Hydrological Transformations: Water, Landscape, and Temporality of Medieval Social Change

Abstract: Mutable and shifting, the changing nature of water management during the Middle Ages and Early Modern period have sustained intervals of change that were both technological and, as often, social. The distinctions between public and private estates, or varied local groups versus centralized systems of governance highlighted the diffuse power of water as a spiritual metaphor. It also led to an obsession with circumnavigating Earth’s waters enroute to the New World. The metaphysical embodiment of a Christian spirit can be juxtaposed with the physical human body as a position that enacts miracles to occur. Equally important is the paleo-environmental impact that water played in developing ecological and agricultural patterns of development in Europe that began to implicate water management literature as a primary mode of economic development. From AD 400 onward, rapid transformations in social capital allowed groups in wet, marshy areas to form communities that had their hydrological structures away from the central authority. Social Baptism, as I here have defined, spread throughout Medieval Europe. However, as historians have demonstrated, it took time to develop unique social and technological traits that did not incorporate some standard or blueprint of governance that was infantile. In accordance, this paper will uncover and do more to prove that medieval water management, akin to Anabaptists, was a means of preserving evolving traditions that ultimately gave people a way of demonstrating a maturity of identity. They made new boundaries out of old practices, ousting with it paternalistic ritualism.