Link to a post by reegar:

So this is the article I ran into when I was 15 about the hypnagogic hallucinations I’d been having. At the time, I had no idea what was wrong with me. This ended up being really helpful, and I thought it might be for others too (especially those afraid they are being abducted, possessed, or haunted and are looking for less fantastic answers). Hopped onto my science news account online and searched through the archives for it; if anyone is interested in nightmares, hallucinations and neuroscience, this might be an interesting read.

Re-posting a link to a great article by Medium Aevum on the Hereford Map, which didn’t fit into the theme properly on this blog. 

A friend of mine has an excellent copy of this up on his living room wall.  His fiance tolerates it with good humor. Another friend made him a Mappi Mundi themed iced cake for his birthday!  I’ll have to see if I can link some pictures…

centuriespast:

FINSON, Louis

(b. ca. 1580, Brugge, d. 1617, Amsterdam)

Allegory of the Four Elements
1611
Oil on canvas, 179 x 170 cm
Private collection

This is Google: Historical London!

An exciting resource developed by a team of researchers from Sheffield and Hertfordshire Universities, including our own Prof. Robert Shoemaker.  The site maps location data onto a historical map of London from a host of historical archives including Old Bailey court records, Hearth Tax records, Coroner’s Inquests and archaeological studies.  Most promisingly, the project hopes to add maps and datasets from other periods in future.

I see this kind of electronic resource as the future of history education and research.  One day in the far future, I hope to be able to slide back Google’s Map’s ‘Timeline’ bar, and be transported through the 20th, 19th and 18th century back to our very best guesses at ancient city locations and burial sites.  Not to mention being able to call up these tools onto screens during lectures.  One can dream.

A fantastic online edition of Comenius’ Picture of the World complete with illustrations. Skip past the lengthy introductions to get to the book plates.

The woodcuts and the list of Latin names for animals, jewels and trade workshops are fascinating.  It ignites an eccentric desire to write an English/Latin comic, based in the crime genre and illustrated in the woodcut style…

Dreams in Legend and Tradition: The 6th Legendary Weekend of The Folklore Society
The Assembly Rooms, Swaffham, Norfolk

Attended Saturday 3 September 2011

Paper Delivered: ‘I Presently Fancied it to be a New World’: Disenchanting Dreams in Seventeenth-Century England

In this paper I demonstrate how English popular print culture wove scientific and philosophical understandings together with folk stories and traditions concerning dreams, and how changes in these arena also gave birth to satirical dream visions.  With a presentation of a wonderful source on 17th-century folklore, A Magical Vision, or, a comfortable discovery of the fallacies of witchcraft.

New Blog Design: Early Modern Group @ University of Sheffield

Meeting Wednesday afternoons in Jessop West, History Department. Run by members of the postgraduate community, the group aims to provide an informal and friendly opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion between students and staff from History, English and Archaeology working on and interested in the Early Modern period.

New Blog Design: Sheffield Student Latin Group @ University of Sheffield

Based in the University of Sheffield’s History Department, SLG is a student-led revision and work group created for the purpose of consolidating and improving members’ Latin language and grammar.

Angels of Light? Sanctity and Discernment of Spirits in Early Modern Europe
Lecture Room 23, Balliol College, Oxford

Attended 20-21 May 2011

Paper Delivered: Dreaming As They Wake: Inner/Outer Worlds in the Protestant Prophetic Imagination

This paper explored the phenomena of prophetic ecstasy, mental alienation and guides to the discernment of spirits through the sensual experience of dreams  in philosophical works of English Platonists and Puritan reformers in the mid-seventeenth century.

(Source: balliol.ox.ac.uk)

Medicine at the Margins: Ideas, Knowledge and Practice from c. 1500 to 200
University of Glamorgan

Attended Friday, April 15th 2011

Paper Delivered: Fleshly and Spiritual Bodies in Seventeenth-Century Dream Theories

A paper on how the dream theories of seventeenth-century English writers looked toward an optimistic vision of the Adamic and Patriarchal bodies of the Old Testament as well as Neoplatonic and radical concepts of the soul to explain the presence of the transcendent in the nocturnal experiences of Christian dreamers.

(Source: history.research.glam.ac.uk)

EM-REM Postgraduate Forum Annual Symposium 2010 - The Other: The Monstrous, the Marginal and the Misunderstood
Westmere, Edgbaston Park Road, University of Birmingham

Attended Friday 18th March 2011

Paper Delivered: ‘Trouble, fear and horror to the soul’: Corrupted Flesh and Monstrous Spirits in Seventeenth-Century Dream Theory

This paper explored the connections between images of the monstrous, how the images of dreams were believed to show how the imagination was corrupted by the desires of the flesh in orthodox medicine, and how bestial and fearful bodies showed the true form of the dreamer’s spirit in Neoplatonic and theosophic dream theories.

Teutonic Philosophy: Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) In Context, His Life and the Reception of His Writings
St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford

Attended 16-17 September 2010

This conference examined the life and works of the ‘inspired cobbler’ of Görlitz and his influence on Western culture from the radical sects of the English Revolution through to twentieth-century Russian Orthodox theology.

The papers at this event were valuable for introducing me to the cosmological and theosophic philosophy of Boehme, of whom Thomas Tryon was a student - the author of a key text of dream theory in the 1680s.  They also indicated the relevance of the works of Jane Lead and John Pordage for my research.

LXXXV.
TO THE DIVINITY OF DREAMS.

The FUMIGATION from AROMATICS.

THEE I invoke, blest pow’r of dreams divine,
Angel of future fates, swift wings are thine:
Great source of oracles to human kind,
When stealing soft, and whisp’ring to the mind,
Thro’ sleep’s sweet silence and the gloom of night,
Thy pow’r awakes th’ intellectual fight;
To silent souls the will of heav’n relates,
And silently reveals their future fates.

(Source: theoi.com)