Cipher Mysteries

While searching for things to do with the humanist minuscule hand, I stumbled across a reference in a short 2002 paper by Jessica Wilbur to an oversized 1981 hardback by Jacqueline Herald called “Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500“. Now, I thought, that sounds like a book I’d really like to buy: only to find out from Bookfinder.com that copies now go for between £403 and £836. Ohhhh well…

However, according to the M25 Consortium and WorldCat there are at least 20 copies of it in libraries not too far from me (including the British Library, the Warburg Institute, Kingston University, Cambridge, Oxford, etc), so it shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of this by some [hopefully legal] means.

Is this something any Cipher Mysteries reader has already seen? It seems almost the perfect book to have in one hand while examining the various Voynich nymphs’ costumes: and it seems strange that such a strong visual resource didn’t feature in the recent Austrian documentary. Maybe its very rarity has made it lost to a whole generation of researchers, who knows?

Update: having posted this, I settled down to continue reading the copy of Mark Phillips’ (1987) “The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence” that I bought yesterday in the very pleasant  Oxford Street Books in Whitstable. And in footnote 22 on p.40 there just happens to be… yes, a direct reference to Jacqueline Herald’s book. What are the chances of that, eh?