Rene,
NO 'expert' is able to date a ms. by looking at it, including Mr. T. You can say first half of the 15th c. or something except in the cases where a ms. is dated by the scribe or when you have some other reasons, like a patron whose life span is known. It is one of the worst tricks of the art historians to tell you they are able to date things by style criticism, no historian is going to accept this. And when you have a C14 dating and the other criteria are fitting, as JKP pointed out, you can be quite sure you have a dating of 1420/30 for the VMs.
The dating of the VMS is worth a separate thread (don't remember if we don't already have one)
Cadamosto's herbal contains illustrations of 316 plants. I transcribed the Italian (mostly dialectal) names of the plants. I also tried to identify the scientific name of each plant, but this proved much harder and time-consuming than I expected. For a little more than 200 plants, there is an identification that I consider rather reliable (but I am no botanist, so be careful!). I also attempt an identification for most of the other plants (these guesses are marked with a “?”). For 34 plants, I was unable to formulate any kind of hypothesis.
A number of plants seem to occur twice. Likely, most of these cases are errors on my side, but others could be actual repetitions in the herbal.
I have used the You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. Images are not directly linkable, but, once you have opened the digital manuscript, you just have to click on the listed image number at the left of the page.
You can find the list of plant names in the first post of this thread. It does not include the types of food illustrated as a Tacuinum Sanitatis in the section after the herbal.
I further extended the first post adding direct links to the images of the later (but still beautiful) copy You are not allowed to view links.
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Thanks to comments by Rene and Davidsch in another thread, I just noticed something I wasn't aware of before: You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. is strictly related to Cadamosto's herbal.
I examined several of the illustrations, and some are very similar. Here I compare Asparagus from the Wellcome and You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. (img 153). In this case, the illustrations are different, but the two texts are very close.
For instance, the third line from the bottom in the ONB text:
“la bulitura del sparigo beuta da licani li occide”
Wellcome:
“e la sua bulitura beuda da / li cani li occide”
I also attach the comparison between the You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. of the Wellcome ms and the versions of Brionia in the other manuscripts.
Marco, I'm glad you posted an example where the text is similar and the drawings more individualized. Based on comments I've seen on the Net, there still seem to be people who think that everything created in the middle ages and early Renaissance are slavishly copied and that there have to be exemplars for everything.
I have always doubted this assumption, partly based on what I've observed and also based on the fact that many of the old illustrated herbals (esp. 11th and 12th century) are descended from unillustrated herbals or are descended from Mediterranean herbals but were adapted to include plants that grow in the north. Obviously illustrators sometimes relied on personal knowledge to create all or part of the illustrations.
-JKP-
Not sure it would be on topic to respond to a comment you make above, so will send as a PM.
Otherwise - [not directed to JKP or any individual but to the theme of this thread] he effort to shift the manuscript's dating from the radiocarbon range does not agree with 'everything' and certainly not with the internal evidence of the primary source. What it would suit is a particular hypothetical narrative which has been promoted pretty consistently over time, though not always in a way consistent with best practice.
If you begin with a preference that the manuscript should prove to be e.g. entirely the work of a western Christian author, but from a region or time which doesn't require study of (say) thirteenth century Franciscan sermons, but rather (for example) sixteenth century alchemical texts, and only include in your preferred medium (blog, web-page, comments to same) such items as create a positive impression of your storyline, then of course it is helpful to have a way of shifting the manuscript's generally-accepted date to one that allows your narrative to seem plausible.
But of course, if your initial, ill-founded hypothesis is wrong, and you've simply 'blanked' any evidence from the primary source, or other research done which shows it .. flawed... then shifting the dates can only add to the likelihood that those who genuinely want to understand the manuscript AND its written text will endure more decades of frustration, mis-direction, unbalanced bibliographies and all the rest.
So no - let's take the dates provided as solid; admit that there are some fairly deep flaws in the 'Latin central European Germanic Franco-German Germanic-Greek alchemical herbal' line of enquiry, and go back to the basic issue of correctly attributing and describing what the manuscript ACTUALLY contains. Otherwise the linguists are going to be as misled as Bax was in relying on the recommendation of Edith Sherwood's identifications, or as so many others have been for similar reasons.
In fact, this matter of 'realism' versus 'signification' for imagery in the Vms has been one that should have been addressed formally some time ago... perhaps in 1931, but certainly since 1999.. so I shall publish something on it in the next day or two, all being equal.
Hi Diane,
I'm not sure if you mean Cadamosto's herbal or the Voynich manuscript in your latest post. If the latter, then let's please focus on Cadamosto's herbal in this thread, as its title suggests.