12-10-2016, 05:39 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-10-2016, 05:58 AM by Diane.
Edit Reason: cut
)
VViews,
I guess the difference is that the 'grafts' idea is just an idea. Not sure whose. It was floated already by 2010 and while I think it should have been allowed a peaceful death long ago, iit keeps being woken up and passed before us, over and over..
It is true that some people in medieval Europe knew how to graft plants. I could produce imagery proving that people on the other side of the world knew how to graft plants. It isn't proof that the imagery in MS Beinecke 408 was intended to convey anything of the sort.
I won't mind if I never have to read another issue of the Journal of Historical Botany, or of ~ Ethnobotany or ~ Economic Botany, or wade backwards through the ever-changing taxonomic descriptions for plants, or undergo again the agony of reading polyglot dictionaries looking for the word that was used to name such and such a plant in such and such a period and such and such a place.
But without preliminary study of that sort, in addition to a solid grounding in how to analyse imagery as imagery, and identify its proper historical and cultural position, anything said is no more than a bit of trivia. "Looks-like-to-me" sort of thing.
I'm not into floating ideas and then trying to find things to make them seem plausible. I prefer the analytic, forensic approach, and a suitable range of comparative study as preliminary to any opinion offered. The aim is surely to assist the people working on the written text, so kite-flying might seem personally satisfying but wastes their time IMO.
So my conclusions about the imagery are conclusions from the research, not 'ideas' for which I later sought something in support. There hasn't been any particular benefit in being honest, either. The conclusions weren't well received, and if I could have done so, it would have been by far the wiser course to pretend that the imagery was appropriate to medieval Latin Christian Europe and the subject of the botanical images was grafting and plants of the standard Latin herbal manuscripts.
But it just ain't so.
I guess the difference is that the 'grafts' idea is just an idea. Not sure whose. It was floated already by 2010 and while I think it should have been allowed a peaceful death long ago, iit keeps being woken up and passed before us, over and over..
It is true that some people in medieval Europe knew how to graft plants. I could produce imagery proving that people on the other side of the world knew how to graft plants. It isn't proof that the imagery in MS Beinecke 408 was intended to convey anything of the sort.
I won't mind if I never have to read another issue of the Journal of Historical Botany, or of ~ Ethnobotany or ~ Economic Botany, or wade backwards through the ever-changing taxonomic descriptions for plants, or undergo again the agony of reading polyglot dictionaries looking for the word that was used to name such and such a plant in such and such a period and such and such a place.
But without preliminary study of that sort, in addition to a solid grounding in how to analyse imagery as imagery, and identify its proper historical and cultural position, anything said is no more than a bit of trivia. "Looks-like-to-me" sort of thing.
I'm not into floating ideas and then trying to find things to make them seem plausible. I prefer the analytic, forensic approach, and a suitable range of comparative study as preliminary to any opinion offered. The aim is surely to assist the people working on the written text, so kite-flying might seem personally satisfying but wastes their time IMO.
So my conclusions about the imagery are conclusions from the research, not 'ideas' for which I later sought something in support. There hasn't been any particular benefit in being honest, either. The conclusions weren't well received, and if I could have done so, it would have been by far the wiser course to pretend that the imagery was appropriate to medieval Latin Christian Europe and the subject of the botanical images was grafting and plants of the standard Latin herbal manuscripts.
But it just ain't so.