This article explores the representation of hunger and thirst as faculties within medieval spiritual allegory that existed at two forms. In their bodily form, hunger and thirst represented a feeling of lack indicating the need for sustenance. In their figurative moralised form these needs came to represent a longing for that which was missing…[Read more]

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]