Magnifying Grains of Sand, Seeds, and Blades of Grass: Optical Effects in Robert Grosseteste’s De iride (On the Rainbow) (circa 1228–1230)

In his treatise On the Rainbow (De iride), composed nearly four hundred years before the first known telescope, the English polymath Robert Grosseteste identified three striking optical effects: distant objects can be rendered close by; close-by large objects can be rendered small; and distant small objects can be rendered large. In the context of the history of optics, the first effect is especially striking. Grosseteste did not give details of the mechanisms underlying these effects but did mention the passage of rays through refraction in “diaphanous” or transparent bodies. While making no final claim that Grosseteste himself necessarily knew of or used lenses, this essay examines the coherence between the three optical effects described in Grosseteste’s treatise and two candidate proposals for the deployment of a single convex lens. A convex lens, deployed in different ways, is shown to produce all three of Grosseteste’s optical effects, in a manner strikingly aligned with the language that he uses to distinguish changes in the location and size of objects. The implications of this coherence for interpretations of On the Rainbow are discussed throughout the essay

How 'dynasty' became a modern global concept : intellectual histories of sovereignty and property

The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. Hegel’s references to ‘dynasty’, read with Marx’s critique, further show how ‘dynasty’ encoded the intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism. Imaginaries about ‘dynasty’ also connected national sovereignty with patriarchal authority. European colonialism helped globalize the concept in the non-European world; British India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates. The globalization of the abstraction of ‘dynasty’ was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/‘tribal’ populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’. These concepts nourished new forms of democracy in modern India. Global intellectual histories can thus expand political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern models of collective and polyarchic power.PostprintPeer reviewe

Historical and intellectual culture in the long twelfth century : the Scandinavian connection /

"In the wake of religious conversion and the establishment of more stable political systems, the outskirts of Latin Christendom produced historical narratives providing their present identities with a foundational past. The essays collected in this volume all seek to illuminate the emergence of a written historical culture in Denmark from the early twelfth century onwards by situating this historical culture in a wider geographical, chronological, and cultural context. The essays in this volume aim to gain insight into Danish historical narratives written in Latin in the long twelfth century.^In the wake of religious conversion and the establishment of more stable political systems, the outskirts of Latin Christendom produced historical narratives providing their present identities with a foundational past. The essays gathered here all seek to illuminate the emergence of a written historical culture in Denmark from the early twelfth century onwards by situating this historical culture in a wider geographical, chronological, and cultural context. 0The period from c.1050 to 1225 saw the emergence of historical narratives about Danish affairs, a development mirroring both the rapid growth of historical writing in the Latin West in this period and the consolidation of Denmark as a Christian kingdom on the model of the great western monarchies. This volume as a whole aims to gain insight into Danish historical narratives written in Latin in the long twelfth century, both by drawing on the theoretical and methodological advances gained through increasing general scholarly interest in medieval historiography over the last decades, and by placing these texts in a larger cultural and intellectual context through comparisons with historical narratives from other areas, particularly England, France, and Germany. The sixteen essays combined in this volume thus range from detailed formal analyses to comparative studies of wider trends in the historiographical developments of the high Middle Ages."In the wake of religious conversion and the establishment of more stable political systems, the outskirts of Latin Christendom produced historical narratives providing their present identities with a foundational past. The essays collected in this volume all seek to illuminate the emergence of a written historical culture in Denmark from the early twelfth century onwards by situating this historical culture in a wider geographical, chronological, and cultural context. The essays in this volume aim to gain insight into Danish historical narratives written in Latin in the long twelfth century.^In the wake of religious conversion and the establishment of more stable political systems, the outskirts of Latin Christendom produced historical narratives providing their present identities with a foundational past. The essays gathered here all seek to illuminate the emergence of a written historical culture in Denmark from the early twelfth century onwards by situating this historical culture in a wider geographical, chronological, and cultural context. 0The period from c.1050 to 1225 saw the emergence of historical narratives about Danish affairs, a development mirroring both the rapid growth of historical writing in the Latin West in this period and the consolidation of Denmark as a Christian kingdom on the model of the great western monarchies. This volume as a whole aims to gain insight into Danish historical narratives written in Latin in the long twelfth century, both by drawing on the theoretical and methodological advances gained through increasing general scholarly interest in medieval historiography over the last decades, and by placing these texts in a larger cultural and intellectual context through comparisons with historical narratives from other areas, particularly England, France, and Germany. The sixteen essays combined in this volume thus range from detailed formal analyses to comparative studies of wider trends in the historiographical developments of the high Middle Ages

The Use of the Stars: Alchemy, Plants, and Medicine

status: publishe