Going Medieval... er... Early-Modern.

For the encoding Challenge, Laura, Jackson and I finally settled on a copiously annotated, heavily worm eaten and variously rebound 1490 Venetian edition of Joannes de Sacro Bosco’s medieval astronomy manual De Spheara Mundi housed in the Thomas Fisher rare book Library.

Image taken from photos of a non-specificed edition of Spheara Mundi (though suspiciously familar in worm-worn-ness to Fisher's copy) found on this tumblr

Laura is the seasoned medievalist among us, I am something of a crypto-medievalist, and Jackson is eager for the variety of challenge the old text presents us for encoding.

Because Spheara Mundi is a physics/astronomy text book of the Ptolemaic word-view, there are a great volume of geometric diagrams contained within the text, which have already proven to be useful in trying to assess to what the degree the specific text in the Rare Fisher Library aligns with already printed translations, and to what degree it has gone along a path of its own. ( It obviously has, because whole leaves of odd shapes have been inserted in parts of the book.

In terms to what will be encoded, our group found an unusual particularly overt style of page marking in the Fisher copy of the De Spheara Mundi, a cut out and folding rectangular section on the outward edge of certain pages (much more violent then the mere page corner crease) 

A picture of the offending mark would be warranted here, but unfortunately we didn’t have a chance to take one (yet!)

The fact that these folds sometimes occur over the top of or straight through the annotations (revealing a sort a biblious depositional procession) and the degree to which the annotations have been cut up from re-binding and the presence of these (I hypothesize) place holding cuts, should create some interesting choices when we crack out the code.

-Ben