Pamela Porter:`Elementary my dear Watson’: Manuscripts, mysteries and the solving of clues

In my paper for the previous seminar I described the tortuous process of tracing information for a catalogue description of a 16th–century German manuscript in the British Library containing the second half of an important, but hitherto unidentified, illustrated treatise on warfare. The purpose of the present paper is to develop this account by relating the manuscript to its companion volume (the first part of the text) which emerged only recently from a private collection where it had remained `hidden’ for many years, and to an ancillary volume in Berlin containing an adaptation of the entire treatise. The intention is to demonstrate how contents, illustration, codicology and context can all be used to shed further light on the three manuscripts and the circumstances of their production.