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Post by Charlie on Nov 19, 2008 5:00:15 GMT
I found your bede.co.uk site from Google, and I am so glad to find intelligent people who also possess common sense. I am not an intellectual, and I often lack the scholarship to answer tough questions from friends or colleagues--some who truly want an answer, and some who just want to see the Christian squirm. In Washington DC, there's an atheist group that bought ad space on the sides of buses, saying "Why believe in God? Just be good for goodness' sake." This leaves me speechless, not that there are atheists in the world, but that some segment of them now seeks converts. Anyway, your site got an instant bookmark, and I shall return.
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Post by merkavah12 on Nov 19, 2008 5:19:59 GMT
Welcome Charlie!
I'm glad you found us.
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Post by James Hannam on Nov 23, 2008 10:34:37 GMT
Hi Charlie,
Sorry I'm a bit late but thank you and welcome.
It is great to hear from people who have found the website useful and I hope you enjoy browsing it.
Do post any queries, comments or anything else you fancy mentioning here.
Best wishes
James
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Post by ChooChoo on Dec 6, 2008 1:03:48 GMT
Dear James,
I'm ChooChoo (from that Guardian thread on Pius XII). I too have enjoyed your site. I first came across your old Bede haunt in relation to the Jesus Myth stuff.
Forget my question from that Guardian thread. Have been reading your first chapter. The idea for the book is v interesting and I wish you all the best with it. I look forward to reading it. I work part time in a bookshop, so I'll order it in when it's published!
Just one point of pedantry. On page 21 (of the PDF document), you mention that Charlemagne was illiterate.
I don't think this is quite true. In Einhard's Vita Karolini - in a chapter (25) on Charlemagne's eloquence and interest in learning, he writes,
"[Charlemagne] took lessons in grammar of the deacon Peter of Pisa, at that time an aged man. Another deacon, Albin of Britain, surnamed Alcuin, a man of Saxon extraction, who was the greatest scholar of the day, was his teacher in other branches of learning. The King spent much time and labour with him studying rhetoric, dialectics, and especially astronomy; he learned to reckon, and used to investigate the motions of the heavenly bodies most curiously, with an intelligent scrutiny. He also tried to write, and used to keep tablets and blanks in bed under his pillow, that at leisure hours he might accustom his hand to form the letters; however, as he did not begin his efforts in due season, but late in life, they met with ill success."
The (failed) attempt to learn how to write presupposes, for all I can see, that he could read. In addition to his mother tongue, Einhard specifies he could speak Latin ("as well as his native tongue") and Greek (understood better than he could speak). The language he tried to learn how to write in was - I imagine - Latin. Incidentally, in the previous chapter, Einhard mentions that during meals, he particularly enjoyed having Augustine's De Civitate Dei read to him. I've never tried it myself.
He's actually an interesting example of the multiple hues of literacy (beyond a literate / illiterate dichotomy): he couldn't write, but he was - in various senses - the author of several kinds of official document.
Out of interest, for your PhD, did you do any research on early medieval science? Would you recommend anything in particular?
I have an ulterior motive in asking: I need to become more au fait than I currently am with pre-Islamic and pre-Salernitan knowledge of medical texts in the west - or even composition. (Pre-Islamic as in before Constantinus Africanus and all that, not before the 7th century).
Any passing references gratefully accepted. There is only - to my knowledge - one book specifically on early medieval (western) medicine before Salerno etc, by Loren MacKinney (published some 70 or so years ago).
Anyway, keep up the good blog.
Best best best.
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Post by ChooChoo on Dec 6, 2008 2:35:49 GMT
(Only one book in English, that is).
Also, I forgot to apologise - is that the right word? - or cushion or insulate or whatever my pedantry. It's not a big point at all. I don't know how the publishing process works exactly - printing yet? hell no? I didn't mean to dishearten or snipe. And perhaps you'd disagree with taking Einhard at face value before reading between the lines as it were.
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Post by James Hannam on Dec 6, 2008 10:46:56 GMT
Hi ChooChoo,
Thank you for the correction which I'll put through as I do the final draft. IIRC, 'illiterate' meant unable to read and write Latin back in those days and was used of people who could read their native tongue. But the point is too subtle and it currently appears as wrong. I will change.
If you can see anywhere else where an edit would help in any way, do please let me know. People who want to attack the book (and hopefully there will be a good few) will use mistakes to do it, so best to nail them down now.
Thank you again.
Best wishes
James
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