Take a trip across the medieval universe, Grosseteste’s On the Sphere, and medieval astronomy with Sarah Griffin. Sarah set up an online resource for these themes in the Oxford Cabinet, an online exhibition platform. It is a very wide-ranging resource and you’ll find information and interactive engagement with medieval astronomical tools, cosmologies, medical texts, and a lot of other fascinating material. And that helps put different and wider contexts for medieval astronomy. Medieval thinking associated the universe closely with the human body, so when we think about medieval astronomy, we also need to think about human biology and physiology. The link between the two draws on the notion that the human body presents a microcosm – a smaller model – of the larger model – the macrocosm – of the universe. It also related to the power of the celestial bodies, who embody certain qualities – heat, cold, and so on to influence what is below them. With the earth at the centre of the universe, everything above influences what happens here, and affects the human frame.
