I think I wasn't clear enough in my Tuesday post. Jean Gimpel, author of The Medieval Machine, discussed eyeglasses on page 149 in that book. He quoted from a sermon given in Florence, in 1306, praising the invention of eyeglasses some twenty years earlier. (He obtained this reference from another author listed in his notes.) [...]
I've been reading The Medieval Machine (The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages) by Jean Gimpel published by Penguin in 1975. I found it on my bookshelves during Christmas cleaning, a leftover from my Catholic scientists project. Dante lived in the middle of the period that Gimpel is describing, maybe 1100 to 1400. Gimpel basically [...]
I think that the Annunciation appears more often than anything else in the Divine Comedy. Here are just two examples... Purgatory Canto 10 The angel who came down to earth with tidings of the peace so many years wept for in vain, that op'd the heavenly gates from their long interdict, before us seem'd, in [...]
Saint Lucy's Feast is on December 13. It is celebrated in Sweden with young girls wearing wreaths in their hair and serving cinnamon buns to their family early in the morning. In Syracuse, in Sicily, in Italy where she lived, it is celebrated very publicly and over several weeks. But people want her to be [...]
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