A paper by Sarah Corrigan, University of Melbourne for the Ancient World Seminar at 1:00 on Monday 29 April in Arts West North Wing 556 and via Zoom.
To receive the Zoom link please email Dr Edward Jeremiah (edwardj@unimelb.edu.au).
While literary texts featuring sea voyages are a global phenomenon, medieval Ireland witnessed the production of a distinct type of such narratives. These Latin and Irish narratives differ quite widely in terms of content and structure, but central to each is a remarkable sea voyage that serves to bring the protagonists closer to the divine. Historically these narratives find their roots in two practices: the sentencing of convicted criminals to being set adrift at the sea and the religious practice of Irish clerics to seek hermitage in the ocean. However, they are also fundamentally underpinned by a cosmological conceptualisation of heaven and hell as being located in or accessible through the far reaches of the Ocean that encircled the known world. This paper will investigate some of the ways that these texts bring lived experience, otherworld cosmologies, and religious faith into conversation with one another.
Dr Sarah Corrigan joined the Discipline of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne in 2023 as the inaugural Allan J Myers Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature. Sarah completed a PhD in Classics at the University of Galway, Ireland, in 2017. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher both at the University of Galway and at the Royal Irish Academy Dublin. Her research and teaching span the ancient and early medieval Latin worlds, with an emphasis on the ways in which they are connected.
Classical Association of Victoria 