ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a sense of the array of writings on the ocean in the late Middle Ages, but it also aims to draw attention to scholastic science’s important ways of thinking about the ocean. Medieval literature provides another particularly rich source of ideas about the sea. The chapter examines various kinds of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature on the subject of the sea alongside scientific works. It focuses on writings in which the sea possesses and gives rise to ambiguous feelings that are not as negatively or positively powerful, or expressive of traditional emotions, but instead shows feelings that are more ‘ugly’. The mutable and associative qualities of the sea are central to the feelings attributed to it and to which it gives rise. Most memorable among powerful metaphors of the sea is the aural one in another work by Chaucer, the House of Fame.
