One of the reasons that I loved Dante, once I figured out how to read him, was that his attitude towards the world was one of careful observation. He knew, for example, where the stars were in the heavens at different times of the year, and different times of night, and different parts of the [...]
Medieval and modern machines
Having posted about the book Medieval Machines (by Jean Gimpel) on December 27, I found The Chip by T. J. Reid. The chip is the microchip inside modern machines of every kind. Reid wrote about the chip because he thought that the people who invented it ought to be as well known as Henry Ford [...]
Saint Ephrem and Dante
The Harp of the Holy Spirit In the course of trying to remember a quote from Saint Ephrem (or Ephraim or Ephraem) that I read twenty years ago I surfed a lot of sites about Saint Ephrem. Top quote about him? "the greatest poet of the patristic age ... perhaps, the only theologian-poet to rank [...]
Eyeglasses and Dante
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.) [...]
After Christmas reading
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 [...]
