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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| When Whytehead died, he gave his scholar... |
How convenient. Most teachers let you have a butchers while they're teaching you.
| ... all his mathematical observations that he had made and collected, together with his notes on Euclid's Elements. |
How is this 'Euclid'? If you send me your nautical observations, together with your notes on Jules Verne's novel, would I publish it under the title "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"?
| This was the foundation of the translation |
What translation? Whytehead could have consulted (assuming they existed) any Euclid. Including an earlier English version. Since we don't have the original, who can say? Any mention of a Greek Euclid among Whytehead's effects? That really would be valuable. Worth keeping that would.
| on which we have only to say that it was certainly made from the Greek, and not from any of the Arab or Latin versions, and is, for the time, a very good one. |
Why would Whytehead, who knows Latin well, bother to seek out a Greek version? He might, if the Latin scholars have been falling down on the job, but it sounds a bit of one upmanship to me, if true in any sense at all. As for the Arabic version, well that route of transmission is even iffier. Was it via Egypt, Sicily, Constantinople, Toledo, my arse? Sorry, that's short for Venice Arsenal, Chios Station.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | We know that Holland was the centre of the rare book trade in the seventeenth century. Small potatoes now but back then, in newly Protestant Europe with religious paraphernalia out, costly but temporal artefacts were the best way to flaunt wealth. (And why else have it?) Once you had what everybody else had -- the pictures in the hall, the porcelain in the dining room, the exotic fruits in the orangery, the statuary in the garden -- the only truly competitive arena was the library. |
Fortunately, thanks to the influx of English Protestant printers, there was no shortage of new books.
| One of the key parts of the English Reformation was a rapid increase in the quantity and quality of knowledge and information available to the general public, as the Church of England broke free from the Roman Church. This was not without its mortal dangers. After the death of Edward VI, the new Queen Mary did her best to stem the flow of the English Reformation, and the old heresy laws were restored. Between 1555 and 1556, hundreds were found guilty and executed. Protestant bishops Hooper, Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer were all burnt at the stake. |
There was no shortage of old books either, ever since the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the market had allegedly been flooded with looted libraries. John Dee had collected them wholesale. And John Dee was well connected with the proto-Intelligence Agencies, and their desire to encrypt their own knowledge and propagate pro-Protestant propaganda.
For much of his life, Dee was on the receiving end of allegations of sorcery. The allegations of sorcery are easier to understand and counter. In Dee's time, Mathematics was still considered a Dark Art, especially by the Humanists who made up most of the academic population of Oxford and Cambridge at that time. Mathematical signs, symbols and formulas were akin to magic for many folk, and still are, for many of the leading lights of Intelligentsia have no idea how a light bulb produces light. Or even an appreciation of "Natural Philosophy".
Dee's skills at cryptography meant he was able to make words and messages disappear and reappear at will. A form of sorcery indeed! Dee's expertise in codes and cyphers connected him with important members of the espionage and intelligence community, like Francis Walsingham (Queen Elizabeth's spymaster). |
... on the afternoon of August 11, 1582 there was an entry in Dee's journal that they met at Mortlake. Bacon was 21 years old at the time and was accompanied by a Mr. Phillipes, a top cryptographer in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham who headed up the early days of England's secret service.
Some say that Dee signed his letters to Elizabeth with two circles and an elongated number 7 - the original 007, four centuries before James Bond.
Ref : John Dee - 007 |
https://grael.uk/fish
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Fortunately, thanks to the influx of English Protestant printers, there was no shortage of new books. |
Very true. However, we are dealing with rare books.
| There was no shortage of old books either, ever since the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the market had allegedly been flooded with looted libraries. John Dee had collected them wholesale. |
Very true. However, we are dealing with rare books.
| And John Dee was well connected with the proto-Intelligence Agencies, and their desire to encrypt their own knowledge and propagate pro-Protestant propaganda etc etc |
I am not in a position to be able to reconstruct the Elizabethan dark arts with the confidence you feel able to though if you look through the last few months' postings you will see we have been trying. Now you have joined us we can redouble our efforts!
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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For the "The True History of England, A Three Act Play"
Can I suggest a few additions to the Dramatis Personae?
Francis Bacon (Solicitor-Extraordinary)
John Dee
I would suggest Francis Walsingham, but I see (as befitting a spy master) he's sneaked into the play without being invited in the Dramatis Personae. :-)
if you can find a way to include The Rosicrucian Manifesto Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, so much the better.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yes, all right, finish it off.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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A fascinating insight into Carolingian survivals. Lupus de Ferrières wrote a letter to someone called Einhard, 'a Frankish scholar and courtier' and the author of Charlemagne's biography, Vita Karoli Magni, "one of the most precious literary bequests of the early Middle Ages." Not only has Lupus' letter survived, so has his copy of Cicero (he claims in his letter to have borrowed one from Einhard in order to copy as his own copy is falling to pieces).
