Search Results for "Mediaeval Science"
Your search for posts with tags containing Mediaeval Science found 20 posts
Whether they were introducing materia medica into the medical curriculum at the universities, going out into the countryside to search for and study plants for themselves, leading students on field trips to do the same, establishing and developing botanical...
This book review needs a little background. Some readers will know the blog post I wrote about meeting historian of astrology, Darrel Rutkin, on a country bus in 2014, whilst reading Monica Azzolini’s excellent The Duke and the Stars: Astrology and...
We have now reached the period of history that the majority of people automatically think of when the hear or read the name, The Renaissance. The majority probably also think, when the hear the term, of a period in European art history, often called the...
Due to various factors I am running well behind schedule this week. The post should, all going well, appear here tomorrow!
To paraphrase what is possibly the most infamous opening sentence in a history of science book[1], there was no such thing as Renaissance science, and this is the is the start of a bog post series about it. Put another way there are all sorts of problems...
There is a widespread popular vision of the Middle ages, as some sort of black hole of filth, disease, ignorance, brutality, witchcraft and blind devotion to religion. This fairly-tale version of history is actively propagated by authors of popular...
“Positively medieval” has become a universal put down for everything considered backward, ignorant, dirty, primitive, bigoted, intolerant or just simply stupid in our times. This is based on a false historical perspective that paints the Middle...
In my recent demolition of Mario Livio’s very pretentious Galileo and the Science Deniers I very strongly criticised Livio’s repeated claims, based on Galileo’s notorious Il Saggiatore quote on the two books, that Galileo was somehow...
As stated earlier the predominant medieval view of the cosmos was an uneasy bundle of Aristotle’s cosmology, Ptolemaic astronomy, Aristotelian terrestrial mechanics, which was not Aristotle’s but had evolved out of it, and Aristotle’s...
Thomas Paine (1736–1809) was an eighteenth-century political radical famous, or perhaps that should be infamous, for two political pamphlets, Common Sense (1776) and Rights of Man (1791) (he also wrote many others) and for being hounded out of England...
One of the most well known popular stories told about Galileo is how he dropped balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to disprove the Aristotelian hypothesis that balls of different weights would fall at different speeds; the heavier ball falling faster....
One of the central problems in the transition from the traditional geocentric astronomy/cosmology to a heliocentric one was that the system that the Early Modern astronomers inherited from their medieval predecessors was not just an uneasy amalgam of...
One of the most fascinating and spectacularly illustrated Renaissance books on science and technology is De re metallica by Georgius Agricola (1494–1555). Translated into English the author’s name sounds like a figure from a game of happy...
I have suffered from a (un)healthy[1]portion of imposter syndrome all of my life. This is the personal feeling in an academic context that one is just bluffing and doesn’t actually know anything and then any minute now somebody is going to unmask...
One of my favourite radio science programmes is BBC Radio 4’s Science Stories presented by Philip Ball and Naomi Alderman. Yesterday was the first episode of the fifth series of this excellent piece of popular history of science broadcasting. Last...
Without doubt the astrolabes is one of the most fascinating of all historical astronomical instruments. Astrolabe Renners Arsenius 1569Source: Wikimedia Commons To begin with it is not simply one object, it is many objects in one: An astronomical...
Anybody with a basic knowledge of the history of Western science will know that there is a standard narrative of its development that goes something like this. Its roots are firmly planted in the cultures of ancient Egypt and Babylon and it bloomed for...
My #histsci-soul-sisterTM, Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt, wrote a charming post on her H-Word Blog to mark the end of European summer time describing the mad scheme of a certain William Willett to introduce the time change in twenty minute increments over...
Erik Kwakkei (@erik_kwakkei) drew my attention to a rather nice short video by Anthony Esolem of Prager University explaining that the Middle Ages were anything but Dark and should actually be called the bright ages. This is a very well done little piece...
One of the websites that I usually enjoy reading is Wonders & Marvels a collective of historians[1] who post mostly short reports on historical things, oft medical, that they have found fascinating. However, as I recently visited this delightful oasis...
Notes on Post Tags Search
By default, this searches for any categories containing your search term: eg, Tudor will also find Tudors, Tudor History, etc. Check the 'exact' box to restrict searching to categories exactly matching your search. All searches are case-insensitive.
This is a search for tags/categories assigned to blog posts by their authors. The terminology used for post tags varies across different blog platforms, but WordPress tags and categories, Blogspot labels, and Tumblr tags are all included.
This search feature has a number of purposes:
1. to give site users improved access to the content EMC has been aggregating since August 2012, so they can look for bloggers posting on topics they're interested in, explore what's happening in the early modern blogosphere, and so on.
2. to facilitate and encourage the proactive use of post categories/tags by groups of bloggers with shared interests. All searches can be bookmarked for reference, making it possible to create useful resources of blogging about specific news, topics, conferences, etc, in a similar fashion to Twitter hashtags. Bloggers could agree on a shared tag for posts, or an event organiser could announce one in advance, as is often done with Twitter hashtags.
Caveats and Work in Progress
This does not search post content, and it will not find any informal keywords/hashtags within the body of posts.
If EMC doesn't find any <category> tags for a post in the RSS feed it is classified as uncategorized. These and any <category> 'uncategorized' from the feed are omitted from search results. (It should always be borne in mind that some bloggers never use any kind of category or tag at all.)
This will not be a 'real time' search, although EMC updates content every few hours so it's never very far behind events.
The search is at present quite basic and limited. I plan to add a number of more sophisticated features in the future including the ability to filter by blog tags and by dates. I may also introduce RSS feeds for search queries at some point.
Constructing Search Query URLs
If you'd like to use an event tag, it's possible to work out in advance what the URL will be, without needing to visit EMC and run the search manually (though you might be advised to check it works!). But you'll need to use URL encoding as appropriate for any spaces or punctuation in the tag (so it might be a good idea to avoid them).
This is the basic structure:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s={search term or phrase}
For example, the URL for a simple search for categories containing London:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s=london
The URL for a search for the exact category Gunpowder Plot:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s=Gunpowder%20Plot&exact=on
In this more complex URL, %20 is the URL encoding for a space between words and &exact=on adds the exact category requirement.
I'll do my best to ensure that the basic URL construction (searchcat?s=...) is stable and persistent as long as the site is around.
