Curiosities Middle Ages

Curiosities of the Middle Ages
During the middle ages many things that we still use today were invented. Some of them changed the life of many people. The spectacles are one of them. These wereinvented some where around the 13th century in Italy. The inventor has never been discovered and according to professionals they will never find who created them. One of the first scripts written aboutspectacles was by Friar Roger Bacon who wrote a description of lenses to make letters bigger in his Opus Majus (1268). Another item which, even though it’s not used anymore, it is considered aclassic: the hourglass clock. It was invented in the 11th century but introduced by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1328 in Siena, Italy. These were used in the sea to measure the time. During the voyage of FerdinandMagellan around the globe, his vessels kept 18 hourglasses per ship.
The third example is horseshoes. It is unknown who invented them, but already by the 6th and 7th centuries, European horsemenhad begun nailing metal shoes to their horses' hooves. Around 1000 AD, cast bronze horseshoes with nail holes had become common in Europe and in the 13th and 14th centuries there was widespread ofmanufacturing of iron horseshoes. The oil paint was another important object. These were created in England in the 13th century by Flemish Jan van Eyck. They were used to add details to tempera paintingsor just simple decoration.




Fig. 1. Portrait of a man in a turban by Jan van Eyck
The action of being in quarantine was also included. This was first introduced in the 14th centurysince people were trading so much the bubonic plague was growing and the government decided to adopt this for the first time in Venice. When the ships first came to Venice they were ordered to be isolatedfor a period of time to allow for the signs of the disease to show and to dissolve the infection brought by persons and goods. Originally they only had to stay for 30 days (trentina) but then it...