As editors, we were delighted to observe further evidence of a burgeoning, diversifying and methodologically agile field of medieval water studies. The most prominent feature shared by the five articles of this Open Library of Humanities Special Collection is that they use the properties of water as an analytic lens for a wide variety of issues and themes within medieval studies rather than as a subject matter per se. An overly instrumentalist and scientific mentality leads to water being studied as a passive and malleable resource, but this trend has also affected cultural and historical inquiry. The articles in this Special Collection reveal a water that is a puzzle, but also a cipher for a variety of nuanced readings and inquiries. As fields such as ecocriticism, environmental history, geography, anthropology, archaeology and water governance have demonstrated, water is always entangled with a larger ecology. Water is more than a subject of academic research, a catalogue of tropes and idioms to be described. A new medieval water studies should be novel, critical, self-aware, global and above all inclusive. In assembling this Collection, it was the intention of the editors to reflect on the best next steps for the study of water in the Middle Ages. In this way they shed new light not only on the literature and history they explore but also on medieval conceptions of water more generally, paving the way for a new approach to medieval water studies. Publication date Usage Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.The articles in this Special Collection engage directly with the realities of water as they simultaneously explore its intellectual potential in various genres of medieval writing, from crusade chronicles to medieval romance.
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