Synopsis
The essays in this volume explore the nature of time, our God-given medium of ascent, known, as Augustine puts it, through the ordered study of the “liberal disciplines that carry the mind to the divine (disciplinae liberales intellectum efferunt ad divina)”: grammar and dialectic, for example, to promote thinking; geometry and astronomy to grasp the dimensions of our reality; music, an invisible substance like time itself, as an exemplary bridge to the unseen substance of thoughts, ideas, and the nature of God (theology). This ascending course of study rests on procedure, progress, and attainment ― on before, following, and afterwards ― whose goal is an ascending erudition that lets us finally contemplate, as Augustine says in De ordine, our invisible medium ― time ― within time itself: time is immaterial, but experienced as substantial. The essays here look at projects that chronicle time “from the beginning,” that clarify ideas of creation “in time” and “simultaneous times,” and the interrelationships between measured time and eternity, including “no-time.” Essays also examine time as revealed in social and political contexts, as told by clocks, as notated in music and embodied in memorializing stone. In the final essays of this volume, time is understood as the subject and medium of consciousness. As Adrian Bardon says, “time is not so much a ‘what’ as a ‘how’”: a solution to “organizing experience and modeling events.”
Contributors are (in order within the volume) Jesse W. Torgerson, Ken A. Grant, Danielle B. Joyner, Nancy van Deusen, Peter Casarella, Aaron Canty, Jordan Kirk, Vera von der Osten-Sacken, Gerhard Jaritz, Jason Aleksander, Sara E. Melzer, Mark Howard, Andrew Eschelbacher, Hans J. Rindisbacher, James F. Knapp, Peggy A. Knapp, Raymond Knapp, Michael Cole, Ike Kamphof and Leonard Michael Koff.
About the Author
Nancy van Deusen holds a Ph.D. in Musicology, Indiana University, Bloomington; is currently Professor of Musicology, Benezet Professor of the Humanities, Claremont Graduate University, and is Director of the Claremont Consortium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Claremont Colleges and Graduate University. She has taught widely at Indiana University, the University of Basel, Switzerland, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Central European University, Budapest, and within the California State University system. She has received American Philosophical Society, numerous NEH, and Fulbright grants; and has published on music within the medieval city of Rome, music, liturgy, and institutional structure within the medieval cathedral milieu of Nevers, France, the medieval sequence within its Latin codicological and paleographical contexts, as well as its significance for the history of ideas; music as medieval science and within the curriculum of the early university.
Leonard Michael Koff holds a B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an Associate of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, where he has taught and developed courses on campus and online, including Homer and James Joyce, the Literature of Existentialism, Technology and Human Values, and Banned Books, and courses in Comparative Literature’s humanities sequence. He has published Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling, essays on medieval literature and medievalism, and lectured in this country and Europe on such subjects as literature and philosophy, the shared texts of Western religious identity (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), theories of translation, Cicero, Freud, and Emmanuel Levinas ― and distance learning for the Ministry of Higher Education, Iraqi Kurdistan. He is co-editor of The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, as well as co-editor of Mobs from Brill in which his essay on Elias Canetti appears.
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