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Aug. 30th, 2006 02:53 pmLast night's class on Medieval Women is still with me.
We explored the relationship between cosmology and religion, then followed it through to look at manipulating the world to meet preset goals (specifically through medicine and magic). We talked about the difference between magic and miracles and that what a modern reads in the Middle Ages isn't the same as what someone living in the period reads into a blessing or adjuration. It was all kinds of cool. It was especially fun when I realised the students all understood what I was saying and asked intelligent questions. There's a feeling of 'all's right with the world' when everyone in a room understands the relationship between Cicero's 'Somnium Scipionis' and a map showing the climate zones.
The best 'ah' moment was when I drew a little Macrobian map (badly) and put a little stick figure at the top and one at the bottom and drew an arrow and wrote "Antipodes" and explained 'anti' plus 'podes'.
We explored the relationship between cosmology and religion, then followed it through to look at manipulating the world to meet preset goals (specifically through medicine and magic). We talked about the difference between magic and miracles and that what a modern reads in the Middle Ages isn't the same as what someone living in the period reads into a blessing or adjuration. It was all kinds of cool. It was especially fun when I realised the students all understood what I was saying and asked intelligent questions. There's a feeling of 'all's right with the world' when everyone in a room understands the relationship between Cicero's 'Somnium Scipionis' and a map showing the climate zones.
The best 'ah' moment was when I drew a little Macrobian map (badly) and put a little stick figure at the top and one at the bottom and drew an arrow and wrote "Antipodes" and explained 'anti' plus 'podes'.