At 10:03 06.10.98 -0500, you wrote:
>What studies could you recommend on medieval
>views of the natural world?
>The chair of the philosophy department at my university
>has written and argues that "people in the Middle Ages did not think
>nature was beautiful" (see his slide show at
>www. phil.unt.edu/show/).
>Any responses?
Dear Claire,
Truely a horrible website! It does not give any name of author or editor,
but if it is true as you say that it was created by, or under the
responsibility of, the Chair of the UNT Department of Philsophy and
Religion Studies (Eugene C. Hargrove), I wonder what the standards in this
Department are. The full statement in question reads:
People in the Middle Ages generally did not believe that nature is
beautiful, or they believed that it was an inferior beauty except
as an element in the beauty of creation as a whole, or they believed
that nature was beautiful but that it tempted them and thereby
conflicted with their love of God.
Nevertheless, most people today do believe that nature is beautiful
in a more secular sense. This presentation explains how that change
took place over many centuries. The story involves developments in
many aspects of Western culture, including the arts, the humanities,
and the sciences
As a general rule, statements beginning with "People in the Middle Ages"
cannot end well, and this one is no exception. The ambitious project
outlined in these initial sentences is carried out on ca. 40 pages, each of
them producing an image file and accompanying text of usually not more than
two or three sentences. With jewels like:
In the Middle Ages, people thought symbollically [sic, O.L].
When they saw an image of an animal,
such as a fish, or of food, such as a loaf
of bread, they thought of the most
appropriate story in the Bible.
Yet they somehow managed to survive. As a critical remark on Domenico
Veneziano's _Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata_ we read:
There are also problems with the look of the mountains.
They lack realistic detail. It is possible that the artist
had never seen a mountain and was relying on written accounts
of them.
What this poor unexperienced man from the Italian waterside had seen
instead must have been some medieval version of Star Treck, as we can infer
from your chairs explanation:
The six-winged seraph is shooting laser-like beams at him [sc.
Francis, O.L.], cutting his hands, feet, and side so that he
can learn what Jesus felt when he was nailed on a cross and
crucified.
So after all the purpose of stigmatization was education. Normally your
chair's historical interests seem to have their focus in detecting what
"the Church" disliked but failed to prevent:
Initially, the Church opposed the creation of gardens.
However, eventually it decided that they could be regarded
as symbols of the Garden of Eden, and reluctantly gave
its approval.
Or somewhere else:
In the beginning, the Church objected to foreign plants, but
eventually approved of plants named in the Bible because of
their symbolic value. After Europe was filled with biblically
related plants, the Church was unable to prevent further
importation from other temperate areas around the Earth: for
example, from China, North and South America, Africa, and
Australia and New Zealand.
If stuff like this counts as tenurable in your Department, I will make sure
to place my next job application there.
Otfried
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