** POSTPONED **
This seminar has been postponed due to illness. A notice will go out on the MISS distribution, and will also appear here, when a new date has been arranged with the speaker.
DETAILS
Wednesday 15th April 2026 at 4:30pm (AEST)
Dr Sarah Corrigan, University of Melbourne
Early Medieval Ireland in Relation to the Ocean
ABSTRACT
Accounts of the Ocean in premodern periods are often analysed against the background of what was not yet known at the time: studies abound in premodern seafarings, premodern zoologies, premodern geographies, premodern cosmographies. We often investigate the early medieval worldview in terms of what we now know that they did not. However, any study of the Ocean in the modern milieu immediately reveals that our current relationship with the Ocean goes far beyond what we know and do not know about it (for the record, the ocean depths have yet to be fully mapped, let alone understood: https://seabed2030.org). Analysis of modern accounts casually assumes the consensus that the Ocean continues to be a phenomenon that is deeply alien to us, in some ways more so than space, as we cannot see through its substance. Allure and terror, familiarity and unknowability are accepted features of the Ocean. In recent decades, there has been an energetic and groundbreaking movement in scholarship to find an approach that has the potential to capture the mind-boggling complexity of the human response to the Ocean. In one such contribution, Peter Campbell points out a key element of this renewed consideration: ‘The sea’s uncanny nature is important, as it conveys the otherness of the waters whose properties, forces, and existence is contrary to the land’ (Campbell 2020, p. 222). This paper will attempt to review a few accounts of the Ocean from early medieval Ireland from this emerging perspective, in order to see whether we might find more in common with them than the often-discussed knowledge gap suggests.
SPEAKER
Sarah Corrigan is the inaugural Allan J Myers Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature in the Discipline of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne. Sarah completed a PhD in Classics at the University of Galway, Ireland, in 2017, and her research and teaching span the ancient and early medieval Latin worlds, with an emphasis on the ways in which they are connected. Sarah’s interests lie in intertextuality and the transmission and reception of texts, and her work also encompasses the medium of transmission, the pre-print manuscript, as integral evidence to this type of research.
LOCATION (In-Person and online)
Jabiru Room, Academic Centre, Newman College, University of Melbourne.