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Full-Text Articles in History

The Landisfarne Gospels, Abby Thomas Apr 2015

The Landisfarne Gospels, Abby Thomas

History Class Publications

The Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the best-preserved and most famous medieval illuminated manuscripts. It is known for its beautiful illustrations and intricate decorating that places it amongst the most praised and studied manuscript masterpieces of all time. Beyond this, though, it is famous for yet more reasons. First, the Gospel was written originally in Latin, but around a century later an Old English gloss was added, and this translation is the oldest known version of the gospels in English.1 Also, the level and amount of documentation for the Gospels is almost staggering.


Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift Jan 2015

Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …