After Dante passes the last ledge in Purgatory and braves the flames that he compares to molten glass in temperature, the sun sets and he can not go further. Even though he is now at the top of Mount Purgatory the rule that no progress is made in the dark remains. He lies down on [...]
Spinning wheels in the 1700’s
There's a lot of argument about the importance of spinning improvements in a medieval economy, but there is no argument that the device called a 'spinning jenny' helped to start the industrial revolution. Spinning in general consists in taking individual fibers of cotton or wool or hemp or nettle and twisting them together into a [...]
How many popes did you say?
One reason that I love reading about Dante, beyond reading his Divine Comedy, is that the early 1300s were a tumultuous time. It helps to keep our modern troubles in perspective. The Church went through 14 popes in Dante's fifty-six year lifespan. Three of those popes served for less than a year. For comparison, there [...]
Spinning is medieval but…
When I was nineteen I worked at the Natural History Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution in DC, for the summer. I was an intern for a meteoriticist, someone who worked on meteorites, not the weather. The job was interesting of itself, but I also went out at lunch and wandered around other museums. The [...]
Another Longfellow poem!
After Longfellow died his brother, Samuel Longfellow, wrote a book about him and included the below poem. It was actually written in 1842, when Longfellow was 35 years old but it was only published in 1886. The title, "Mezzo Cammin," is Italian for the middle of life. The words come from the opening line of [...]
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