Dangerous Tides: Perceiving, Imagining, and Managing Maritime Risks in Ancient and Early Modern Worlds

The dangers and risks lurking in the deep waters of the world, be they profane and natural (storms, currents, shoals, cliffs, pirates) or divine and supernatural (the wrath of one or more gods, magic, sea monsters) are as individual and diverse as the stories of their consequences – and as numerous as the intentions behind these retellings and reconfigurations. In their telling, specific dangers become accepted risks that those who undertake the venture of a sea voyage choose (or not) to expose themselves to. Maritime actors make their assessments of the balance between risk and benefit according to historical and contemporary cultural criteria, which are contingent on the discursive horizon of their time, as reflected in iconographic and textual sources. Building on sociological and historical understandings of "risk" as conscious exposure to specific dangers, the case studies in this volume engage with conceptions and discourses of maritime risks in written and visual media from antiquity to the early modern world, with contributions ranging from early Greek epic to British Atlantic merchants in the 1700s. This broad perspective enables a multifaceted study of representations of maritime dangers in words, images, and numbers, and to discuss contemporary discourses on causes, consequences, and methods for avoidance of maritime risk.