Literary Dimensions Seminar

Series: Literary Dimensions Seminar Series

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.

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For more information, please contact Joanna Poon by phone at 626-395-1724 or by email at jpoon@caltech.edu.

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