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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture On Sunday, August 20, 2006, at 5:56 pm, Brenda Cook wrote: > and his death date was > > inscribed, presumably from local records, as 20. August 1118 > (thought to > > have been an error for 1181) on a pilaster in the cathedral of Conza > > that was destroyed by the earthquakes of 1694 and 1732 (as > opposed to > > its eighteentn-century replacement that collapsed in the great Conza > > earthquake of 1980). > > What date is the carving of the inscription ? > I have a problem with MCXVIII being as error for MCLXXXI The inscription (which might really have been only a painted legend -- "inscribed" could be my faulty memory at work or my source could have been using the term loosely) is long gone. The sole source for it (if I remember correctly from my reading of a few years ago) is an eighteenth-century antiquary's report of what he saw. My knowledge of that report is second-hand. Because the dates in question, when expressed in Roman numerals, are so obviously different, my assumption has been that the error arose at some time after Hindu-Arabic numerals came into common use in inland southern Italy. Since that happened in the later Middle Ages and since the report of the inscription/legend is no earlier than the last decade of the seventeenth century, that leaves a lot of time for the putative error to have arisen and to have established itself in whatever document (probably a chronotaxis of bishops of Conza) was used for the datum in question. Best again, John Dillon ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html