The past decade has seen a surge in scholarship about oceans and human engagements with water. Variously termed coastal studies, ocean history, or the blue humanities, this mode of analysis includes efforts to recontextualize literary cultures and broad historical analyses such as W. Jeffrey Bolster's The Mortal Sea: Fishing in the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (2014) and Helen Rozwadowski's Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (2018), among others. Most recently, Bloomsbury's six-volume Cultural History of the Sea (2021), under the general editorship of Margaret Cohen, collects multiple scholarly perspectives on this long human history. To this academic blue wave John M. McManamon's Neither Letters nor Swimming makes a dense and erudite contribution.

McManamon's history mines traditional scholarly archives for descriptions and examples of two practices, swimming and free-diving. While noting that these terms are not always distinguishable in the archival record, he takes swimming to refer to locomotion across the surface of a body of water, and free-diving to mean movement beneath the surface. He takes his title from a much-repeated Greek proverb that “defined abject ignorance” (5) as being both illiterate and unable to swim.

Scholars of the early modern period may turn directly to the final third of the volume for its descriptions of two Renaissance swim manuals: Swiss humanist Nicholas Wynman's Colymbetes (1538) and the Cambridge Don Everard Digby's De Arte Natandi (1587). It is primarily through these authors, as well as figures such as Castiglione and Erasmus, that McManamon asserts his claim for a rebirth of ancient aquatic arts. The first two sections of McManamon's book, however, provide thorough and detailed explorations of aquatic practices in the classical period, in a section called “Ancient Legacy,” and the Middle Ages, under the title “Medieval Impoverishment.” As those section titles suggest, McManamon hews closely to traditional ideas about classical flourishing, medieval loss, and Renaissance rebirth.

The value of his book, however, lies less in its rearticulation of this familiar historical structure than in his detailed and precise enumerations of traditional sources. His exploration of the practical functions of swimming and free-diving, which include diving for pearls and coral from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and later the Caribbean, and also diving and swimming in salvage and military operations, opens up a wealth of materials for further study. He traces classical and medieval swimmers from open oceans to rivers and lakes, and from the balmy Mediterranean to Beowulf's cold and monster-filled northern waters. The section on medieval swimming leans heavily on legendary figures but also engages with “Medieval Salvage Diving in Law and Practice,” as well as a careful description of Dante's simile of Geryon swimming through Hell (Inferno 17).

In his third section, “The Renaissance Conceptualization of Swimming and Free-Diving,” McManamon provides close summaries of Wynman's Colymbetes and Digby's De Arte Natandi. The appended table of Digby's “agile movements in the water” will be particularly useful for anyone working with that text. Emphasizing that Digby seems not to have known Wynman's earlier work, McManamon contrasts the humanist theological structure that animates Colymbetes with Digby's focus on technical proficiency. For Wynman, in a somewhat Erasmian mode, swimming can be “an allegory for Christian faith” in which the practice represents “the space accorded human freedom” (267). Digby, by contrast, highlights swimming as skill, as the woodcut images of human swimmers employing different strokes and maneuvers demonstrate.

Scholars who engage in blue humanities or oceanic studies will find much of value in these pages. McManamon notes only briefly important recent work by Kevin Dawson, Molly Warsh, and others that emphasizes the proficiency of African and Native American peoples in aquatic skills and labor. A thorough reconsideration of how much Europeans learned about water practices from beyond Europe remains outside the scope of this volume. As we await more of that essential work, this book represents a thorough summary and presentation of traditional European materials about an increasingly central topic.