Re: Prague

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [Rene:] Oh yes, the 'dodo'.
    
I just got my snapshots back from the lab; the "dodo" ones came out
better than I had feared.  Watch this channel for the scans.

    > It didn't look all that much like the other dodo's I've seen :-)
    > In fact, it didn't look like anything I've ever seen before. We
    > suspect that there is more tradition than fact behind that item.

I am skeptical too. (Unless, of course, we were looking at the wrong
case altogether.)
    
    > Rudolph's beer brand :-)
    
...and I had "pork mix à la Rudolph II" for dinner.
    
    > We came away from the meeting with Lubos Antonin with the clear 
    > message that, in the context of various recent exhibitions, no record
    > related with Rudolph or Dee will have been overlooked.
    
Humm... having contemplated the Strahov monastery library, I am not so
sure of that. There must be zillions of books and documents about
Rudolph II scattered all over Europe, the vast majority still
unlisted and unindexed. Witness the two "unknown" letters by Kircher
that Lubos and Rene found in the Strahov index. Even with all the
interest generated by the Rudolph conferences, I doubt whether there
were enough man-hours available to go throug all that material.

On the other hand, the "easy" sources must have been combed quite
thoroughly. Therefore, any new information must be buried in
non-indexed, hard-to-get books, which cannot be reached by following
pointers from the standard ones.

Besides the Clementinum at Prague, the Jesuits had major
residences/schools at Olomouc, Brno, Cesky Krumlov, and two other
places in Bohemia which I could not identify ("Commotoniense" and
"Novodomense" in Latin). Each of these surely had its library and
archives; and any of them coud contain records about our heroes. Then
there were the monasteries of other orders (such as Strahov's), the
Karolinum libraries, state archives, libraries of royal palaces and
vassal castles, the Swedish libraries (where, it seems, most of
Rudolph's state archives are probably kept), the Vatican files, etc.
etc....

I would say that the search has barely begun...
    
All the best,

--stolfi