Rosettes and Revelations Pt.1: The Holy City - Koen Gheuens and Cary Rapaport

[Mark Knowles]

However, there is clearly a great disagreement among researchers about what makes an argument strong when it comes to interpreting these images.

Yes. And I think that maybe we need to start to think hard about what is the methodologically correct approach to interpreting images.

Clearly, comparing images to drawings in other manuscript that were around contemporaneously is a good idea and this is a common approach as the author would have clearly been heavily influenced by other manuscripts and documents that he/her/they had seen. I think it is important though to accept that the author(s) drawings were also influenced by things that they had seen in the real world outside of manuscripts. They may have also been influenced by things that they had read and observed in manuscripts or the outside world. And of course the drawings will have to some extent been a product of the author(s) imagination. I say this as often I think there can be an approach which relies too heavily on the notion that everything drawn in the manuscript was merely copied from another manuscript and so we should only be comparing that drawing with those in other manuscripts. Comparing drawings with those in other manuscripts is undoubtedly a very very good idea, but I think that some times this can be over done. In my own analysis I have certainly been keen to compare illustrations on the Rosettes folio with those in other maps of the period. I have also though deliberately been very happy to compare illustrations with those of photos of real world buildings and places.

While these discussions can seem rather "meta" and philosophically abstract maybe this is a time to talk more about methodology.