TIME IS TBD
Join Ellen Arnold for a special event at Clintonville Books to learn about the many different roles that penguins took on as Europeans first began to encounter them in the mid-1500s, from quirky oddity to salvation for the starving. Over the course of the following centuries, Europeans had many different interactions with penguins, and these shaped how they understood what the birds were. Sailors and scientists alike brought back accounts of the strange birds, which were only slowly understood to be unique to the South.
Ellen Arnold is senior lecturer of history at Ohio State University. She is a medievalist whose work focuses on how people in the past understood and told stories about the natural world. In particular, she works on the history of water, rivers, and saints, and how people in the pre-modern world understood the intersection of people, god, and nature. Her current project looks at a surprising effect of European exploration of the non-European world—the “discovery” of penguins. Currently, she is looking at the stories of the earliest European encounters with these strange birds, from ca. 1450 to ca. 1700.
Clintonville Books is located at 3286 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43202. Clintonville Books is an independent bookstore in Columbus, OH. They sell new, used, vintage and rare books for all ages. They strive to be a community-driven project dedicated to sharing good books with good people at good prices. Find more information on their events and mission on their website.
Clintonville Books
3286 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202
