Water in Medieval Intellectual Culture. Case Studies from Twelfth-Century Monasticism by James L. Smith (review)

In this first monograph from his hand, James Smith sets out to investigate how water functions as an intellectual entity within medieval monastic thought. To do this, he presents a 'model for the power of water as an ingredient in the motion of composition, providing an image of medieval graphicacy, or "visual literacy", that is composed in a lively and motive fashion' (p. 3) with the following goals in mind: first, to better understand the relationship between medieval thought and its ideas of water; second, to explain the ways in which monastic rhetoric used the properties of water to express complex thought. The third goal combines the previous two to find new ways of reading a variety of texts written by monastics of the twelfth century. These three goals serve the overarching aim of gaining new insights into 'the history of monastic thought and our understandings of water in the wider Middle Ages' (p. 3).

The first two chapters serve as an introduction to the debates in the study of water as a complex metaphor and the various challenges encountered during these studies. Chapters 3 to 5 contain the case studies and explore three medieval texts, each using water as an important structural, metaphorical, or philosophical part of its message. Smith discusses Godfrey of Saint-Victor's poem Fons Philosophiae and the navigation of the 'rivers' of the trivium and quadrivium in the third chapter of his book. This embedding of knowledge into a fluvial structure allowed Godfrey to show the course of knowledge he had seen and the revelations gained from this. The letters of the Benedictine Peter of Celle are the focus of the case study in the fourth chapter. In these letters, the very act of writing is rendered an act of metaphorical speech, 'a flow of words as a flow of ink' (p. 121), connecting authors through the abstract flow of the rivers of knowledge. In the fifth chapter, Smith discusses the anonymous Description of the Position and Site of the Monastery of Clairvaux. This case study focuses on the fountain and its symbolic flows of spiritual essence and purity, nourishing the monks' souls as well as their bodies. A link is made between the waters of the fountain and the rivers that flowed from Eden, the monastery like a reflection of Paradise separate from the outside world, the waters and influence of which spread far beyond the limits of its closed space.

Smith concludes that patterns, both environmental and intellectual, are part of how humankind makes sense of the world. More specifically, the medieval hydrological symbolism this book investigates was intertwined with the patterns of human life in such a way that water metaphors were always more than just an image. 'Water', he says, 'was an intellectual entity of complex power for medieval minds, and remains so today. It is an indispensable cultural vocabulary' (p. 184).

Smith's Water in Medieval Intellectual Culture provides new understanding of twelfth-century culture and monasticism and paves the way for further analysis of medieval thought through what he calls a 'medieval frame' (p. 182). He makes a convincing case for further study of premodern knowledge visualizations and medieval graphicacy. The book has a logical structure and the separation of the more theoretical chapters from the case studies makes it possible to read the theory in its own right and to apply it more widely than the author has done in this work. While well written and filled with impressive insights, the book contains such rich and illustrious language that it loses some of its readability. Especially those without prior knowledge of the subjects discussed or the non-native English speakers among us may have some difficulties grasping the full meaning behind Smith's masterfully crafted sentences. Regardless of this, Water in Medieval Intellectual Culture is a remarkably insightful book and an...