Learning Journal #12

The source mapping activity on Friday was a great start to the literature review. It was so nice to get a good look at all my sources and see how they really all fit together visually. Even though I know that all my sources lead back to my project in some way, and I know how they all match up with it, it was really nice to actually organize them into sections and see how the work is actually going. Taking a step back and getting a view of the big picture helped me recognize where I am concentrating a lot of attention, and where I need to be filling in holes.

Looking at things as they are right now, I can see how I want to move forward in my research. I want to read some Ptolemy, and really get a sense for how he envisioned the universe. It will be really interesting to compare what Ptolemy said directly with Copernicus' theory. It will also be interesting to see how Ptolemy's theory evolved, and how it was interpreted through a Renaissance lens. 

I also want to delve more into the religious responses, and really get a good look at how the Church responded, both immediately and over time. I want to look at the writings of the clergy at the time. I'll be on the lookout for good sources in my Christian History class, as we'll be discussing the relevant time period in just a few weeks. My professor for that class, Brother Gaskill, is always putting up excellent quotes from primary texts by the early Christian Fathers, and so I think he will pull out a lot of the important names. Of course, I will absolutely do some research on my own, but there's nothing wrong with having a starting point, and he knows so much that I'm sure that class will be very helpful to me, as I hoped it would. 

The last area that I want to especially focus on is the actual capital-L Literary responses to the changing universe. I feel like I've already got a lot of these in line, although I haven't posted them as annotated sources yet. Dr. Siegfried gave me an excellent list of texts, which I believe I've mentioned before on here, and I just need to include them among my official list of sources. All that being said, they're just a starting point and I certainly need to look at quite a few more texts to get a real feel of how the relationship between man, the universe, and God was changing because of Copernicus' theory. (Side story: My world history teacher during my sophomore year of high school taught us little rhymes/hand motions to remember all of the major scientists and philosophers of the Renaissance-and-there-abouts period which we would recite almost every class period during the Renaissance unit, and the one for Copernicus was "Old Sonny (Sun-ny) Copernie said the sun was the center of the universe!" It had a very sing-song-y rhythm to it. But now every time I type "Copernicus," I hear that rhyme in my head and want to call him Old Sonny Copernie.)

Of course, I'll still be doing research in other areas of my project, but these are the places that I want to focus my energies right now.