (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the editor of A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Era (Bloomsbury, 2021), among other books, chapters, and articles.
