English Research Seminar --- Dr Tamsin Badcoe (University of Bristol) Writing Saltwater Experience in the Early Modern Literary Sea Voyage

School of English Research Seminar featuring Dr Tamsin Badcoe (University of Bristol) –
Writing Saltwater Experience in the Early Modern Literary Sea Voyage

Various writers of the early modern period suggest that there is something inherently close to death about the art of early modern seafaring: a commonplace inherited from classical thought. Juvenal, in his twelfth satire, famously offers an image of the thickness of the wooden keel that separates sailors from a death by drowning: ‘Go trust yourself to a hewn plank', he writes, ‘which parts you from death by four finger-breadths of pitch-pine, or seven if it be extra thick!'. The fragile casing, he suggests, is no shield from the proximity of the potential for dissolution, and the measure, given in terms of a man's hand, catches at the relative smallness and fragility of a ship's carpenter's labours.

This paper reads across a selection of early modern literary and devotional works that engage imaginatively with the risks of sea travel, by writers including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Tomkis, and John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, and considers the particular humoral and cognitive effects of saltwater experience. It focuses on images of returned travellers, the notion of the ship as a cognitive environment, risk and preservation, and the tendency towards ecophobia that shapes how those who travel by sea are characterized in the period.