VMs: Shelton shorthand...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone (particularly GC),

The matter of the additional (probably) shorthand symbols on f57v is 
something that I've thought quite a lot about, and which we should perhaps 
discuss a little more.

The "Fear God" symbol is extremely interesting - this is on the 17 x 4 
circle, but note that each of the four instances of it are slightly 
different (IIRC, in only one case is the central shape clearly like a 
superscripted "o"), which I'm not sure what to make of... please correct me 
if I'm wrong.

I'm not an expert on Shelton (only knowing that he called his system a kind 
of "tachygraphy", that it emerged circa 1630, and that Samuel Pepys used a 
modified version of it for his diaries), so will leave it to GC to describe 
more usefully. :-)

FWIW, my reconstruction of late-16th-century shorthand history is this: 
that Timothy Bright happened to observer a religious shorthand being 
written on wax tablets when he visited Paris, but that what he saw was 
probably based on a small tachygraphic (ie, single-stroke) alphabet 
(probably gaining extra speed via abbreviations) and with a few additional 
religious symbols added. There was an ongoing need within the church for 
techniques to transcribe sermons (especially within the Vatican, I'd wager) 
onto wax tablets (for later copying), and the slow death of Tironian notae 
had left something of a technical void.

There were also some me-too systems that emerged just after Bright, but I 
don't recall Shelton's as having been one of those - IIRC, Shelton's system 
had its roots in some other (undisclosed) system, perhaps Greek 
tachygraphy? A close reading of his various books (or biographical details 
about him) might make any such dependency more obvious... I, for one, don't 
know, though. :-(

There's also a further issue of whether both the VMS' underlying alphabet 
and other shorthand systems' alphabets would necessarily have been derived 
from each other, or from a common (probably religious shorthand) ancestor. 
If it's a Shelton symbol, but one that Shelton probably didn't invent 
himself, what can we reasonably infer? :-o

From the things I do know, my current best guess is that f57v is an 
encoded magic circle (of the type described by Kieckhefer), but where 
certain letters on the original unencoded magic circle were written using a 
(probably religious) shorthand, much as I surmise had been observed by 
Bright. Find the locale of that shorthand & you can probably guess the 
underlying language of that page... though that may not be much, it would 
at least be *something*. GC, I guess the key problem we share here is the 
same as that in statistical analysis - how can you ever move from 
correlation to causality, without some kind of smoking cannon to point to? :-/

BTW, back when I was looking for examples of religious marginalia circa 
1500, I found a researcher called Tom Magill at the University of Glasgow, 
who I ~believe~ spent quite some time working at the Apostolic Library in 
the Vatican on marginalia (especially autograph + astrological marginalia) 
of Nicholas V's MSS. If anyone out there can throw light on this, I guess 
it would be him - but unfortunately he didn't return my emails (though I 
might have networked through to the wrong person with the right name, you 
never know).

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


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