Miscellany from the British Library...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

(1) "The Art of the Alchemists", C A Burland, 1967, was mentioned a while 
back as having a few pages on John Dee and Edward Kelly in Prague: so I 
checked it out for myself.

According to this, "[i]t was revealed to Kelly that the red powder had been 
hidden by Saint Dunstan and so had remained intact for some six centuries 
before Kelly's discovery."

Burland describes Kelly as a "trance medium of considerable power": and 
notes that later, it wasn't Rudolph that Kelly fell out of favour with: 
rather, that "denunciations of the papal authorities led to Kelly's detention."

From what I saw, it's a fascinating book, but the lack of connection 
between the text and the large bibliography made it frustrating for me... 
the above information could have come from anywhere, and it left me wanting 
MORE. :-(


(2) I also checked out Simon de Phares, to see what his list of 127 "usual 
suspects" looked like. The full text is in the first volume of the 2-volume 
"Le Recueil des Plus Celebres Astrologues de Simon de Phares", ed. 
Jean-Patrice Boudet, 1999: it's (unsurprisingly) in French, with extensive 
footnotes correlating not only each of the astrologers with actual people 
where they existed, but also making predictions about who he might have 
been thinking about in the vast majority of cases that appear to be 
completely fictitious. :-/

De Phares garbles names arbitrarily, gets dates (even centuries!) wrong, 
assigns skills (astrological and otherwise) arbitrarily, and generally 
gives a strong impression of a shotgun methodology - sometimes he hits a 
real target, sometimes he doesn't, but he causes a mess regardless. :_/

Because of the arbitrariness of all this, Boudet's references necessarily 
have to jump all round Europe (and all round the Middle Ages), so these are 
actually quite interesting. The pick of the bunch:-

D. Jacquart "Theory, Everyday Practice, and Three Fifteenth Century 
Physicians", Osiris, 2nd Series, 1990, pp 140-160.

D.P. Lockwood, "Ugo Benzi: Medieval Philosopher and physician 1376-1439", 
Chicago, 1951.

Another interesting person to read about might well be Martin Bylica of 
Olkusz (1433-1493).

An interesting thread running through the notes was to do with a "fameuse 
controversie sur le choix des jours favourable a la saignee et a 
l'administration des purgatifs qui devaient etre indiques sur l'almanach de 
l'annee 1437".

In the VMS, I've been thinking for a while whether - on the "astrology" 
pages - there was a link between star-colour (red/yellow) and menstruation, 
similarly to the Factory egg-timer (FAC7). However, reading this made me 
realise that blood-letting, purges and surgery were other things that 
astrologers would be asked to predict the most auspicious time to do - in 
fact, I believe that a number of French astrologers still do this.

The VMS' "astrology" pages might then encode not only information about 
male/female conception, but also about blood-letting (red/yellow stars?) 
purges (legs open/together) and surgery (hand in front of stomach/behind 
stomach?).

I'm not saying I understand the correlations yet, but this is definitely an 
aspect of the link between astrology and medicine we should be aware of.

Further reading indicated from Boudet:-

T. Charmasson. "L'etablissement d'un almanach medical pout l'annee 1437", 
comptes-rendus du 99o Congres national des societes savante (Besancon, 
1974), section des sciences, fasc. V, Paris 1976, pp. 217-234.

Also: Biblioteque National lat 7427, numero 21 is "un parfait exempl, pour 
l'annee 1470 de ce type d'almanach medical".


(3) I finally got round to reading Paul Saenger's article "Benito Arias 
Montano and the evolving notion of locus in sixteenth century printed 
books" (from "Word & Image", Vol 17, Issue 1, 2001) that Edward Tenner 
recommended.

This confirmed a lot of what I suspected - essentially, inter-textual 
references were essentially unknown (apart from one extraordinary one noted 
by Eric Reiter - though didn't follow that up), and intra-textual 
references normally referred to quire numbers.

Foliation was used round about 900-1000CE, but fell out of use again. 
Tables of contents only really started happening once incunabula began 
being produced - they're extremely rare before 1460. The first significant 
use of pagination was 1499, for the paginated Aldine copy of Niccolo 
Perotti's "Cornucopiae linguae latinae".

Rolewinck (1474) used punctus before/after a folio number to indicate 
recto/verso. Matthew Parker first used the term "folio" in 1566, BTW.

As for line-numbering, or row-labelling: "[O]nly in a very few 
fifteenth-century medieval Latin manuscripts did scribes make such 
reference points graphic by writing equally spaced letters of the alphabet 
in the margins".

Erasmus, while editing the drafts of his books, would refer to page and 
line number (sometimes counting up or down a page).

Essentially, Saenger's thesis is that (later in the sixteenth century) the 
Church needed to produce a list of passages that needed to be removed from 
books (before that, they'd just burn it), which is basically what Benito 
Arias Montano compiled: but to do this, Monatno needed to develop better 
mental tools for rigorous editing, which was (ultimately) his legacy.

A further paper on this is "The Impact of the Early Printed Page on the 
Reading of the Bible", in "The Bible as Book: The First Printed Editions", 
ed Saenger & Van Kempen, London , 1999, pp. 31-41.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....