my colleague Monica Green's post for February is up on the Constantinus Africanus blog!

it gives an overview of the works he produced, discusses what languages he knew, and explains the enduring influence his works had on what we think of as Western medicine

(it also has a few attractive manuscript images, such as this attractive 13th c. copy of his work on the stomach)

https://constantinusafricanus.com/2018/02/22/once-settled-in-this-monastery-he-translated-a-great-number-of-books-from-the-languages-of-diverse-peoples-the-constantinian-corpus/

https://scholar.social/media/0A9B26gK979OWeSeyOE

been working for a while on this weird manuscript fragment of a medieval medical text from around the turn of the 12th c.

got the hang of it, I think, but it is an odd little beast: the script is an odd mixture of two quite different scripts. there are weird mistakes, rewritten parts, corrections, etc.

but I think I've actually come to like it

(the two close-ups read 'aristologie' and 'findit')

https://scholar.social/media/de45DlYlBdq0pvec7EU https://scholar.social/media/qbhRuZxRVkmcpJBHUvA https://scholar.social/media/2Js9QzOK3LObGxze-_A

interesting!

yale published a facsimile of the Voynich MS, with essays edited by Ray Clemens and Deborah Harkness

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217230/voynich-manuscript

looks like it might make for interesting reading on a dismal winter day

and this review has some great detail on the life of Voynich himself

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-certain-riddle-of-the-sphinx-the-enduring-mystery-of-the-voynich-manuscript/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/voynich-manuscript-woudhuysen/ https://scholar.social/media/WCb-PkMTsd7ZaqT3WIc

one final point about our evidence that helps explain where Symes is coming from: grave goods

years ago, (racist) scholars constructed these whole scholarly edifices around grave goods like these fibulae

they believed that if s.o. ended up in a grave with goods of a particular style, it was demonstrably true that you were from a particular ethnic group

but this is obviously bullshit, and no one believes this anymore

(credit: James Steakley/wikimedia commons)
https://scholar.social/media/z-oTRv6LvrVM_Nm3W4U