SC - questions

[Elysant at aol.com]

- -Poster: <Elysant at aol.com> 

Ras wrote: 
>> Secondly, the area of medieval cuisine has expanded rapidly in the past 
few 
>> years and with a few notable exceptions 'scholarly' works simply have not 
>> kept up with the progression. 

to which Jadwiga responded:
>Could you elaborate on that statement? To an academic librarian, at least,
>that doesn't make sense. How would you know that the area of medieval
>cuisine has expanded if nobody is publishing scholarly works about these
>new discoveries?

I think the crux of this issue is that as time progresses, we get better at 
what we do, and it is much better for someone to go back to the original 
source manuscript today and to start there than to look at a secondary source 
from some time back where the methodology might me a little primitive now to 
what is currently known, practiced, and done as state of the art in this 
science.

The more we do and talk about MA recipe redaction, the better at it we will 
get - same with any art or science.

As a parallel, look at the way in Archeology some of the earlier excavations 
actually ruined a lot of material found at sites because the methodology of 
doing an excavation to the level we do it now was not known, or primitive at 
best.  (an example would be Sir Arthur Evans at Knosos who apparently 
destroyed portions of the site unwittingly in his efforts to excavate - as 
careful as he was). 

Since then the science of archeology has progressed tremendously.  His work 
still stands as a classic though even though it is primitive and sad now in 
comparison to what is currently done.  

In our field we are lucky in that we can re-do the recipes from the original 
sources and undo the primitive work others in this field have done from 
several years ago when redacting was in it's earlier days.  

That's where we should be and where we should be directing new people to... 
IMO.  Why send them off to a source that might be inaccurate?

And as to the difficulty a new person might have with going to the original 
sources... a lot of the recipes in the manuscripts are not that complex.  I 
remember in Ras's class at Pennsic last year, a lady who had never approached 
the subject before was able by the end of the hour long class to do a 
complete redaction which would have been far more accurate as it was being 
done with all the experience we have amassed to work with do do this now, 
than a redaction I might read in a secondary source written several years ago 
because that author would not have had access to all the progress we've made 
and the knowledge we've amassed since the time he/she put pen to paper.  

Elysant