Yes, I agree that there is a risk of a disconnect between what happens in the university and what happens in the park. To avoid this, I feel that we should keep the idea of the 'talisman' at the forefront of our minds in both contexts, whatever we are working on, which is why I've been doing some digging to find out more about how the term has been used. A while ago, I read a brilliant piece of work - an article by Alistair Kwan in a a journal called Early Science and Medicine. Kwan is explicitly talking about Renaissance understandings of talismans and argues that for the Renaissance occultists (John Dee, Marsilio Ficino, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa) they were like RADIO RECEIVERS. I'll say more about this comparison in a later post but I thought I'd just draw attention to it here. It's such an intriguing idea - a talisman is like a radio.
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