What a spectacle: a post in a meme-dump has made me rethink myths and legends
I saw this post a couple of days ago in a Facebook meme-dump; it has made me reconsider my understanding of myths and legends and recognise that I had assumed good eyesight when considering the past. I am shocked that I had used good eyesight as a standard when considering the past for a number of reasons:
- I use both short and long distance glasses. I more often walk around without my distance-vision glasses than not because I can do so safely and mis-see stuff as result.
- I have considered low-light conditions affecting eyesight when looking at ritual practices.
- I was amazed the first time I saw spectacles featured in a medieval manuscript representation of Moses and looked a little at the history of eyeglasses after I saw it.
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Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 19, fol. 141v. |
So, I really ought to have considered this before, but had not.
I immediately shared this new insight and discovered that I was not alone in this discovery even among friends with a deep and abiding interest in history, and some involved in reenactment groups.
So I was not alone in what, if I am honest with myself, a somewhat ableist assumption.
So why does society as a whole often fail to recognise compromised eyesight as a disability? Because eyeglasses are not only ubiquitous in modern society (honestly, next time you are out, try to note how often people are wearing glasses), and that doesn’t even take into consideration contact lenses or corrective surgery, and they have existed since the late thirteenth century CE.
It seems that an unnamed monk in Pisa first invented what are now called rivet spectacles which Moses is shown wearing above. According to a well discussed passage in a chronicle which was apparently deliberately misquoted in the seventeenth century, the broader creation of eyeglasses was the result of the deliberate theft on intellectual property by a Dominican friar called Alessandro della Spina in Pisa.
These eyeglasses using convex lenses were created to allow people to see better up close. I recently read, but now annoyingly cannot find it, that the invention of eyeglasses sparked an increase in book production because people with the money and time to read were mostly older and thus had compromised vision up close.
But this does not address poor distant vision which the original social media post discusses which requires concave lenses. Well, as far as I have been able to find in the short amount of research I have conducted since yesterday when I started this blog, suggests Florentine production from at least the mid-fifteenth century CE.
Italy becomes the centre of eyeglasses production for a considerable period following the original invention likely in the 1280s. Venice also became a centre for the production of lenses as a result of its strong glass manufacturing history.
So, humans have had their distance vision artificially assisted for more than half a millennium.
This means that all the mythical creatures which feature in western classical mythology and folklore came into our cultural consciousness before corrective eyewear existed. I don’t know about you, but the concept of centaurs, sea monsters, and unicorns make a lot more sense when you consider that 20/20 eyesight was far less common in antiquity than it was today.
I don’t know what the intentions were of no.fun.sara when they posted their musing on mythical creatures and eyesight, but they have made me completely reconsider how we should perhaps think about the way that mythical creatures came to be in human history and imagination. They definitely gave me, and a number of my friends, food for thought.
Further reading:
There is an awful lot of information regarding the history of eyewear online. Here’s a couple of academic articles that I quickly looked at when writing this up.
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