Professor s Charles Burnett s works
Then back to page 176:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/info/cmequato.m3.htmProfessor s Derek Price s work on Chaucer
http://digilander.libero.it/McArdal/Project/Link_E-Books.htmChaucer s work
http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/about/oxford-figures/figures.shtmlA picture of an equatorium in Chaucer s work
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/starry/regiomontanus.htmlhttp://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Regiomontanus.html
Regiomontanus bio
http://elektra.bsb-muenchen.de/servlet/Top/frames/hitsframeRegiomontanus works
Well I really found nothing cracking, sorry, but Regiomontanus for instance is not uninteresting : born in Königsberg, connected to England, Germany, Hungary, Italy..., not unrelated to some of our VMS favourites...,
"It is often said, and justly, that Regiomontanus set the agenda for the reform of astronomy to which Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Kepler all contributed".
"Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, the teacher of Nicolaus Copernicus, referred to Regiomontanus as having been his teacher."
and he moreover wrote:
De quadratura circuli, dialogus, et rationes diversae separatim aliquot libellis exquisitae
Regiomontanus, Johannes
1533
in Universitätsbibliothek (LMU)
This at the end IS encouraging, after all :-).
Jean
Hi Jean-Yves,
At 19:14 15/07/2004 +0200, you wrote:
>Here is the book which was referred to hereafter, not that billig but
>looks exciting:
>
> From Prof. David A. King Institute for History of Science Johann Wolfgang
> Goethe University D 60054 Frankfurt am Main
>
>The Ciphers of the Monks. A Forgotten Number-Notation of the Middle Ages.
>David A. King Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, (Boethius, volume 44), 2001.
>
>With indices. Hardcover, 506 pp.
>ISBN 3 515 07640 9 $143.00
This book (I have my copy right here) is a treasure trove of information,
with a densely packed 60-page bibliography: for example, (opening it at
random) chapter four discusses the later 12th century English "ars notaria"
(legal penmanship), and refers to (amongst many, many others) Charles
Burnett's excellent "N! otes and Note-Taking" - recommended further reading
on the subject (as Professor Burnett always is).
Though "the ciphers of the monks" (of the title) seem nothing to do with
the VMs in any substantive way, David King had to cast a very broad
academic net in order to bring in a sufficient body of evidence to write
this book - and in so doing, covers a great deal of Middle Ages-related
shorthand and cipher sources. Any view of the VMs as somehow medieval (as
opposed to early modern, which is quite different) should be informed by
the kinds of sources cited here.
Incidentally, King writes (as an aside, page 176):-
I know of only two scientific manuscripts which contain coded scripts,
but these are unrelated to [the ciphers of the monks]. First, the
coded
script attested in MS Cambridge Peterhouse 75.I of what is probably
the treatise on the equatorium by Geoffrey Chaucer. Five marginal
notes in this manuscript written in ! 1392 are in an alphabetic code
which was deciphered by the late Derek de Solla Price in his splendid
volume devoted to this text. <...> Second, in MS Munich Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek lat. (Clm.) 24104, fol. 79r, we find a colophon
in code
at the end of some astronomical tables by the celebrated German
astronomer Johannes Regiomontanus (1436-1476). The date of
copying is 1487; thus the code is not in Regiomontanus' hand.
Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....