Oh, THAT’s the stuff? Hmm. Honestly, I think it’s just generic leaf. Reminds me of broadleaf plantainas much as anything, and that stuff’s all over the UK (and, like, *everywhere *else White Man has ever stepped!)
That’s a serious possibility. Robert Cooper has argued that all the carvings were added later and that, as this would not have been done until the building was roofed, all that can be said is that they could only have been added at some unknown date after 1484. The Rosslyn Hoax? (2006), pp. 154-5, 164-5.
Actually, Cooper’s The Rosslyn Hoax? is the most important book on Rosslyn Chapel published in recent years. He debunks at great length much of the nonsense that so badly needed debunking and, unlike most writers on the subject, he knows his way around the archival sources. Although perhaps not one for the casual reader.
There is some question about the age of pasta in Europe. As to the tomatoes – some things just move quickly. Look at the potato in Ireland. Or the turkey – by Shakespeare’s time, only a hundred years after Columbus, the English thought it had “always” been in the Old World.
For a full blown rant on the folly of changing “corn” in works being read or shown in the States, see Lindsey Davis’ - the author of the brilliant Falco stories set in Vespasian’s Rome - web-site.
Having dealt with “corn” she goes on to talk in general about altering books for the American market:
God, I hate that, especially since here in Aus we sometimes get the Americanised versions and even if we don’t, fandom is majority American.
The US edition of the most recent Artemis Fowl book (character and author both Irish, and proudly so) has Artemis make an emotional breakthrough and start calling his mother ‘mom’, which is ‘mum’ in the UK edition. Mind you, in a previous book there is a reference to her as Artemis’s ‘mam’, so possibly even the UK edition of the later book was altered for dialect.
