Nebuly lines

[-JKP-]

Don't know who first noticed nebuly lines in the VMS, but this is a subject that has been discussed quite long ago.

Btw, last year I You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. a post aiming to summarize all cloudband occurrences in the VMS. I provide an example there from Basel A II 2, which was written in 1397.

As a general response to several of the preceding posts (not specifically yours, Anton)...


Part of the problem of attribution is that some things are obvious to some and not to others, depending on their background.

For example, no one would cite the first person to claim that the plant drawings look like plants. It's obvious to most people.

To me the fact that there are nebuly-style lines (regardless of what they may represent) is just as obvious as the fact that the plants are plants, because I was already familiar with them from studying old paintings and illustrations. I had collected dozens of examples of nebuly long before I saw the word "nebuly" mentioned by others in the context of the VMS. The idea of crediting the "first" to refer to them as nebuly lines wouldn't cross my mind any more than crediting the first to call the plants plants.

The same is true for the gallows characters that might be pilcrows (I'm still researching this and don't have proof one way or another yet, but I have a mountain of data and HOPE to someday settle the matter, at least to my own satisfaction). I have a desktop-publishing background, among other things, and so the resemblance to pilcrows/capitula was as obvious to me as the resemblance of the "a" and "o" glyphs to the Latin "a" and "o" in the first five minutes I looked at the manuscript. Again, the idea of crediting the "discovery" of pilcrows probably wouldn't occur to me unless I were elbowed and told that not everyone has a DTP background and would recognize them right away AND because no one has yet PROVEN whether they are, in fact, pilcrows.


So on it goes. Latin abbreviations are obvious to me, but not obvious to someone who is new to paleography. We're all on different parts of the learning curve. I know almost nothing about heraldry and thus would have to devote a lot of time to figuring out whether a series of patterns were indeed heraldic rather than simply a series of common patterns. I wouldn't recognize it right away, as I would other things, and thus would be likely to cite the sources that helped me get up to speed.


Citations are an individual decision. I have no hesitation in giving credit to those who give me a hand up the ladder but I'll be honest in saying I'm reluctant to credit someone who I've never read or heard of in a matter for which I have a strong background myself. The only time I might do that is if there is a requirement to cite "prior art" as there is with patents and some academic journals. You need to demonstrate not so much that you've read them (or were influenced by them) but that you know of their existence and thus are not repeating old news. If someone did genuinely influence me (as opposed to mentioning something that is intuitively obvious to me, even if not to others), I cite them.