I wouldn't put much reliance on the Cicero on account of being a copy of an author whose works were churned out everywhen
| More manuscripts of Cicero’s work survive than of any classical Latin author. |
But the Lupus letter matters because this is the first written mention of Vita Karoli Magni . The letter was in a manuscript belonging to the Harley Library, Harley 2736, now held by the British Library. It's been dated c. 836 by the BL
| The date of the work is uncertain, and a number of theories have been put forward. The inclusion of Charlemagne's will at the end of the work makes it fairly clear that it was written after his death in 814. The first reference to the work, however, comes in a letter to Einhard from Lupus of Ferrieres, which is dated to the mid-9th century. |
The first record of the manuscript's existence is 1719-20
| Nathaniel Noel (fl. 1681, d. c. 1753), bookseller, employed by Edward Harley for buying books and manuscripts chiefly on the Continent, where his agent was George Suttie: sold to the Harleys in February 1719/20 |
The librarian of the Harley Library was Humfrey Wanley, responsible for acquisitions for the library and for writing the catalogues but seems to have farmed out the actual acquiring, and sometimes the cataloguing, to other operatives. The person who supplied the Harley Library with the Lupus manuscript of Cicero's book is named as George Suttie
One of Harley's chief suppliers of manuscripts and printed books from abroad at this period [1720-1] was Nathaniel Noel, who obtained many of his prestigious offerings through the manuscript and book buying activities of a peripatetic resident on the continent, George Suttie. Wanley described Suttie in 1726 as Noel's agent, but Suttie also issued his own catalogues and sometimes acted on his own behalf.
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Suttie was a great collector/acquirer but more or less permanently in debt according to the diary entries of the Harley librarian
Dark hints by Wanley concerning Suttie's reputation raise the possibility that his long sojourn abroad may not have been entirely voluntary. .... Noel wrote to Wanley that Suttie had been 'long guilty of private Gaming, undone himself , and cannot leave Paris before his Debts are paid...'
Before his weaknesses got the better of him, Suttie appears to have been for a considerable time a knowledgeable and industrious pursuer of manuscripts and printed books, sometimes producing more than 20 catalogues a year; it was due to his efforts that Edward Harley obtained some of his most spectacular acquisitions |
This sounds like a standard pattern of a forger which wouldn't be particularly interesting except the Harley Library manuscripts are more than yet another ducal ostentation
| the Harley manuscripts form one of the foundation collections of the British Library. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A classic tale, Hatty. However, dissing the British Library is a bit parochial, what interested me is Cicero being the Great Survivor. As a world record, I think that must be our next port of call.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Normally when sniffing out forgeries we come across a 'discovery' of an item in the ground or on someone's library shelf. But I've noticed a twitter group called 'dark archive' which addresses the opposite problem, of missing books/ manuscripts that aren't where historians expected to find them.
An ingenious explanation for their absence has been proposed
| ...inventories were not necessarily (or ever?) a comprehensive record of every item in a particular institution & certainly not intended for future scholars to use to reconstruct what was and wasn’t in a particular place or in a particular time. |
This statement is clearly a get-out and actually fraudulent -- blame the archivist for incompetence if and when a manuscript can't be located, much as Danes & co. get the blame when monasteries can't be located. But the dodgy/sloppy archiving thesis works the other way round, if items can be left out they can also presumably be added. Either way it all resonates with our more radical conclusion that no great libraries existed before the invention of printing
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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This event?
https://aevum.space/darkarchives
| THE DARKNESS OF THE MEDIEVAL ARCHIVES, the shadows of the library stacks: too vast for countless lifetimes of scholarship to exhaust? And yet, in our internet era, the accelerating machine-processing of centuries of collected medieval materials and data is yielding ever more detailed, extensive maps of the archive’s extent and features. The goal of completely surveying the archive, down to every folio and character, is not only increasingly viable but irresistible – and at a time when competence in its languages, diplomatics and palaeography is contracting; for this same process promises new revelations, of unprecedented richness and detail, about the medieval world itself. |
Is this a new version of the usual academic begging bowl? "More research required"
| Yet the great irony is that on our new map, the Dark Archives, the medieval unread and unreadable, dwarf all that we currently know, and indeed threaten to paralyse fresh research. In quantity, they encompass the great majority of the millions of known folios and associated records, that remain unread, unscanned and scattered across the world. Who will fund their expensive digitization? What should be prioritized? And to what end, when the mass-transcription and record-creation technologies needed to explore them remain unequal to the task? Most challenging of all may be owning the shift in perspective that the Dark Archives are forcing upon us: the unsustainably small extent of what we term ‘the medieval’, and the uncertainty over what might succeed it. |
Isn't Google already doing that? Or is there some back-story about the way Google is doing that? Is this a bid to startup a new "Dark Archives Search Engine", independent of and separate from Google?
