Welcome!

This is my repository for my research into the Medieval Sciences, especially the areas of Natural Philosophy including Astronomy, Time, and Medicine.

Please enjoy what you see here. It is definately a work in progress! Feel free to comment or point me to sources of information I'm missing (please!!)

What is Natural Philosophy?

The short answer is ‘the precursor to modern science’, however this does not convey the full flavor of the scholarly pursuit. Who better than the 13th century Practitioner Robert Bacon to flesh out the definition:

Natural Philosophy is concerned with a principle of motion and rest, as in the parts of the elements fire, air, earth, and water, and in all inanimate things made from them, as metals, stones, salts, sulphur, and colors such as red lead and white lead and lapis lazuli, which is bright blue and green, and such things as are generated in the bowels of the Earth. And similarly plants, such as herbs, trees, cabbages, reeds, and bushes; and there are brute animals and man. In all these there is naturally a principle of motion and rest and thus there is in them a nature which is called a principle of both motion and rest and are moved naturally, as is obvious with respect to local motion, and other motions, and with respect to generation and corruption, alteration, augmentation, and diminution. Similarly the celestial bodies have a principle of motion within themselves, but not a principle of rest as do terrestrial bodies. 

(Paraphrased from Edward Grant's translation of Bacon's Liber primus communium naturalium in A History of Natural Philosophy)

Join the College!

Marginalia: An "invisible College" for Natural Philosophers of the Knowne World. Whether your interest  be in Astronomy, Alchemy, Physic, Birds & Beasts, Lapidary, Maths, Herblore, Zymurgy, or other Natural Sciences, you are welcome here!

The Invisible College is a term that has been applied to the early beginnings of what was to become the Royal Society of London. One of the methods they used to communicate was through annotations in the margins of books know as 'marginalia'. We are fortunate to have a more direct means of communications, but our distributed nature makes us a "invisible college" in the Modern Middle Ages.

Join the Invisible College at Yahoo Groups


Galen