She cited Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner, " with its frozen polar wastes and specters of "Nightmare Life-in-Death, " which as an 8-year-old child she had heard the poet recite in her father's parlor, and she made several dark allusions to the alchemical experiments of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, two Medieval figures with whom Percy had become obsessed during his studies at Oxford.

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McKitrick notes that Mann, a lead author, had available to him two studies besides his own presenting hemispheric temperature histories dating back to the Medieval Era.

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Medieval scholars were particularly fascinated by the science of optics and invented eye glasses partly as a result of their studies using lenses to determine the nature of light and the physics of sight.

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