Mixing modal verbs with History. Can it be possible?

Hello, everyone! First of all, I would like to congratulate you women for your day.

Well, this day made me remember when I started my Letras course in UFPB because in my first period I studied a discipline named “Introduction to Sociology”. My teacher was Neide Miele and one of the first subjects she presented was about the importance of the woman in many moments of our history. She spoke, for example, about her “power of healing” and so she told us about a woman named Hildegard von Bingen.

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was a revolutionary person during her age and she’s still mentioned as a great example of woman. She was an abbess, but she wasn’t dedicated only to her religion, as we can imagine. She was also an artist, author, counselor, physician, herbalist, poet, activist, visionary and composer (!!!!!!).

But there was something that motivated me to make this text. As we could see, the art was predominant in von Bingen’s life. She made various paintings named “illuminations”, which had religious thematic and often had as illustrations Hildegard herself receiving visions from Heaven or a man “meditating” inside some circles, as we can see in the picture below:

Some months ago this last picture made me create an analogy with the modal verbs of necessity “have to” and “must” and made me wonder if it wouldn’t be nice to give a class about these modal verbs inspired in Hildegard von Bingen’s works.

Hmm… you may be confused with this analogy I made, right? But please let me explain. First of all, it would be necessary to explain the illumination. As we can see, there is a man in the picture and there are two circles evolving him. According to Hildegard, the “external circle” (in blue) and the “internal” one (in brown) are, respectively, the spirit and the soul, or the order we receive from god to live our lives and the way we live by ourselves. And according to what I know about the modal verbs “have to” and “must”, I could say that the first one corresponds to an external power while the last one can be an internal power of the speaker. So I compared the blue circle with the “have to” and the brown one to the “must” with the objective of facilitate the student to see what is this so-called “internal and external power” of the speaker and give informations which are not only related to grammar. By the way, the teacher can play some Gregorian Chants composed by Hildegard von Bingen during the activities or intervals.





And to finish this text, I would like to know your opinion about the analogy and the proposal of class I made. Did you like it? Do you have any suggestion?

See ya!

Links:


Do you want to know something else about Hildegard von Bingen?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen


Do you want to download to download her music (Orkut)?
http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=39196195&tid=2558008240105239125