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The Mainz Merlon Mystery
- The Mainz Merlon Mystery
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RE: The Mainz Merlon Mystery
ReneZ > 20-08-2025, 11:49 PM
Yes, this image has caught the attention in Voynich discussions before. I am not sure if it is also used outside the Nuremberg chronicles.
One may wonder if it is possible to find a place that combines all the important elements from this illustration - it won't be Mainz - or not, but it is of course possible that it is just that: a combination of known elements.
The onion dome is one indicator, beside the ghibelline crenellations, and also the rocky hills are not found everywhere. Fortifications right next to a river (or lake?).
Nürnberg is just about possible. Salzburg seems to fit even better. An interesting puzzle but it may very well just be an imaginary place. -
RE: The Mainz Merlon Mystery
MarcoP > 21-08-2025, 10:56 AM
(20-08-2025, 11:39 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Medieval AI slop. Looks like the entire chronicle was clickbait
Quote:The author of the text, Hartmann Schedel, was a medical doctor, humanist, and book collector. He earned a doctorate in medicine in Padua in 1466, then settled in Nuremberg to practice medicine and collect books. According to an inventory done in 1498, Schedel's personal library contained 370 manuscripts and 670 printed books. The author used passages from the classical and medieval works in this collection to compose the text of the chronicle. He borrowed most frequently from another humanist chronicle, the Supplementum Chronicarum by Giacomo Filippo Foresti of Bergamo. It has been estimated that about 90% of the text is pieced together from works on humanities, science, philosophy, and theology, while about 10% of the chronicle is Schedel's original composition.
OK, I understand that this is a joke, but I don’t get it. How does the anachronistic derision of the Nuremberg Chronicle follow from the quote? Isn’t copying from other sources the way all encyclopedias have always worked, including Isidore, the Encyclopédie and Wikipedia? One of the “great innovations” of AI slop is that it isn’t copied from other sources: AI grinds and mixes sources that it doesn’t understand at all, and regurgitates something new, made up on the basis of a statistical algorithm.
The Nuremberg Chronicle was made with the goal of selling and making money, but this doesn’t automatically make it “clickbait”. Most books have always been published with the goal of profit: the book industry is an industry and survives by making a profit. I don’t know much about the Nuremberg Chronicle, and it is possible that they reused engravings just because people loved illustrated books. But, having a small figure for paragraphs about individual cities or popes, also makes the layout of the text easier to navigate, rather than a uniform text-wall. We know that illustrations in manuscripts often worked similarly, I am thinking of the totally unrecognizable plants in so many illustrated herbals. And some of the city illustrations in the Chronicle, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., are wonderfully detailed and informative.
Personally, I think the Chronicle was an amazing work: an affordable encyclopedia that summarized human knowledge and made it available to a wide public was a step forward out of the middle ages and towards democracy. The idea of creating a German edition for the home market and a Latin edition for the international market was also brilliant, in my opinion.