Rant on research; was, Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Coffyns

[Bill Fisher]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:28:08 -0500, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
<adamantius.magister at verizon.net> wrote:
ove of extremism ;-). On
> the other hand, for example, the paperback edition of, say, Millham's
> translation of Platina, which does not (IIRC) include the original
> Latin text, is clearly and demonstrably not as good as the hardcover
> edition, which does. If that makes me an evil decryer/critic of
> secondary sources, so be it, but I prefer to see it as a preference

Well, that's a bad and good example.  The latin facing pages are a 
re-written  averaging of several manuscript versions together
and fixing the latin so that it can be read.  Says so in the 
Scriptorum in the beginning part of the book.  (Page 59).  

So what you are seeing is an aggregated and corrected 
latin version, and an english translation for that. 

It doesn't make invalid though because
Milham states in the footnotes which manuscripts the various
parts come from in each section and even what sources 
Platina is copying from.  Compound that with the fact that
no autograph copy of this exists in Platina's hand.  
(my theory was that  seeing as he was the vatican librarian,
he probably passed the work off to a scribe to clean up his
in prison edition)

The bad part is that it isn't all Platina's latin.  The good part is
that Milham is very precise in her documentation as to which
sources she is pulling from, what changes she has made,
even to the extent of the differences in the various manuscripts.

I'll still use it as a primary source though.

Cadoc
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