The Atlantic as Mythical Space: An Essay on Medieval Ethea

Ever since Johan Huizinga‘s reassessment of the medieval mind (‘Herfstij der Middeleeuwen’, 1919) as a passionate intensity, scholars have sought to understand pre-scientific perceptions of nature. Garcia-Osuna’s medieval Ethea captures this point; the hero's moral fiamework and perception strategies reflected their assimilation of society’s communal codes for perceiving, judging, and acting: ‘Those codes are the source of the hero’s supply of implicit knowledge’ (p. 222). At the centre of this study is a reconsideration of the rote of myth in the medieval view of the Atlantic Ocean. Garcia-Osuna proposes that an explanation of reality offered by myth ‘is just as valid as that offered by science in the sense that, as a human social construct, “reality” is effectively intertwined with human experience. ...The legitimacy of myth, then, flows from its ability to supply human beings with a coherent, qualitative method of interpreting reality through metaphorical patterns and symbolic archetypes’ […]

[Extract from book review at 'Irish Historical Studies', Volume 47 Issue 172, pp. 337-354. Reviewer: John B. Roney (Sacred Heart University) https://doi.org/10.1017/ihs.2023.28]