Re: VMs: 'Astrology' section parallel?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 23:21 21/11/2003 -0500, Tim Ackerson wrote:
> Not having had the time to go through the old VMS archives (so forgive me 
> if this has been put forth before), has anybody noticed that the so-called 
> 'Astrology' section (f70 to f73) has a strong resemblance to something 
> called a " computus " ?
> (I humbly offer a cut-and-paste link to an example.)
>
> http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/medievalbook/Schoolbooks/Computus.htm

        This manuscript, which features an astronomical diagram of
        the planets encircling the earth, is a computus, or text
        designed to facilitate calendrical calculations. The geocentric
        diagram is included to provide theoretical context for the
        practical exercises.

        Computus. Germany, ca. 1438.

If you re-read the above paragraph, you'll see that it's the *manuscript* 
that's the computus, not the diagram. Worse still, while the "astrological" 
diagrams superficially look like volvelles, they seem to have no art 
historical link with volvelles. IMO, they are probably either purely 
decorative (with the basic idea copied from Padua) or contain some 
subtly-encoded 30-character cipher keys. Or both. Who knows? :-o

BTW, here's Tim Ackerson's web-page on the VMs-as-Welsh, which were 
mentioned on-list before:-
http://hometown.aol.com/arqy0plex/index.html

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


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list