(15-11-2025, 07:44 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Have you tried to match words of pharma vs. herbal folios where the plants seem to match?
I'll leave text analysis to others, it should be simple to write a script that compares words, word variants and phrases in different pages - but not for me. As far as I know no convincing parallels were found between botanical and pharma pages but I might be wrong. I stick to imagery.
(15-11-2025, 09:53 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hands may or may not be relevant.
They probably are in regard to plant drawings, see Koen's brilliant work on Alpha vs. Beta plants.
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Currier A / Hand 1 plants are fundamentally different from Currier B Hand 2/3 plants. Hand 5 is somewhat intermediate. But yeah, the strongest distinction is between Currier A and B. Distinguishing Hand 2 and 3 is very hard though but the drawings have a different 'feel'
I have to somewhat revise my statement about Hand 3 plants being absent.
If we look at the flat-top root plant on f102r1 and acknowledge that You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. by Hand2 is a decent match, we must also grant the same status to f95r2 by Hand3 which is highly similar.
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I am however not totally convinced that these depict the same plant as in pharma. It has single leaves and this fish-tail flat top root. It also isn't a classic root table. The attached leaves form 'knubs' where they connect to the flat top of the fish-tail root. They are closed by a line which is an 'Alpha' feature. The corresponding 'Beta' plants by Hand2 and 3 have open attachments to the root table which is more like a dug out patch of soil, or some sort of 'claws' like small roots, a 'Beta' feature. This shows that while the Hand1 artist was aware of at least a prototype of the concept of root tables (which I believe is a misrepresentation of a patch of soil or a waterbody in the source image), he still drew the plant in his own stye which is different from the true root tables used only in 'Beta' plants by Hand 2/3, both of those hands are nearly indistinguishable. The small sample size doesn't help either.
This leads us to the fundamental question - was the Pharma section created before the 'Beta' style arose and the full plants corresponding to the Pharma sketches were drawn? At least I can't find any evidence that rules this out. The fundamental concepts were already established. The only thing we do not find in Pharma are VM 'daisies' but flowers are generally rare in Pharma.
The main points are:
All Pharma pages have at least some weak match to VM plants in the botanical section though the best matches are strongly clustered.
Multiple plants may show similarities to a single pharma image and vice versa
Plants of all scribal hands, both Currier A and B are found in Pharma with very good matches.
Plats from all botanical quires are found on Pharma with at least one decent match, mostly several.
I still wonder why the same plants were drawn multiple times on the botanical section, often but not exclusively by different hands. That's not overly unusual and is found in other manuscripts where the same imagery was re-used either because of an error or because no other image was available.
