Love of Learning is the Spice of Life

I've been keeping myself busy these past few months with some very interesting free online courses:

Stanford's Digging Deeper - Parts I and II 

Coursera's "Sagas and Space - Thinking Space in Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia" from the University of Zurich and "Magic in the Middle Ages" from the University of Barcelona

I would rather take the courses one at a time to get the most out of each course, but since the guided courses are only open for a limited time, I didn't want to miss the opportunity to participate.

My favorite courses are the Digging Deeper courses, Parts 1 and 2,  offered by Stanford University. The first part was an introduction to medieval manuscripts: how they where made, how to find them online and how to read the scripts. The second part of the course explored Chinese and Arabic manuscripts, as well discussing the current state of manuscripts today. Again, there are transcription exercises to test letter form recognition. The instructors did a wonderful job in putting the courses together and I am very grateful to have the chance to learn something I may not have had a chance to learn otherwise.

My favorite activity is transcription. Most of the text is in Latin, but there was at least one on Old English. I really enjoyed using my knowledge of both of these languages to see if I could make sense of the passage. Fortunately, the English translations were thoughtfully included in the exercises, so whenever it was difficult to make out a letter, I could always look in the dictionary to find out what the letter might be.