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VMs: Re: Stuff requested by Nick + more

Hi Petr,

I posted the most relevant parts of the witches brews from Flora magica on
http://pkazil.free.fr/
The book is filled with interesting details and should be copied entirely,
but on the other hand the most relevant part is the list of latin plant
names. This is the essence. I also copied the first part of the ANTI-magical
flora. The book has solid, but very dispersed references, no good. It is a
book I might consider buying.

Thanks very much, that was extremely kind of you! :-)))

I'm now crawling my way through your Flora Magica scans, though at the speed I read Flemish I should be finished in, oooh, about 2008. :-)

Then I thought "what if VMS is not about women's health but about another
forbidden subject". And I looked up a book on "abortion". It's rather
horrid, but it gives a good overview of ancient practices. Those poor women!
Another reason to make abortion more freely available so that they don't
have to go through all this ... Maybe there's some VMS relevanse, I'll leave
that to the old-timers.

Two books you might find relevant:

John M. Riddle, "Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance" (Harvard University Press, 1992). Nice book IIRC, but didn't really cover what I was looking for,

John M. Riddle, "Eve's Herbs", Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Though I found the first one quite diffuse, I've since read favourable reviews of the second, which I gather is weighted more towards herbs than the other source you scanned. I've been meaning to order it for a while... keep forgetting... bah! :-/

Finally some very bad scans of renaissance piping technology. I couldn't
make the copies any better, but still they are interesting. Look at the
shape of the siphons! It has a VMS-feel. And those guys were advanced
indeed!

Though I doubt Francesco di Girorgio is relevant to the VMS' history, I do think you're probably right about the importance the pipes in the VMS. Some of the pipework in the balneological section (curves and junctions) is clearly fanciful... yet others seem quite deliberately rendered. Is that a shower-head at the top-centre of f82r? :-)

Don't also forget that the idea of pipes reappears not only on the 9-rosette "map" page, but also in the cosmological section (I'm thinking of f69v here) and on the Pisces and Aries volvelles (to name but two). In fact, you could say that pipes and nymphs are the two things that (pictorially) bind the VMS together.

Has anyone done any systematic study on the history and technology of piping?

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