Course Redesign Update: May 26, more Aesop and more Jesus stories

What a fun day! I worked on the two units I started yesterday: Aesop's Fables (the Winter book, with audio) and Infancy Gospels. Yesterday, I put up the raw posts and then today I worked on them so that they really are ready for the students to use in Fall. Not finished — but good enough! My basic minimum for a unit ready-to-go is: proofread all the posts, put in the navigation links, put in the audio links (if available), add images to all posts (hopefully), and add notes to pages that absolutely need notes now and cannot wait, and then add a few words to the unit page, a kind of mini-introduction until I get around to writing a full-blown introduction for every unit.

Adding the images to the Infancy Gospel pages was such a pleasure! I couldn't find actual illustrations for all the episodes, but there was still plenty of wonderful artwork to use. Here are some good ones:

This beautiful painting by Perugino of the marriage of Mary and Joseph works nicely for the story about how Joseph was chosen to be Mary's husband (a story not in the Bible, but in the Gospel of James):

This 14th-century nativity scene shows the midwife who will wash the baby Jesus; the midwife does not appear in the Bible, but she is an important part of the extra-Biblical nativity narratives!

Here's another depiction of the midwife:

Joseph's profession as a carpenter was obviously an inspiration for visual artists, and it also figures prominently in the extra-Biblical legends:

Here are two versions of the "toppled idol" story, one western and one eastern: