What's a millenium, more or less, between
friends?. . .some of the events, ideas, texts that fall, roughly, across
semester break and which seem to me to be interesting from the perspective of
"doing" Core--AKD.
- 337 - Constantine's conversion, death
- 5th century - northern barbarians
trash Rome / western Roman Empire
- 622 - the Hegira, Mohammed's flight from Mecca
to Medina
- 711 - Arabs into Spain
- 1150/67 - Universities at Paris / Oxford
- 1215 - Magna Carta. . .whatd'ya mean you got
liberties?
- 1229 - Inquisition, Toulouse, forbade Bible
reading by laymen
- 1274 - Thomas Aquinas died. . .the Greeks are
back, courtesy of Arab scholars; how does one philosophize on the nature of
being and knowledge in the Church of Augustine?
- 1295 - Marco Polo returns from China
- 1321 - Dante died. . .one hell of a poet, of
course
- 14th cent. - Black Death
- 1453 - Constantinople falls to the Turks
- 1454 - Gutenberg Bible printed
- 1486 - Malleus Maleficarum published. .
.~83% of the thousands of people executed as witches between 1480 - 1700
were women.
- 1492-ish - Isabella & Ferdinand expel Jews,
Moors. . .people come to expect the Spanish Inquisition.
- 1492/8 - European seafarers reach Americas,
India
- 1513 - Machiavelli's Prince
- 1516 - Thomas More's Utopia
- 1517 - Luther nails his theses
- 1519 - Leonardo dies
- on mining: Henry Cornelius Agrippa (The Vanity
of Arts and Sciences, 1530), "reiterated. . .moral strictures against
mining found in the ancient treatises, quoting [a] passage from Ovid
portraying miners digging into the bowels of the earth". . . making
"the very ground more hurtful and pestiferous. . ."; Georg
Agricola (On Metals, 1556) counters that "Nature has given the earth. . .to man that he might
cultivate it and draw out of its caverns metals and other mineral
products", an activity worthy of the "splendid and glorious
natural endowment" of humanity (Merchant).
- 15th/16th centuries -
"geared machines operated by horse, wind, or water power, such as
grainmills, [etc.], become much more widespread" (Merchant).
- 1531 - Antwerp opens the first stock exchange
- 1558 - John Knox has bad timing: "It is a
thing repugnant to the order of nature, that any woman be exalted to rule
over men. For God hath denied to her the office of a head. . ."
- 1600 - Giordano Bruno burns
- on clocks: Kepler (1605) "My aim is to
show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism
but to a clockwork"; Boyle (d. 1691) "The world is like a rare
clock. . .where all things proceed according to the artificer's first
design, and the motions. . .do not [thereafter] require the peculiar
interposing of the artificer, or any intelligent agent employed by
him."
- 1616 - Shakespeare died. . .secular,
sophisticated, when "the darkness was here [just] yesterday"
(Conrad).
- 1619 - first African slaves are imported into
Virginia
- 1637 - Venice opens the first public opera
house
- 1642 - Galileo (look, the Sun has spots!)
died; Newton was born
- 1684 - a delegation of "aristocratic
Siamese arrived in Paris. . .the King of Siam, when asked by a missionary to
turn Christian, [had] replied that divine Providence, had it wished a single
religion to prevail in the world, could easily have so arranged it"
(Palmer & Colton). What to make of these civilized, philosophic
strangers?
- 1662/6 - scientific societies formed in London
/ Paris
- 1687 - Newton's Principia; gravity goes
as 1/r2. . .but why?
and as ever, war happens.
References:
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Merchant, The Death of Nature,
1983
Palmer & Colton, A History of
the Modern World, 1978