3.4 The role of the Edinburgh Town Council This route incidentally leads us to another important feature of the movement, namely the role of the Edinburgh Town Council and its provosts. (The English equivalent would be a lord mayor.) Throughout the eighteenth century, the Town Council, with a policy of enlightened self-interest, promoted the city by sponsoring or patronising its academic, medical and scientific life. The Council regarded the city's university, infirmary and medical school as institutions which, if given enough prestig
3.3 Architecture Printing and publishing, then, had their connections with the Enlightenment programme. Architecture too was related. The Adam family of architects (the father and his two sons) moved in the Edinburgh circle of the intellectuals. The young Robert Adam, for example, attended both McLaurin's mathematics lectures and Monro's anatomy lectures at the university, and his home life was enlivened by regular visits from the leading lights of the city. As one contemporary described the household, in a r
2.2 The Church The Scottish Church seems an unlikely place to look for the stirrings of enlightenment. In 1690, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland passed an act against ‘the Atheistical Opinions of the Deists’, and, in 1696, an eighteen-year-old Edinburgh University student was executed for denying some of the propositions of Christianity. The legacy of the Scottish, Calvinist Reformation, it seems, was one of conformism, intolerance and narrow-mindedness. But this is not the whole sto
2.1 The Act of Union, 1707 Before examining Scottish science in detail, we need a sketch of the particular Scottish historical background from which an astonishing cluster of intellectuals and ideas emerged. It needs to be said at the outset, however, that there is no scholarly consensus as to why a small, poor country in Northern Europe should have made such a disproportionately large contribution to the thought of the age. The event in Scottish history which tends to polarise opinion among scholars is the Act o
6.1 Marketing cloth in Ghana The market in Kumasi is arguably one of the largest in West Africa, and mostly anything can be found there, including lots of cloth. In this section you will learn about the marketing and selling of cloth in Ghana and, in particular, in Kumasi market. 4.3 The functions of adinkra Once you’ve watched the video, make a few notes on what you learnt about the functions of adinkra. 4.1 The functions of kente In Section 4 you will learn about the many uses of kente and adinkra. Once you’ve watched the video, make a few notes on what you learnt about the functions of kente. 3.5 What can we learn? The next activity poses a question that should encourage you to bring together the various observations you made above. What can we learn from who is trained and the way people train to make kente and adinkr 2.4 The manufacture of kente Once you’ve watched the video, describe the materials used in the manufacturing of kente. 2.6 Books and the internet as sources Finally, let's come back to the different types of modern sources as indicated in Figure 1. Many of these types are familiar to you in one way or another, so we can be brief. The course A219 uses set books that students registered with the Open University are required to purchase. Three of them are clearly modern schol 2.5 Modern sources As set out in Figure 1, modern sources, too, fall into various subcategories. We'll look at some of them in more detail a little later. For now let's just say that most of the sources you will use in this unit are broadly scholarly: publications written by people with an expertise in the Classical world. We will 2.4.3 Literature This doesn't have the kind of physical presence that material evidence does, but it has a different strength: it gives us, more literally, voices from the past. We can, as it were, hear the ancient Greeks and Romans speak, about what happened, about how they felt, about what they thought, and experience how they expressed themselves. This gives us a rather different access to their world, complementary to the one we get from material culture. Like the word ‘arts’, literature can sug 1 Why study the Classical world? Welcome to A219_1 Introducing the Classical world. There will be many different reasons why you have chosen this unit. You may have a lifelong fascination with the ancient world, and hope to nurture it by studying this unit. Or you may know very little about it and are curious to know more. Alternatively, you may have been prompted by some of the many aspects of the Classical world that are present in our world today, be it physical remains, theatre, films, books, words or ideas. This Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should: have an understanding of how sources are used in studies of the Classical World; have an understanding of issues related to time and space in studies of the Classical World. Introduction This unit aims to get you started on exploring the Classical world by introducing you to the sources upon which you can build your knowledge and understanding. The unit also gets you started on an exploration of both time and space in the Classical world. This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Exploring the classical world (A219). Acknowledgements This unit was written by Dr Derek Neale Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce References 2.1 Building a believable world Writing is a perceptual art, one in which images are created via language in order for the reader to make meaning. It is therefore imperative that the writer's powers of perception are alert. Writing is a process of becoming aware, of opening the senses to ways of grasping the world, ways that may previously have been blocked. Often we take the world around us for granted, we are so immersed in habit. All of our lives contain relative degrees of routine. We go to sleep, we eat, we go to work. 1.1 Using life experiences in your fiction Creative writing courses and manuals often offer the advice ‘write what you know’. This is undoubtedly good advice, yet what exactly does it mean? Many writers testify to using their life experiences – their memories and their everyday perceptions – as a source for their fiction or poetry, as well as for their autobiographies and memoirs. Yet these experiences aren't necessarily extraordinary in themselves. You don't have to have led an unusual or exotic life in order to write. You do Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should: be able to articulate your own thoughts on the notion of ‘write what you know’; be equipped to write ‘blind’ descriptions of known objects and note new observations; have an enhanced ability to list sensory perceptions; be able to write short texts about a personal memory of either a place or a character.
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Activity 14
Activity 12
Activity 11
Activity 4
