Re: Hermathena and Cicero

Your dictionary researches are interesting to the extent that they  
indicate no great precision, in times long gone by, in distinguishing  
between copper and bronze... and then there is brass as I earlier  
pointed out.

I had a cheeky thought, that a scholar would try to resolve whether  
one can do engravings in bronze by means of a thoroughgoing  
literature review of 200 tomes and 1000 journal articles in peer- 
reviewed journals, while I would probably get a slab of bronze and a  
burin and see what happens when you have a go. Can you cut a nice,  
smooth groove that will hold ink, or does the metal chip and fracture?

:-)

Does anyone remember the book "Counterpunch" which Robin Kinross's  
Hyphen Press published some years ago? I lost many of my books last  
year and so I can't recall the author's name. I was touched by the  
part where the author described learning to hand-cut the punches for  
making the matrices for casting metal type, and how various blends of  
elements that make up the steel, and how the steel blanks were  
treated in the cooling process, meant that you could create one bit  
of steel with a hard, sharp edge, and another bit of steel that could  
be carved "like butter" with the first piece.

Metallurgy is fascinating. My father was a welding specialist and we  
had many interesting monographs around the house. It is not for  
nothing that in some pre-modern societies, the smiths were thought to  
have magical powers (in less scholarly mode, see also "Conan the  
Barbarian").... I guess that in the Renaissance which you like to  
document, that mantle began to pass to the proto-chemists, as Persian  
and Arab research methods began to percolate into Europe.

Conrad

On 5 May 2010, at 05:03, Deborah Taylor-Pearce wrote:
> Conrad,
>
> Well, it turns out that Pope Julius III was not the only one to
> mention Bocchi's "bronze engravings".
> ... <big snip>
>
> I should have known that this would not resolve so easily. ;-)
> It never does!
> I have another colleague in my circle who's very good at Latin -- as
> it was written/spoken in Europe from the medieval period through C18
> -- and shall ask his opinion next.
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