Punter, Cambridge
Reading week Spring 2011
Photograph by Elina Hamilton




On the road again

I'm on the road researching again - this time between the University of Cambridge (the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College and the Wren Library at Trinity, to be specific!), the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford and the British Library in London.  This trip I am looking at Odington's scientific treatise, Ycocedron, which was clearly as widely known and transmitted as his music treatise, De speculatione musica.  His scientific treatise is often paired with magic treatises or astrological charts of stellar and lunar movements.  One of the enjoyable parts (out of many!) of working through these medieval manuscripts is finding little faces of men caricatured in the margins of folios (see post on Bangor Pontifical below).  Today, I came across a rather fat looking man with a crooked smile.

After spending hours on two manuscripts today, I couldn't help but wonder how accurate the 15th-century predictions of the future through astrological calculations may have been...