Journal Notes: August 2022

This is just a short journal-style post to make a few notes. I haven't posted like this on this blog for a while, but it really is a handy way of keeping track of information. The notes relate to topics touched upon on here before.

Firstly..

Firstly we have this quote concerning Giordano Bruno. It's from George Abbot (1562 - 1633), who mocked Bruno for his view that the Earth was in motion. Abbot later went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

"[Bruno supported] the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still"

I thought this was interesting as it illustrates how uncommon belief in the heliocentric model was at the time.

This then led me on to the following little titbits of information.

Namely that Christopher Marlowe didn't mention heliocentrism in his works - this passage comes from a work titled Christopher Marlowe by Richard Wilson:

It is true that in none of his writings - as they have reached us - does Marlowe ever mention a heliocentric universe, while his poetic imagery often contemplates a 'centric' earth and the revolving spheres; none the less, many of his critics have found it surprising and even contradictory that he did not include Copernicanism among his unorthodox and unlicensed opinions.

The next is simply an interesting bit of word knowledge. This time from a book tilted Spatial Questions: Cultural Topologies and Social Spatialisation by Rob Shields. It concerns the concept of space.

First century BCE Judaic thought adopted the Hebrew 'place', makom kadosh, as a name of God (Arabic makam 'holy place').

We've mentioned words with the double 'M' sound on this blog before, so I thought this was an interesting addition. The relation of 'space' to 'place' is also quite thought provoking. The entire passage (titled 'Space as the Sacred') from which the above quote is from is well worth reading in this regard.