Account of fishes found in river Ganges (19th Century)

This detailed and meticulous compilation of aquatic life in river ganges was issued by Scottish naturist and physician Francis Buchanan-Hamilton (1762-1829) while he was living in India, employed by the British East India Company. With this publication, Francis was describing around 100 unknown species to the scientific community!!. One can imagine Sir Francis Buchanan as the typical multi disciplinary 19th century naturist, having a passionate life exploring unknown and vast extensions, reporting about topography, zoology, history... I can’t avoid thinking in my favorite explorer –and my childhood hero as well-, Percy Fawcett. Hope someday I’ll find material about Sir Fawcett to post in this blog.

Francis Buchanan-Hamilton BIO is available on wikipedia, link here. Article is short, but provides interesting links to The Royal Society or the International Plant Names Index (forgot to mention that he also developed an intense activity regarding botanic science). The other important note in this post is about the virtual library where I found this "Account of fishes found in river Ganges": the botanicus project. This is the first virtual-library project I see in which the scan process is done via OCR or "digital text recognition", even for manuscripts. This means that once the codex is digitized, navigation via "key words" inside the document or through entire database is available, amazing. The weak point of Botanicus Project is scan quality (pdf resolution is poor). Anyway, I'll come back to the botanicus project for sure!

Updated (October, 26): add some new samples (including the rarest fish I've never seen before, don't think scuba diving in Ganges river is a good option)

1st position for rare fish ranking in Ganges...

Book of the Knight (Epitre d’Othea), 15th Century

This manuscript could be something like a guideline for young knights during 15th Century. Contains instructions and best practices for young knights with spiritual and moral poems. The codex contains around 100 chapters, each consisting of extreme lavish and detailed illustrations and verse texts. Original title for this codex is “Epître d’Othea”, by Christine de Pisan, a Venetian-born woman of the medieval era who strongly challenged misogyny and stereotypes prevalent in the male-dominated medieval culture. As a poet, she was well known and highly regarded in her own day. A brave woman. She composed around 41 pieces during her 30 year career (1399–1429).

Christine de Pizan (also seen as de Pisan) (1363 – c. 1430)

Christine de Pisan was a surprise for me, never heard about her. Wikipedia has a brief biography here. I discovered during my investigation that her most successful literary works are The Book of the City of Ladies and The Book of the three virtues. City of Ladies is my personal target for another post because serves as her response to Jean de Meun's The Romance of the Rose -another delightful codex-: Christine combats Meun's misogynist beliefs by creating an allegorical city of ladies. She defends women by collecting a wide array of famous females throughout history. These women are "housed" in the City of Ladies, which is actually Christine's book. As Christine builds her city, she uses each famous woman as a building block for not only the walls and houses of the city, but also as building blocks for her defense of female rights.

The codex is decorated with about a hundred masterful miniatures. One of these contains the dedication of the work and shows four figures, identifiable as Philip the Good, Charles the Brave, and the two noble bastards David and Anton of Burgundy. I attach some high-res samples below,