Mary Rose 1511 — the epitome of the Northern tradition

[Waldemar]

 

Anticipating the end of this thread, I would once again like to thank all those involved, especially Martes, whose comprehensive assistance and on a variety of detailed issues proved invaluable.

 

Waldemar Gurgul

 

[Kenchington]

Thank you for posting all of this great information, Waldemar!

 

If you are coming to an end, I must start over and try to assimilate everything you have offered. However, I still get the feeling that I am missing the foundations of your conclusions. Are there earlier threads in which you developed your arguments?

 

Trevor

[Waldemar]

 

1 hour ago, Kenchington said:

Are there earlier threads in which you developed your arguments?

 

Thank you very much, Trevor. Yes, a whole series of threads in this area have already been created. The majority of the most mature, and also the most closely related to Mary Rose's case, as they concern the Northern European tradition, are on the sister nautical-modelling forum (easy to find, I believe). All in all, it has been quite a long and difficult road allowing for the eventual breaking free of the overly speculative and yet universally uncritically accepted doctrines of today on this issue.

 

 

 

Edited Sunday at 01:03 PM by Waldemar

[Waldemar]

 

18 hours ago, Kenchington said:

However, I still get the feeling that I am missing the foundations of your conclusions.

 

I would also like to add, for the sake of greater clarity, that this very issue, in its historical terms and significance, is indeed very closely related precisely to Mary Rose herself, and more specifically to her incomplete, haphazard and simply wrong conceptual interpretation (or rather only a residual attempt at such an interpretation, limited to ‘forceful’ matching of a more or less random arcs to the contours of Mary Rose's frames), published in one of the chapters of Mary Rose's archaeological monograph. Archaeologists themselves, or at least some of them, are nowadays drawing attention to this fatal circumstance, it is just that no one has so far been able to offer a complete yet convincing solution.

 

In addition, this disastrous state of affairs has also been largely contributed to by the failure so far to offer a proper study and publication of Mathew Baker's manuscript, which essentially, as it seems, describes the Venetian methods he learned there. In fact, even the availability of the manuscript itself is so far strictly restricted to only a small circle of interested parties, maybe not without reason. As a result, in today's historiography and consciousness, “classical Venetian methods” are taken for “classical English methods”, and — quite ironically and also misleadingly — the Baker's manuscript itself is even called the Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry.

 

I am attaching below a file with published conference materials from 2003, from which one can see just how weak premises today's doctrine on this issue has been based on (apart from the general historical ones, which by the way you cited earlier, the catastrophically wrong conceptual interpretation of the Mary Rose case and a handful of rather naive explanations, or rather speculations, of a conceptual nature). Sadly, this is the result when technical issues are looked at and explained in, shall we say, a predominantly “humanistic” way.

 

In fact, it may be even surprising that nobody has done anything about it so far, at least not in an effective way, but this, I guess, may have been influenced by more than just substantive considerations.

 

 

Nowacki Horst, Valleriani Matteo - Shipbuilding Practice and Ship Design Methods From the Renaissance to the 18th Century - 2003.pdf

 

[Waldemar]

 

As a kind of epilogue to this thread, I am also including here a case from another, rather distant part of Europe, nevertheless thematically and chronologically highly relevant to the issue.

 

In 1570, the Polish ruler Sigismund Augustus, intending to build a royal fleet practically from scratch, instead of turning to Gdańsk/Danzig, which, after all, was at the time one of the largest, if not the largest builder and exporter of ships in Europe, but over which he had almost no political control, asked none other than the Venetian doge to send an expert (granted) who could design and build ships. Most telling, however, is the expressed rationale for this request, clearly stating that Venice was second to none when it came to the ability to build the best ships in the entire known world of the time. Or at least that is what was thought at the time.