SW 6 Mullennix

On October 4^th, I went to the special collections section of the library to look at some of the materials shown to the class on the 3^rd. Looking at books from the 1500 and 1600s was fascinating due to their age. The preservation of the books was really incredible and flipping through the pages felt a bit surreal, as the materials and style of these older books differ greatly from the usual texts we handle today. I was amused by the pictures in many of the materials depicting uncanny events. One book I viewed was John Glanvil’s Saducismus Triumphatus, printed in 1681 in London on the topic of witches. It took a very religious approach but the last bit of the text was reportedly real-life stories of supernatural experiences and apparent instances of witchcraft. I read a few of the anecdotes and found them a bit funny in that they were very seriously toned accounts of some slightly humorous things, like dramatic fainting at ill-timed lightning or people being essentially ding-dong ditched by spirits. My overall takeaway was that students should take advantage of the special collections section more and that it must have made life very interesting when belief in the supernatural was more widespread.

One item that particularly interested me was Francois Boussuet’s De Natura Aquatilium Carmen (1558). It is a collection of illustrations and Latin poems regarding marine life, some specimens real and some more imaginative. I was drawn to this item because I studied Latin in high school and it’s nice to feel like that knowledge is useful. Furthermore, having always lived on the water in my hometown Annapolis, where the Chesapeake Bay was an important part of my childhood, I have studied and taken an interest in marine life and ecosystems. The woodcut illustrations were really detailed and intriguing. I found it interesting that this was probably viewed as a scientific authority, although some of the marine life depicted was most definitely fantastical and some would be considered sea monsters. It’s fascinating how in the place of today’s more thorough knowledge, people’s imagination really thrived. Today there is still a lot we don’t know about the things in our oceans but it seems like people don’t believe in sea monsters as creatively or as seriously.