Re: Prague

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, 

As Rene mentioned, I just got back from the Czech Republic. It was a
great experience, thanks mostly to the people who were our guides and
advisors --- Marcela and Kamil, Denisa, Michal Pober and Lubos Antonin.
In fact, everybody there was extremely friendly and helpful.

Rene actually led the whole expedition; I was mostly silent watcher,
if not a dead weight. (I guess my greatest contribution was to provide
an excuse for Rene and Marcela to go to Prague.)

However I did help Rene search Schmidl's volumes at the Clementinum,
and I was lucky to find the original (latin) version of Jacobus
biography. The entry in Otto's encyclopaedia appears to be simply a
literal translation of that text. I copied it by hand, and I hope to
post it tomorrow. The only new information which I could notice was a
reference to the "Clementinum Archives" as the primary source.

I suppose Rene will soon give a general report of our investigations,
especially about what we learned from Lubos, Michal, and Denisa. As
far as I can tell, we didn't discover anything new about the Voynich
per se, but we got some additional references that need to be checked
out, a better idea of what happened to Rudolf's library, and---most
importantly---we now know where one should start looking for data of
that period in Prague.

All the best,

--stolfi