Platonic Psychology: Got Medieval

Showing posts with label Got Medieval. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Reasoning: Truth Behind the Song

So there was an interesting piece on Got Medieval about "Ring Around the Rosie." I thought it was pretty interesting that the supposed origin of the song was not in fact the plague, as I was always told.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Appetitive: You Don't Doodle in Gold Leaf

Apologies for my long silence. I've been really powering though the Greek and Latin lately as well as trying to have a few moments to socialize with Catullus II and some fellow classicists.

For today, I thought I'd post a note on medieval manuscripts. Catullus II is really into medieval manuscripts and I want to a wonderful lecture the other week on Apocalypse narratives in medieval manuscripts that I will hopefully get a chance to post about at some point. Anyway, here is a lesson in distinguishing between doodles and marginalia.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Appetitive: Marginalia and Things to Come

I have not been feeling particularly well over the past few days and so I have not been as diligent as I had originally planned, in either posting or in working on translating. However, I go back to proctoring exams again tomorrow, and I am going to bring some classically-related material to read in the hope that I might jumpstart my work again.

In the meantime, Got Medieval has started posting again and posted a rather amusing piece of marginalia yesterday. Enjoy!

Why Platonic Psychology?

Entry types into this blog are divided into three categories: appetitive, spirited, and reasoning to correspond with the three parts of the Platonic conception of the soul. The appetitive portion will most often be humorous content with a classical bent. However, Plato's understanding of appetitive is much broader than that, encompassing the general pleasures of spectacle-- such as theater, both comedy and tragedy-- as well as emotions and bodily pains and pleasures. Sometimes I will stray into one of the more Platonic uses of appetitive. If I can manage it, I will post a weekly translation of a joke or funny phrase into Latin or Greek. The spirited portion (literally timophillic i.e. honor loving) will be my own ideas about Greek and Roman ideas. This section attempts to put me on the map as a classicist with a point of view. The reasoning part will be commentary and reviews on classical texts. I will also try to post a passage for Latin or Greek prose composition, as well as translations of prose passages or poetry in Latin or Greek. I will offer my take on the passage, and if anyone would like to offer their own attempt at the passage, or corrections or criticisms of mine, they will be welcome to do so in a comment on the blogpost or email me at sulpicia3@hotmail.com.

Bread, Roman Poetry, and Other Frivolity

If you're interested in me as well as my commentary about classical texts, visit my personal blog Fragments of Sulpicia (III), in which I discuss my general day-to-day existence, alongside bread recipes, pedagogy, and Roman Love Elegy.

The Roman love elegists, writing at the end of the Roman Republic wrote beautiful poems about their experiences in love, creating the persona or changing the name of a real person on whom to center their poetry. The only extant female poet calls herself Sulpicia, daughter of Servius and constructs her poems around her lover, Cerninthus. In order to write freely, I have taken up her name, Sulpicia, and the names of her characters and the characters of her contemporary love elegists, to refer to people in my own life. A reference list of characters can be found on the righthand side of Fragments of Sulpicia (III).