Re: astrological iconography

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

	The recent speculation on an East European provenance
for the VMs amuses me.  In 1996, when I first started
posting to the list, I suggested an East European
provenance, my reasoning being that this was a lesser
known part of Europe where something strange might have
gone unnoticed by history.  I was ignored.  

> Thus she confirms the opinion of Panofsky (and my own
> amateurish feeling) that the VMS should be dated
> to mid-15th Germany/Poland/Bohemia.
> 
> The suggestion that it is a student's notebook
> is a bit of a revelation to me! Drawing naked ladies
> and fantastic pipelines during boring lectures
> is perhaps what they were doing from the dawn of time.
> 
> Prof. Sniezynska-Stolot has not addressed the VMS script
> but I hope to keep in contact with her. Maybe that
> was some kind of a medieval "beta-kappa" students'
> corporation fun popular in Cracow and there are loads
> of similar manuscripts at the Jagiellonian Library?

	In those distant days I wondered about the Polish
alchemist Michael Sendivogius as a candidate for
authorship of the VMs.  One of your articles on Adam
McLean's site notes, "The Polish alchemist started his
higher education at the Jagiellonian University in
Cracow in about 1582".   He's too late for our usual
dating, but not impossible, since he was in Rudolph
II's court at the right time.  To palm off your school
doodlings onto the sovereign for the present-day
equivalent of 1 MM US$ would take a lot of chutzpah -
and some very creating doodlings indeed!

Dennis