Why isn't the Earth completely covered in water? How and why does God keep dry land dry? Encountering Water shows how these questions animated scholarship in Christian Europe for centuries. With this book, Lindsay J. Starkey offers a concise intellectual history of the debates surrounding these questions as they evolved from the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century across multiple disciplinary registers: from natural philosophy to biblical exegesis, from humanist scholarship to travel writing and works of geography. Ultimately, Starkey reveals water as a central preoccupation of premodern European scholars who questioned the relationship between water and earth as a means to “try to answer questions about God, the world, and themselves” (213).

Encountering Water is divided into two main sections, each of which comprises three chapters. The first part surveys changing ideas about terrestrial water from the medieval to the early modern period, while the second discusses the drivers of that intellectual change. In Part I, Starkey traces the medieval roots of sixteenth-century scholarship on the question of water's relationship to land across three genres of scholarship: biblical exegesis, natural philosophy, and geography and cosmography (these last two are treated together because they were so closely linked in premodernity). Part II focuses on the three principal drivers of change in thinking about water and earth in the late medieval and Renaissance periods: the Reformations, the rediscovery of classical texts, and the Atlantic expeditions to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.

The biblical commentary tradition inherited from late antiquity and the classical tradition of natural philosophy based on the works of Aristotle generally converged on the notion that the universe was a stable and orderly system. Medieval scholars in Christian Europe approached the separation of water and dry land from within that framework, viewing God's initial separation of water from land on the third day of the Creation as supernatural but interpreting the ongoing existence of dry land since that time as natural, if not also providential. The sixteenth century, Starkey argues, witnessed a crucial shift. While medieval writers such as Augustine claimed that water was naturally lower than the dry land, their early modern counterparts began to insist that the present-day separation of water from earth was due to God's ongoing intervention. Martin Luther, for example, claimed that water naturally overpowered land and only God's continuing action kept it from inundating dry land and killing everybody and everything on it.

Starkey sketches a similar shift in the scholarly traditions of geography and cosmography. Medieval writers generally believed that there was more water than land in the world, and that most of that water was concentrated in the unpopulated southern hemisphere. The travel accounts of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville in the late Middle Ages began to challenge that consensus, a process which accelerated with the Iberian overseas voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the end of the sixteenth century, most European works of geography and cosmography were claiming the opposite: that there was more land than water on Earth, as shown by the large number of people, islands, and other landmasses in the southern hemisphere.

Part II, which turns more fully to the drivers of this sixteenth-century shift, identifies overseas travel as the main impetus for change. Starkey additionally identifies the Reformations, the rediscovery of classical texts, such as Ptolemy's Geography, and Hebraic scholarship among Christians as other important drivers of change. One of the book's most significant contributions is to reveal the impact of medieval rabbinic scholarship on Christian thinking about nature in the early modern period. Increased attention to medieval Jewish exegeses of Genesis by Christian writers of the sixteenth century, part of a new interest in Hebrew and in rabbinic scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, shifted Christian thinking about cosmology and planetary history. Jewish writers in the Middle Ages were more likely to claim that God's initial separation of water and land was a miracle that went against the nature of both water and earth, which resonated with Reformation-era claims that God alone was keeping the world's oceans at bay.

Drawing our attention to water as a site of intellectual transformation, Encountering Water suggests several fruitful avenues for further inquiry. Beyond the bare discovery of lands and peoples previously unknown to Europeans, how did the encounter with sub-Saharan African and Indigenous American cosmologies affect European cosmologies of water and land? Given the impact of medieval Jewish exegeses of Genesis on early modern Christian scholarship, how did early modern Jewish scholars read and respond to these same medieval texts? Were there significant differences of opinion between Protestant and Catholic scholars, in addition to the broadly shared connections outlined here? Finally, what was the influence of the premodern period of climate change known as the Little Ice Age on changing conceptions of water and land? The sixteenth century witnessed some of the worst impacts of the Little Ice Age, including increased flooding. Encountering Water may offer suggestively rich evidence of the ways in which Europeans living through this period of climate crisis made sense of material changes in their environment.

The Afterword gestures towards the salience of this premodern history of water for the twenty-first century, which faces a critical shortage of fresh water. Further scholarship connecting the intellectual, religious, and environmental history of the sixteenth century may reveal yet more layers of significance for our current climate crisis. In the meantime, Encountering Water will be of interest to scholars of Reformation history as well as intellectual history, the history of science, and the emerging field of the blue humanities.