Arabic, hems, and the Virgin Mary

The Cambrai Madonna ~1340 Cathedrale de Cambrai, France
notice the script on the sleeves and hood.

Mike's post on the different value system of the Hopi started me thinking about the exchange of information between civilizations, especially when they have very distinct cultures. One example I encountered is very fitting because it deals with writing (our current unit), the concept of occult (as defined by Dr. Petersen as hidden or mysterious not as the devil worship), art (mentioned by Misa), and the Virgin Mary (the rise of the cult of Mary was also discussed in class, though more in connection to archetypes and the importance of myth to cultures). I call your attention to Islamic writing in paintings of the Virgin Mary.

Printing.

The first printing press was invented during the Renaissance era around 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz. This printing press used a movable metal type which was set to print one page of a book at a time. Oil-based inks were used to coat the type. After so many copies were made of one page, the type would be cleaned and rearranged to form the next page, until all of the pages of a book were complete.

Johannes Gutenberg

The metal type used was more durable than woodblocking

(which was also used for printing images), as it was molded of metal and would not crack or break as easily. The type was also more uniform and easily read, unlike written writing which was often times corrected by multiple people with different hand-writings. The type could also be adjusted or created to be more aesthetically pleasing and appealing to the eye. Often, art was also inserted into books through printing as well. Oil-based ink was used because it was long-lasting and would not fade as much.

Because books and other written works were able to be printed quicker and through mass production, the price of books became cheaper and became more available to the common people. The most famous of these mass produced texts, the Bible (or the Gutenberg Bible), was most commonly read more than any other book during this time.

Gutenberg Press

With this new found way of mass producing written works, the printing press popularized all throughout Europe within only a few decades. This allowed for scientists, religious leaders, and other scholars to circulate their ideas and discoveries quicker and on a much broader scale that was available to the middle class as well.

This method of printing and distributing of knowledge continued until the 19th century when the hand-operated Gutenberg press was replaced by the steam-powered rotary press and, eventually, computer printers.

Calligraphy party!

Ok so it it party time. Come to my house tomorrow, Friday Oct 31, at 4:30 and we will do some cool calligraphying. By which I mean making a mess with ink.
Also remember to be thinking about the best time in the next few weeks to go to the print museum.

Chicken ScratchERS

Yesterday, I was doing some research on the internet about different forms of writing.  I realized that everyone seems to have their own sort of writing utensil that they like to use.  Personally if it is not a Cristal Bic* (preferably black) or at least Bic* mechanical pencil, I am just not going to be a happy writer.  Well this got me thinking about how much we've seen about writing character systems and what we write on, but we hadn't looked a lot into what we write with.  So I decided to compile a short history of writing utensils leading up to the renaissance.

Chicken Scratch

 All right, so today I am going to put up two posts and this one will be short.  I was thinking about what I would blog about this week when I realized that my room mate's girlfriend had a set of calligraphy pens.  I figured that there would be nothing like a hands on experience with something that most of us are completely unfamiliar with today.  I started messing around and wrote this page (albeit somewhat sloppily) just to try my hand at writing with the metal tipped ink pen.

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This week, I decided that rather than examining written knowledge on a large scale, I’d focus on one very specific piece of our written knowledge tradition: the ampersand. In case you didn’t know, “ampersand” is the name for the “and” symbol that looks like this: 

The King's Speech

So I don't know why I didn't put this on our blog a few weeks ago, but it is the video of our class midterm.  It is a memorized choral recitation of King Benjamin's speech from the Book of Mormon.  I won't say much about it, we'll let the words speak for themselves.

A Roman Alphabet and Arabic Numerals

Sorry to break the trend, but I am going to step away from the idea of mediums ... and into the realm of numbers.

The Evolution of Numbers

I don't know if I have said this previously, but I love the etymology of words, and knowing the origins of things and what that can teach us about the thing itself, whether it is whole words or letters or numerical symbols.  That's partly why I was so happy I got the Phoenician civilization, because it had the first alphabet (basically).  But as I have continued to study the alphabet and where ours came from (if you can't find "Letter Perfect" at the library, it is because I have it :-),  the thought occurred to me: if we use the Roman alphabet, why don't we use Roman numerals too?  Where did the Arabic ones come from?

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE AT CHICHEN ITZA

I love architecture and I have been fascinated by the Mayan architecture ever since I started blogging, well to be honest I always have been, but I never quite seemed to be able to fit it into any of the topics I was blogging about. Something I hadn't thought much about until researching for this post is the depth of research and knowledge can come from just a given culture's architecture. We can study a culture through the lens of architecture to examine what the culture deemed important. I would like to highlight a certain pyramid in Chichén Itzá called Kukulkan's pyramid to examine the importance of astronomy and architecture to the Mayans. 

Los Angeles

sorry my blog is a little late! I am busy in LA! It will be up soon though!