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Valerie Newby wrote:
Hear! Hear! Please let's end it now and save our sanity.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Karrow" <[email protected]>
Why don't they start a Vinland Map list, where they can go on forever.
Moving swiftly past the slight paradox that "Hear! Hear! Please let's
end it now and save our sanity" is not quite on-topic for a map history
discussion group...
Some of us who have studied the Vinland Map in detail (such as me, who
came at it several years ago from a longstanding interest in medieval
cartography) neither want the discussion to go on forever, nor to
ghettoise it and pretend that it's of no relevance to the study of
fakery in general. One of the biggest problems over the past 40+ years
of the Vinland Map's history has been its eminent suitability for
press-release scholarship, as we saw last summer in the wake of the
Copenhagen conference. The press (and, it seems, James Enterline) are
not interested in the complexity of the story, with which Kirsten Seaver
easily filled several hundred pages, researched over many years. Hence
the general public tend not to understand that professional historians,
particularly those with a real grounding in Scandinavian culture, gave
up on the Vinland Map within months of its revelation, because, even
without X-Ray whizzo gadgets, there were just too many reasons to be
suspicious of it. Studying the story of the Vinland Map is particularly
important for specialist curators and librarians, because ultimately it
was the librarians who were the patsies in the Map's miraculous ascendance.
David Bradbury
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