VMs: Drawing circles

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 10:54 03/08/2003 -0700, Dana Scott wrote:
> Very good. So perhaps our scribe had access to rather sophisticated
> writing/drawing tools, such as might be found in a monastery or an
> institution of higher education.

We're getting there, but we'll need to work just a little harder to lock 
down the precise way that each circle was drawn. If there are indeed dots 
in the centre of some (but perhaps not others), then it suggests a 
mechanical aid (like a circinus) - but I'm also fascinated by the question 
of how many of the less obvious rings were produced.

Look at the outer ring on f70r1: this has a sequence that looks like 
....oooooooool ar..e.. sasa.. . . . . . . (weird stuff). And look at the 
outer rings on f67v1 - these look hand-traced or hand-drawn, not mechanical 
at all. Many of the circles appear to be slightly wobbly and/or 
non-circular - look at f67r1, for example.

Given the general production techniques for manuscripts, I'm not really 
sure I understand how circular bands of text would be produced easily, 
unless the whole manuscript was rotating. I suspect that the weird stuff on 
f70r1 is just a scribe having fun with a rotating writing table. :-)

All in all, there are plenty of circular diagrams in the VMS - so we should 
really be able to work out reasonably definitively from all their 
peculiarities how they were produced.

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

PS: a quick aside for Phil Neal: have you looked at the horizontal lines on 
f67r2? The text lined up by them appears to be largely top-aligned (ie, to 
the top of the gallows) on the second and third line, but not on the first? 


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