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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They need to get a move on with digitization. Concern over the corrosive effect of iron gall inks on paper and parchment began about a hundred years ago. The chemical composition of gall ink varieties remains 'poorly understood' and their rates of corrosion can only be guessed at. It stands to reason that there is no 'cure' but it does make one wonder if this very important area of research has been wilfully sidelined because it raises the obvious question of how thousand year-old manuscripts could still be readable, never mind not falling to pieces.
It sounds like scientists lack authentic old samples to test. Perhaps the dark archives could help
| The use of alternative treatments for iron gall ink corrosion is undermined by the lack of cumulative data on the consequences of treating ink and paper materials. In the absence of naturally aged samples, researchers must rely on artificial aging techniques to predict long term effects of treatment. Unfortunately, artificial aging can never accurately simulate the complexities of natural aging processes. |
Forgers don't seem to have a problem with ageing effects though, as per other industrial processes, they keep it to themselves. But more to the point, if chemists think the ageing process can't be accurately duplicated, who can historians turn to for corroboration when something might not be old as it purports to be.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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The presence of iron gall ink on a document, and the condition it is in, might well be a proxy for the age of the document.
If I understand the chemistry correctly, iron gall inks are Iron Sulfate (FeSO4) in a solution of Tannic Acid. When the ink is exposed to air (like when written onto a document) the Iron Sulfate oxidises to Ferric Tannate (i.e. a kind of rust). But there will still be some Tannic Acid in the ink on the document, and that's the corrosive part.
I'm guessing the ageing process can't be accurately duplicated, because we can't guarantee how much Iron Sulfate and Tannic Acid were in the original mix, or in what proportions, or how much moisture has been left lurking in and around the document for maybe a few 100 years.
The *absence* of corrosion would be a contra-indicator for the age of the document. Put it another way, if it hasn't corroded, it hasn't aged very much.
But none of that is beyond the wits of a good forger who wanted to "cook the books" to simulate age-induced corrosion.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Never mind gall ink, it can never be a smoking gun (though don't stop trying). All they have to do is carbon date a single parchment and the whole house of cards will fall down. They would prefer to spend millions on the 'garbage in' part rather than fifty quid on the 'garbage out' part. Remember, girls and boys, there is not a single document from 'the early medieval period'. That is why it is so easy showing each one is a forgery though impossible to persuade them to test one. You can see their point: when you're sailing in a ship of fools...
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | there is not a single document from 'the early medieval period'. That is why it is so easy showing each one is a forgery though impossible to persuade them to test one. You can see their point: when you're sailing in a ship of fools... |
Do you mean
there is not a single original document from 'the early medieval period' ?
As opposed to copies. Or copies of copies?
I think that's where I get easily confused. Given that almost *all* documents in a North Western Europe maritime environment will eventually and inevitably rot or crumble into dust, a Late Medieval scriptorium might genuinely (and in good faith as Standard Operating Procedure) be copying older documents as "reprints".
Given the way "provenance" works in the art market, a copy of a copy is never worth what an original is worth. But is it always a fake?
It's a ship, Jim. But not as we know it. It's the Ship of Theseus.
In the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The concept is one of the oldest in Western philosophy, having been discussed by the likes of Heraclitus and Plato by ca. 500-400 BCE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus |
As so eloquently exampled by Trigger's well-maintained broom; he's had 17 new heads and 14 new handles. But it's still the same broom.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| As so eloquently exampled by Trigger's well-maintained broom; he's had 17 new heads and 14 new handles. But it's still the same broom. |
In the broom example you have the same design but not the same broom. It's a similar situation for moulds in metal-working and coin dies which are easy to replicate and hard to authenticate, assuming they can be found
| Given the way "provenance" works in the art market, a copy of a copy is never worth what an original is worth. But is it always a fake? |
It's only a fake if it purports to be an original. There's a grey area with works 'from the school of ...." which may be contemporaneous or done later, i.e. a forgery.
Do you mean
there is not a single original document from 'the early medieval period' ?
As opposed to copies. Or copies of copies? |
Without at least one verified original for comparison, as with artists' works, you can't say whether a manuscript is the original or a later copy-- unless scientific testing is done. Also like the art world, manuscript scholars have recourse to 'schools' though usually to denote broad geographical areas and/or historical eras.
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