A World Book Metaphor. Hugo Wstinc and Alan of Lille in the Cloister of the Dom, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Travelling from Groningen or Venlo to meetings at Utrecht, quite centrally located in The Netherlands, I've never regarded as a great hardship. Trains are mostly comfortable and I look forward to walking a bit before official duties begin. My favorite haunts then are the Old Botanical Garden and the Cloister of the Dom-Church (also called St. Martin's).
Intent all morning on a set of papers about philosophy and science, the familiar sight of this canon writing a book quite suddenly dredged up from the deepest reaches of my mind:
"Each creature of the world / is as a book and picture to us / and a mirror."
[Omnis mundi creatura,
Quasi liber et pictura
Nobis est et speculum.]
Penned by Alan of Lille (c.1128-1202), these words are a shorthand for what is called "The Book of Nature", an idea still very much alive even in modern science. Think only of closely related metaphors such as "the DNA code".
This statue of a canon writing in a book dates from 1913. It was designed by Jan Hendrik Brom (1860-1915) and cast by his son Jan Eloy (1891-1954). They took as their inspiration the figure of the medieval legal scholar and canon of St Martin's, Hugo Wstinc (?-1349). Wstinc had been pointed out to them by Jan Hendrik's brother, Gisbert or Gijsbertus Brom (1864-1915). Gisbert was an astute scholar and a foremost archivist of the Middle Ages, who also wrote a fine guide to the archives of the Vatican. Moreover, he was active in contemporary socio-political debate in the Church between 'modernism' and 'integralism', coming down hard against the latter. For Gisbert the medieval legal scholar Wstinc stood as a contemporary metaphor for science and scholarship in general. It was in this spirit that the City of Utrecht presented the University with this token of their esteem.
In back in the Cloister walls are scenes from the life of St Martin.
A World Book Metaphor. Hugo Wstinc and Alan of Lille in the Cloister of the Dom, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Travelling from Groningen or Venlo to meetings at Utrecht, quite centrally located in The Netherlands, I've never regarded as a great hardship. Trains are mostly comfortable and I look forward to walking a bit before official duties begin. My favorite haunts then are the Old Botanical Garden and the Cloister of the Dom-Church (also called St. Martin's).
Intent all morning on a set of papers about philosophy and science, the familiar sight of this canon writing a book quite suddenly dredged up from the deepest reaches of my mind:
"Each creature of the world / is as a book and picture to us / and a mirror."
[Omnis mundi creatura,
Quasi liber et pictura
Nobis est et speculum.]
Penned by Alan of Lille (c.1128-1202), these words are a shorthand for what is called "The Book of Nature", an idea still very much alive even in modern science. Think only of closely related metaphors such as "the DNA code".
This statue of a canon writing in a book dates from 1913. It was designed by Jan Hendrik Brom (1860-1915) and cast by his son Jan Eloy (1891-1954). They took as their inspiration the figure of the medieval legal scholar and canon of St Martin's, Hugo Wstinc (?-1349). Wstinc had been pointed out to them by Jan Hendrik's brother, Gisbert or Gijsbertus Brom (1864-1915). Gisbert was an astute scholar and a foremost archivist of the Middle Ages, who also wrote a fine guide to the archives of the Vatican. Moreover, he was active in contemporary socio-political debate in the Church between 'modernism' and 'integralism', coming down hard against the latter. For Gisbert the medieval legal scholar Wstinc stood as a contemporary metaphor for science and scholarship in general. It was in this spirit that the City of Utrecht presented the University with this token of their esteem.
In back in the Cloister walls are scenes from the life of St Martin.