RE: VMs: RE: Map scans now posted...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Don,

At 23:46 20/06/2003 -0600, Don Latham wrote:
> Boy, I'm not too sure (being kind of selfish) that I would like the VM
> pushed onto the academic map, generating "professor books" in aid of tenure
> and all the rest, devoid of humor, and drowning in the dust of academe . . .

The move to whiteboards probably helped reduce academe's dust problem. :-)

You'll probably be pleased to hear that there's no obvious sign of the VMS' 
becoming a valid research target any time soon - no obvious iconography, no 
obvious palaeography, and all attempts to link it into the many 
well-documented families of medieval herbals have failed. I've tried to do 
the same with the cryptography (history), map (history), astrology 
(history), and shorthand (history) sides: I've drawn my own conclusions, 
but still it all remains less substantial than I'd hoped for - perhaps as 
we're working at such a distance from the source, I should take Hume's 
dictum (that things "seem conjoined but never connected") less seriously. :-)

Having said that, it sometimes only takes one pebble to start a 
landslide... for example, if even one recipe in the pharma section could be 
shown to be the same as (say) a recipe given in Caterina Sforza's 
Experimenti, then the list might suddenly be awash with historians of 
pharmacy, looking for long-lost recipes to cannibalise and patent anew for 
Big Pharma Inc. Fairly unlikely, but you never know... :-)

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


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