I have seen that Montague R. James has written You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. that includes this one. I have read some of his great ghost stories, but I didn't know he was a medievalist
I have transcribe and translated a page from the ms (You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. 54v). I hope to transcribe a few more in the future.
There would be so many other things one could do to approach this manuscript!
- An extensive list of plant names - it wouldn't have to be perfect to be useful (like that of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.);
- A systematic comparison of two or three plants from the initial part with different Pseudo-Apuleius manuscripts;
- A systematic comparison of the illustrations with those in the VMS;
- An analysis of the text to see if there are other subsections: Rene has pointed out that Pseudo-Apuleius and related texts appear at the beginning, but likely the following pages are not homogeneous and come from different sources. For instance, the Indian plants pointed out by Koen might be grouped in a few pages.
JKP: the fruits do indeed look like eggplants. I've looked at historical eggplant names a bit but still can't connect it to any of the three synonyms given in the manuscript :/
Rene: my link to camphor came from the Hebrew "cemehor", but the Latin and Greek names look completely different.
Marco: I'm in the process of quickly going over the plants that have the "grows in..." phrase in the beginning. This is only an indication, since I miss any mention of origin further in the paragraph, but still...
There are generally three categories:
- Most plants get a description of the terrain on which they grow: mountains, coast, sandy ground, shade, near rivers, "everywhere"... I think these are considered common in the text writer's home region.
- A region in southern Italy (including Sicily, or bench-bench-lia as I now call it).
- An exotic place.
The exotic locations are the following:
- Arabia (common), at times with indications of terrain, usually mountains.
- India, India Maior or India Minor. Rarely with further specification, e.g. near rivers
- Cappadocia
The following I've found only a few times or once so far:
- Alexandria
- Cilicia
- Ethiopia
I'm still going over the last pages, but I'm getting close to 50 exotics. This is a minority of all the "new" plants, but in itself I'm surprised by the high number. I kept note of all the folios of exotic plants but I still have to type this into a decent format, if you're interested I will put the list here when I'm done.
Thank you, Koen! I will certainly be interested in seeing the results of your analysis.
Another possible line of investigation would be to analyze the names. The ms seems rather systematic in providing "common", Greek and Hebrew names. The "common" names do not look Latin/Italian to me: the prefixes "al-" and "el-" seem rather frequent, so one could think of an Arabic origin?
Marco: to be honest I'm confused by the names. There's an unusual amount of "th" in them, for example. As you say, it often doesn't look like Latin, even if you add an ending. And the Greek names must be abbreviated in some way I'm not used to.
From what I have seen so far:
The Pseudo-Apuleius part of the MS is from folio 3v to folio 39r. Folio 14 (r+v) appears to be a dislocated page.
There should have been 4 herbs here, which I haven't yet found elsewhere in the MS.
Almost all herbs are easily identified with the standard set of herbs from this tradition, and most if not all names are standard.
The 'Ex Herbis Femininis' part is from folio 39v to folio 61r. The order is disturbed in several places, and a number of herbs have non-standard names, but the drawings are easy to match. The folio Marco has transcribed (54v) is in the middle of this sequence, but it does not belong to the 'Ex Herbis Femininis' list of herbs.
After this it gets more complicated.
Largely speaking, the herbs on folios 61 to about 106 or so tend to have recognisable names, but the drawings are different from those in the few herbals I compared them with.
From 107 onwards, the names all look as if they have been invented.
In addition, the Greek names aren't Greek if you ask me.
Many drawings are comparable to drawings in other herbals, and in general I see different styles.
Rene: Exactly, the section I've been studying starts at 107r with the first plant (from India Maior). Here the names get really weird. The script and thickness of the pen also changes, and there's no more words marked in red ink (rubrication).
The structure of the sections also becomes more rigid. Where the first parts show many synonyms (others call it....) the section from 107r on holds to a strict pattern of "The name is... Greek:.... Hebrew:.... It grows in..." And the names are hard to interpret. Very fascinating.
It might also be worth noting that here the text becomes more cramped and really starts hugging around the drawings.
f136 is also out of place, it's got scenes and rubrication.
(30-04-2017, 01:18 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.f136 is also out of place, it's got scenes and rubrication.
You're right. It should have been between fol.s 22 and 23. On the recto are herbs 'Crision' and 'Scordeon' (latter name invisible), and on the verso is 'Isatis'.
Marco, would you read this "in barbaria" as an indication of the terrain type or as a cultural/political "abroad"? It's a rare place indication, occurs two or three times only.
f.143v
Here's the overview of plants which are assigned to exotic locations. This is
only the section that starts with f107r.
There are also place names in the preceding section, but those are spread across the paragraphs so they will be more time consuming to gather.
Various plants do not include an indication of place or terrain at all. There are others where the phrase is damaged, faded or otherwise illegible. Still this overview should give a fair indication, but keep in mind that it is by no means complete.
Apart from exotic names, there are names of
regions in southern Italy. These are not very frequent, but do occur various times (I did not take count, unfortunately). The regions I noted are Sicily, Lucania and Apulia.
The "exotics" are the following, I noted a total of 51:
- f.107r India Maior
- f.109v Arabia Islands
- f.112v India Minor islands
- f.113r India and Cappadocia mountains
- f.113v India Major
- f.114r India Minor
- f.121v Arabia
- f.128r Arabia and Capadocia
- f.142v Cappadocia
- f.157r Arabia
- f158r Capadocia
- f.164r Arabia
- f.166v India Minor
- f.173r India
- f.174v India Major
- f.174v India Major
- f.176r Arabia
- f.176r India Minor
- f.186v Arabia
- f.192v Arabia
- f.193r Arabia near water
- f.195v Arabia
- f.196v India Minor
- f.197v Arabia mountains
- f.197v India Cappadocia
- f.200v India Minor
- f.201r Tunis?, Alexandria, parts of Arabia
- f.201v Arabia
- f.201v India Maior
- f.208v Arabia
- f.210v India Maior
- f.214v Cappadocia
- f.215r Arabia
- f.218v India Minor
- f.219r Cilicia
- f.222r India
- f.223r Cappadocia
- f.225r Cappadocia and Alexandria mountains
- f.225r Syria mountains
- f.226r Cappadocia mountains
- f.227r Alexandria
- f.227r India Minor
- f.230r Arabia and Sicily
- f.230v India (humid places, near rivers)
- f.231r Arabia and Cappadocia
- f.231v Arabia
- f.232v Arabia (mountains)
- f.236r Cappadocia
- f.238v Syria et "advene"
- f.239r Cappadocia
- f.243r India Minor
This section appears to use different place names than the preceding one. No mention of Ethiopia here, while my very limited look into the preceding folios (about f61 to f106) netted two mentions of it already. This should be investigated further by listing the geographic names in the 61-106 section.
Here's a pdf with screenshots. Page number should correspond to the number in my list.
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