Literary Dimensions Seminar
Dabney Hall 110 (Treasure Room)
What is a machine in the European Middle Ages? Cognition, mechanics, and cosmology in medieval philosophy
Jonathan Morton,
Associate Professor,
Tulane University,
Focusing particularly on texts from 12th-century Western Europe, this paper thinks through the surprising strangeness of the meanings of the Latin term machina. The aim is both to defamiliarize modern "common-sense" ideas of what a machine is or should be and to offer a window into how medieval machines (and works of art) could be conceptualized as mediating between individual humans and the cosmic universal.
For more information, please contact Joanna Poon by phone at 626-395-1724 or by email at jpoon@caltech.edu.
Event Series
Literary Dimensions Seminar Series