Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes

Mandrake Illustration from Herbal illustrated in Italy, ca. 1520 (LJS 46)

From this morning’s Coffee with a Codex, we ran across an illustration of a mandrake—yes! the very same plant you’ve probably heard of from the Harry Potter books and movies. Complete with a man covering his hears for fear of dying from the cries.

page 16r of a manuscript with a colored illustration of a naked man representing the roots of a plant. The man's feet are tied together and attached to a dog which is pulling the plant from the ground as nearby a man covers his ears with his hands.
page 16r of Herbal illustrated in Italy, ca. 1520 (f. 2r-53v)

In one superstition, people who pull up this root will be condemned to hell, and the mandrake root would scream and cry as it was pulled from the ground, killing anyone who heard it. Therefore, in the past, people have tied the roots to the bodies of animals and then used these animals to pull the roots from the soil.[2]
—Wikipedia citing John Gerard (1597). “Herball, Generall Historie of Plants”. Claude Moore Health Sciences Library. Archived from the original on 2012-09-01.

 

Dot Porter did a more thorough tour of MS Codex 1248 today compared to our prior glimpse.

Today I learned that the phrase “run the gamut” comes from Γ ut or gamma ut, which is the lowest note of the hexachord system on the Guidonian hand and is also used to describe all the possible notes.

And for some somewhat related musical fun via John Carlos Baez:

Guillaume Dufay (1397 – 1474) is the most famous of the first generation of the Franco-Flemish school. (This first generation is also called the Burgundian School.) He is often considered a transitional figure from the medieval to the Renaissance. His isorhythmic motets illustrate that—their tonality is dissonant and dramatic compared to typical Renaissance polyphony.

@wiobyrne, @AllossoDan has also been using it in his teaching. If you’re curious to see a use case applicable to the classroom, you might appreciate joining/watching an upcoming “book club” he’s doing w/ Obsidian over the holiday break: https://danallosso.substack.com/p/obsidian-book-club-the-dawn-of-everything.
@UCLAExtension I know a follow up course to the first half of Differential Topology is being offered for Winter 2022, but it doesn’t seem to be on the site yet to register. Can someone fix this?
https://www.uclaextension.edu/sciences-math/math-statistics/course/introduction-differential-topology-math-x-45148
I’ve downloaded my copy of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow for Dan Allosso’s forthcoming Obsidian-based book club. https://danallosso.substack.com/p/obsidian-book-club-the-dawn-of-everything

Curious to see how these tools can be communally used for collaborative note taking, knowledge creation, and discussion.

For the REAL @RoamResearch fans.

Ok zettelkasten fans. Unless someone can come up with an earlier source, the inventor of the zettelkasten method for excerpting and note taking is Konrad Gessner in 1548. (Again it’s not Niklas Luhmann!)

Text card that reads "1. When reading, everything of importance and whatever appears useful should be copied onto a good sheet of paper. 2. A new line should be used for every idea. 3.“ Finally, cut out everything you have copied with a pair of scissors; arrange the slips as you desire, first into larger clusters which can then be subdivided again as often as necessary.” 4. As soon as the desired order is produced, arranged, and sorted on tablesor in small boxes, it should be fixed or copied directly. —Gessner, Konrad. Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium. 1548. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer. Fol. 19-20"

More details to come on this fun bit of history soon.