At 11:35 AM -0400 9/13/06, Andrew Stiller wrote:
BTW, this symbol is amazingly old. I've seen it in an early-15th c. MS. No conductors back then!
Do you happen to remember what ms. that was? I wouldn't
have thought that eyeglasses were all that common back then, if used
at all. (Hmm. Time for a WikiSearch!)
OK, I was wrong. I often am!
Glasses first began to appear in common use
in northern Italy late in the 13th century; most likely in the late
1280s. It is not clear when the technology was invented. It has been
said that Marco Polo reported seeing many pairs of glasses in China as
early as 1275[citation needed]. In 1676, Franciscus Redi, a professor
of medicine at the University of Pisa, wrote that he possessed a 1289
manuscript whose author complains that he would be unable to read or
write were it not for the recent invention of glasses, and a record of
a sermon given in 1305, in which the speaker, a Dominican monk named
Fra Giordano da Rivalto, remarked that glasses had been invented less
than twenty years previously, and that he had met the inventor. Based
on this evidence, Redi credited another Dominican monk, Fra Alessandro
da Spina of Pisa, with the re-invention of glasses after their
original inventor kept them a secret, a claim contained in da Spina's
obituary record.
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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