As Fortunatus wrote of twisting, shimmering fish, he may well have had in mind artistic representations of fish like these brooches. Made of gold and silver with inlays of precious stone and glass, their bent forms would have sparkled in light, like Ausonius’ pebbles. This pair of stylized fibulae were made using a style closely connected to Frankish artisans – cloisonné. This style involves making intricate gold and silverwork pockets into which glass, enamel, and precious stones were inlaid. This style endured in the area around the Mosel to the extent that, by the end of the period covered in this book, Mosan cloisonné work was the gold standard for reliquaries and other religious objects.

This chapter uses medieval chronicles and annals to explore how river disasters were understood and remembered, and how people chose to tell stories about rivers. A focus on floods brings up issues of risk and resilience, and how floods were interpreted by medieval people. The chapter also focuses on how rivers are connected to other memorable and historic events and why they were such powerful stories. The chapter then turns to the ways that rivers were incorporated into monastic memory and to stories of foundation, and how holy sites were seen as revealed by God and the saints. The chapter ends with a case study focused on St. Sturm and the monastery of Fulda, with a focus on the role of rivers in the house’s history.

When in 1010 the monks of Reichenau created this image, part of the book now known as the Bamberg Apocalypse, they may well have thought they were preparing for the end of the world. The previous century saw the attacks of the Vikings and the rise of powerful minor landlords and nobles in the political void left by the declining Carolingian state. Depending on your historical point of view, by 1000, power had either devolved into the hands of petty warlords or had been reclaimed by local leaders. In either case, the uniformity of economic, ecclesiastical, administrative, and jurisdictional practices that the Carolingians had heavily invested in was transforming again into locally defined ones. This led to a series of local and regional conflicts over the exercise of power and authority, which eventually led to open strife.

Here the artist has drawn a crowded and vivid riverscape, teeming with fish and serpents and dragons. The riverbanks are full of vegetation; animals, birds, and men stand alongside the river, looking up to God in the heavens. The animals include mundane cattle and deer alongside more spectacular elephants and lions. The imagined worlds of Biblical creation could both intersect and run counter to the lived worlds of the European lived environments.

This chapter focuses on the cultural transformations of Late Antiquity, using poems and letters produced between 300–600. Late Antique poets used rivers as ways of addressing changing religious, political, and religious identities, and to help them create new images of self and country. These early writers were responding to both literary and cultural rivers and to real encounters with river ecosystems. They shaped a sense of place and community alongside the rivers of Gaul, and their poetry reflects not only a sensitivity to the aesthetics of these riverscapes but also an awareness of the non-human world of river ecosystems. All told, Gallo-Roman poetry highlights an appreciation for the natural beauty of rivers, an awareness of their ecological abundance, and a recognition of the manifold ways in which human cultures, histories, and economies were drawn up in their watery webs.

This chapter explores the ways that rivers could shift from cultural and economic resource to sites of risk. Beginning with a close reading of the early medieval historian Gregory of Tours, it argues that as a bishop, Gregory saw rivers both as sites of regular and significant economic and cultural risk and of potential religious salvation. This balance between practical and religious response and representation weaves through the chapter, which draws heavily on hagiographical accounts and historical sources to explore cultural constructions of “risk.” Rivers were sources of economic and political instability, and threats to cultural memory and cohesion. Floods, shipwrecks, drought, and other disasters are found throughout medieval narrative, and form the basis of this chapter’s analysis. Finally, this chapter argues that medieval authors also saw rivers as connected to existential threats: the “Flood,” sin, demons, and the dissolution of memory and cultural identity. Paired with these fears, those same rivers became sources of salvation and markers of sanctity.

The chapter details early medieval riverine infrastructure, looking at ways that medieval leaders and communities understood the challenges and opportunities posed by the many rivers that supported and surrounded them. Working across the broadest range of sources, this chapter is the most focused on material culture and human infrastructure. It surveys practical responses, economic solutions, concerns about riverine sustainability, and the construction and maintenance of infrastructure (canals, mills, fish weirs, bridges, etc.), presenting the ways that medieval people responded to rivers on a daily basis. It also includes discussion of the regulation of riverine resources and the conflicts that could arise over rivers, ultimately arguing that rivers were actively contested, constructed, and integrated into the full economy, culture, and experience of medieval Europe.

Rivers and roads dominate this portion of the Peutinger Table, a Late-Antique/medieval map of the Roman Empire. Imagining the imperial realm as smooth and flowing, the map fits an uncertain topography on a straight roll of parchment. It presents the Empire as a set of linear, connected spaces – Rome is where all roads and rivers lead. Space is condensed, bodies of water and land masses stretched and shrunk, and cities arranged schematically rather than mapped precisely.

This book explores the cultural meanings of rivers over a broad span of time (c. 300–1100). The regional focus is on Northwestern Continental Europe (France, Germany, and Benelux), on the territories that were the core of Roman Gaul and of Merovingian and Carolingian Francia. During these centuries, several fundamental redefinitions of culture, community, and economy took place: the transformation of the Roman Empire and the rise of the earliest Germanic kingdoms; the centralizing push of the Carolingian imperial government, especially under the aegis of Charlemagne; invasion and retrenchment during the Viking Age; and the emergence of new cultural, religious, and political communities around the year 1000, with a corresponding intensification of river use.

Many stories about river miracles and wonders were repeatedly told, retold, and transformed as part of the process of establishing and understanding discussions about moral values, sanctity, and socioeconomic behaviors. This chapter looks at some of these, following the stories over time and space. The section “Reversing the Rivers,” framed around a specific set of narratives involving the bodies of saints, tackles medieval ideas about what is “natural” and the ways that saints were understood as capable of both sustaining and reversing the natural. The chapter ends with an exploration of a series of stories that stretches into the 1100s and 1200s, encouraging readers to imagine themselves transported both backwards to the Edenic past and forward to a future salvation.

This representation of Noah’s Ark at Chartres (built between 1194 and 1220) imagines the ark as a bridge across the waters. The boat fully fills the frame so that the ship’s structure resembles a stone bridge, very similar to the extant Romanesque bridge that crosses the Danube at Regensburg. The rainbow of the Covenant shines down onto the ark from the heavens, visually serving as a kind of covering for the ship, whose hull bears a striking resemblance to the low riverine ships favored in earlier centuries by the Vikings.