Published papers

The city of Trier has been home to two copies of the Gutenberg Bible. One of them, commonly known as “Trier II”, has been divided and fragmented at various stages of its transmission history and scattered all over the world, with the largest portions now kept in Mons and Bloomington. Its fate has been well documented, its dispersed leaves meticulously hunted down, and its known leaves catalogued, most recently and thoroughly by Eric White. The other copy, “Trier I”, is a complete first volume of the Bible, with no trace of a second volume. Although more substantial than Trier II, Trier I has kept a relatively low profile in the study of the Gutenberg or 42-line Bible (hereafter B42). However, a careful examination of Trier I’s hand-added elements, that is, the hand-painted initials and the handwritten tituli, demonstrates that the copy is in fact a key to connecting the two earliest printing shops in Mainz, the one that issued B42, ca. 1454-6, and the shop of Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, 1457 and after. As we shall see, Trier I can be associated with two publications by Fust and Schöffer’s shop: Durandus’s #IRationale divinorum officiorum#RI of 1459 and the 48-line Bible of 1462. As such, Trier I stands as a copy of unusual importance in the study of B42, offering a glimpse into events in the earliest printing shops in Mainz.

This paper explores how the role of illustrations in medieval European herbals changed over time and in various contexts. The negative view of plant illustrations held by Pliny the Elder in antiquity was persisted well into the Middle Ages, resulting in the general lack of illustrations in medieval herbals. The paper examines such exceptions as the beautifully illustrated Vienna Dioscurides manuscript from the sixth-century Byzantium; an eleventh-century Old English translation of Pseudo-Apuleius’s Herbarius, which is accompanied by schematic illustrations; the Tractatus de Herbis of ca. 1300 from the circle of the Salernitan medical school with life-like depictions of plants; and the ‘Carrara Herbal’, a sort of artistic plant album created ca. 1390 in the Paduan court. The paper demonstrates how, in differing contexts, herbal illustrations could convey political messages, enhance the usability of the book, reflect scientific or academic interests of the compiler or the commissioner, or be presented as a token of wealth, power, and intellect. The advent of movable-type printing in the mid-fifteenth century enabled illustrated herbals to be widely distributed, thereby contributing to the democratization of knowledge. We also witness a change in attitude towards plant illustrations from those of Pliny; as demonstrated in the Gart der Gesundheit, published in Mainz in 1485, realistic depictions of plants were finally considered a virtue in which the publisher took pride.

A survey into university students' knowledge levels of science at Keio University was conducted among 1st and 2nd-year students of the Faculties of Letters, Economics, Law, and Commerce (so-called non-scientific faculties), and 1st-year students of the Faculty of Science and Technology. The survey was carried out in May 2022, and the number of responses is 238 (52.1% response rate) for the non-scientific faculties and 249 (49.1% response rate) for the Faculty of Science and Technology. In addition to the knowledge and interest in 36 scientific terminologies, we surveyed inferiority complexes toward physics and science and compared the survey results with those mainly from 10 years ago. The media for acquiring scientific knowledge has changed dramatically from newspapers to the Internet. There was almost no change in the age when students developed inferiority complexes from 10 years ago. In the non-scientific faculties, Economics and Commerce students who took mathematics entrance exams had few complexes in physics, whereas in the Faculty of Science and Technology, those majoring in Chemistry and Life Sciences had high complexes in physics. There was an increase in the percentage of students who do not have complexes in physics regardless of whether they are men or women. In particular, the proportion of women who do not have complexes in physics has increased significantly, with 1.4 times more in the Faculty of Science and Technology, and 2.0 times more in the non-scientific faculties. Knowledge of RNA and the quantum computer has increased, as well as the interest in the latter. Surprisingly, interest decreased in most of the scientific terminologies.