According to Augustinian hermeneutics, the greater the plenitude of meanings a text or symbol contains, the more accurately it can reflect the bounty and munificence of God. Read in this light, the associative density of water in devotional literature highlights the glorious abundance of creation and, more specifically, the literary potential of water to reveal it. The range of references to water in medieval religious writings, and the multitude of traditions which influence and inspire such references, are dizzying. Rivers, streams, wells, seas, and tears all saturate the pages of Christian works, twisting and transforming, eluding definition and categorisation. This book has shown how the use of water as a metaphor in devotional prose actually hinges on this inherent flexibility and adaptability – water’s ability to signify a number of different, often contradictory things at once are what makes it such a useful tool for authors of these works, even if that same quality also makes it liable to trickle out of their grasp, too.

A literary language of water, a shifting set of images which are made to figure in multifarious ways in various works of devotional prose from the later Middle Ages, has been revealed and analysed in this study, from cleansing the soul to bathing in the fluids of Christ’s body. In order to highlight the rich, generative potential of water, literary tropes involving water have been brought into dialogue with socio-historical analysis of water’s role in medieval life; and this book has experimented with reading the tropes of water in devotional writings alongside water in other medieval literary genres ranging from encyclopaedic works to alliterative verse. It has argued that, alongside the well-trodden biblical precedents, a wide range of allusions to water in medical, theological and scientific works – as well as in everyday life – contribute to a medieval understanding of the element as ‘able’, transformative, and possessing a special affinity with women. Taking these allusions and references into account not only enables a fuller, general understanding of water in the Middle Ages, but can also shed light on its ability to function as a mediator between the earthly and the spiritual, as well as an especially apt means for articulating the different kinds of spiritual exchange that can lead to transformation of the soul.