RE: VMs: 1006184 & 1006185

["John Grove" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

	I think William's healthy criticism of the plant identifications falls
right in line with anyone's reaction to 'solutions' given to text fragments
or
the entire text. It's the same kind of input that many of us offer when
confronted
with somebody saying - I know that this page has a specific date on it, or I
know
that the text was written in this language, or I know that this star
arrangement
represents this stellar event, or even better... I know that certain members
of
the VMS mailing list already have the solution, if only they looked a little
deeper.

	The point being, that I think Dana's work is tremendous - but William is
right in questioning the reasoning behind the identifications. We know
nothing.
Everything is speculation, until we can tie some kind of regular pattern to
more than one word or one image and not impose our own interpretations onto
the pages.

	GC... I like where you're headed with the variations of script based
on i/c starters and a wide variety of end ligatures.

	John.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Nick Pelling
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 3:41 AM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: VMs: 1006184 & 1006185


Hi everyone,

At 19:36 10/06/2004 -0600, GC wrote:
>What's interesting about the early printed books is that, even though you
>may have the same plant growing in your back yard, if it didn't come from
>the place Pliny or Dioscorides, or some other ancient author said it should
>come from,
>your local plant was never as good as the foreign one.  There had to be
some
>reason the local plants didn't cure as the ancients promised, so naturally
>they couldn't be the same as the originals, because the ancients couldn't
be
>wrong, could they?

Note that this was one of the key reasons for the existence of (typically
manuscript) "experimenti" (like Caterina Sforza's) - to find if exotic
ingredients in passed-down recipes could be substituted with
locally-sourced ones. The roots of empiricism and modern science lie just
as much in those experimenti (and in early modern "books of secrets") as in
the printed works of the sixteenth century.

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

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