VMs: Re: Re: Re: New stars and what could or could not be in the VMs

["Larry Roux" <LRoux@xxxxxxx>]

"One thing we can say with some confidence is that the vms is not an encrypted copy of an earlier popular work - we'd have noticed the 
resemblance by now!"

I think we HAVE noticed this in certain cases and these have been noted.  'sides, it is "previous works" not "work" that I am proposing.

I think the danger is that just because something looks like a T-O map does not mean it is.  If you go through modern algebra texts you will see diagrams that looks like T-O maps too - but they certainly are NOT.  While I DO believe that there are T-O maps in the VMS I still say that this is no indication of age.  If they existed in other texts they could be easily copied.

We each bring our thoughts into the VMS and see what we have experience with.

I would say the case for the Pleiades/Aldabran identification is certain (yes, I will say a "fact")  (more certain than any proposal that certain entities are T-O maps, at least).













******************************
Larry Roux
Syracuse University
lroux@xxxxxxx
*******************************

>>> barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 02/09/04 11:04AM >>>

> > Barbara Blithered:
> > But to me the most significant date dependent clue in the vms is the use
> > of T-O maps, they'd ceased to be used by the 1500s (falling out of use
>> from the late 1400s onwards); so what were they doing in a 16th/17thC
>> document? And rather than an argument that just "explains away" (ie
>> logical guess work without evidence) such an anomaly I think I'd need
>> hard evidence that T-O maps were still in use in those later times before
>> I'd accept that the T-O  maps didn't put an upper limit late 1400s upon
the
>> vms: which would exclude heavenly events in the 15 and 16 hundreds.

> Robert Rote;
> I assume you mean on f68v3, the 'galaxy' folio.

Barbara Babbles;
Indeed I do ;-), Although I'd call it the Wind Rota folio,  and the T-O map
in the corner of the maps page which perhaps informs us that all the
Rosettes represent some aspect of Europe, and the "unfinished" T-O.

> I strikes me as being evidence for Larry's idea, that the VMs Author took
> ideas from other books. He might have used it just because he found
> it interesting.

An unfounded speculation that needs *Evidence* to back it up.

The *evidence* is that after the discovery of the new world T-O maps fell
out of favour. Sure I've found T-O maps in later manuscripts but exclusively
in exact copies of earlier, pre-mid 1400s, works! There's no evidence that
any author used an unmodified  T-O map in an original work after late 1400s.
One thing we can say with some confidence is that the vms is not an
encrypted copy of an earlier popular work - we'd have noticed the
resemblance by now!

> It certainly doesn't provide an upper limit to the creation of the VMs; I
> could make a T-O map myself, here in 2004.

If the vms was recording contemporary knowledge it does indeed give an upper
limit and it is the purpose to which the T-O map is put that determines
that. And in the context of the maps page and the "galaxy" page the T-O map
serves the purpose of a world map - which in turn is evidence that as far as
the author was concerned they were representing the whole of the known
world. There's nothing in the vms to suggest otherwise. So there are
circumstances in which the T-O map places an upper limit on its composition..
It's up to anyone who thinks it is younger to find hard evidence, as opposed
to speculation and guesswork, to the contrary.

> In any case, we won't know for sure it IS a T-O map until we can read
> the captions.

Really? So if one can not identify captions the illustration is unknown? For
example if I was to post you a jpeg of an elephant captioned in a script you
couldn't read it you couldn't recognize it was an elephant until you
deciphered the script?

> So the same problem that exists for my star identifications
> exists for the "T-O Map" identification.

On the contrary. Recognition is from form and function (not labeling) and
degree of correspondence to existing examples.

The correspondence of the vms T-O maps to medieval T-O maps is one2one,
except that we can not read the labels.  Heck, would you say a keyboard
isn't a keyboard unless the keys were inscribed with Latin characters and
made sense to you personally? Of course not, we can all recognize a keyboard
as such from its form and function regardless of the writing system on the
keys.

In the case of the T-O maps one recognizes medieval T-O maps first and then
compares them to the vms examples looking for similarities and finds the
correspondence is exact. But in the case of astronomical events it's a case
of "I wonder if..." then looking for evidence to support it. Very different
approaches; the first is research discovering evidence and the second is a
speculation that something might be evidence and then doing research to
support/exclude the speculation.

Neither approach is superior to the other IMO, but confirming the star
identifications is a very different problem from recognizing the T-O maps!

>From the few I've seen, the  "T" is upside down from the usual practice

Which only means that you haven't seen enough of them ;-) I've seen them
with
west orientation (as in the vms) and with north orientation. It was
ecclesiastical practice to use an east orientation as clerics considered
"Asia" more important as the place where Christ was born and carried out his
ministry and where Jerusalem (the centre of the world) was located.  So the
orientation of the T-O map is of no relevance except to *suggest* that the
vms author wasn't a cleric and that the content isn't ecclesiastical in
nature, and that the author's primary concern was Europe. It doesn't *prove*
any of that, but it does *suggest* it.

> The upper left might say "Klingons" the upper right "Romulans", and
> the lower "Federation".   : )

Now you *are* being pointlessly silly. But it did make me smile ;-).

BTW: Someone (I can not find the post) said that circular astrological
charts were unknown in medieval times and were a recent invention; so what
are the circular astrological charts (planet, moon, zodiac, and star rotae)
in Bishop Isodore's "de natura rerum" and "etymologies" (6th Century AD) or
even the Dendera Zodiac (Circa 1st C AD) then; Irish mist?

Although to be fair perhaps we were each using the word "chart" to mean
different things; to me a "chart" is a generic term for any informative
illustration that's diagrammatic or schematic as opposed to representational
in nature. However I understand some astrologers only use the word "chart"
to refer exclusively to the plotted horoscope itself. In which case we're
both correct in our statements.

Barbara




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