(12-01-2016, 04:25 AM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... the VM author must have had some particular motivation for including it, since maps were not typically included in books primarily concerned with herbs and other medical information and those with astrological charts usually only included maps of the solar system and sometimes mappa mundi.
It's possible that the VM author included the map, the charts or whatever because he was paid to do them. if you already had a book and wanted to add an atlas section or an astronomy section why not just have a new quire written and bound in with your old book. Is there any evidence that the scribe was the author? He could have just been writing up some scholar's notes for him in a script the scholar developed. Adding a new quire could have been the medieval equivalent of bookmarking a website that interested you. I think there was even a tradition of doing this in Germany.
And back on topic I think the merlons can be used to fix the map chronologically (pointless since we already know the parchment dates to about the same time period swallowtail merlons originated) but I don't think it can restrict VMS to being written in a particular place. After all the same map (if it is one) has swirly roofed buildings that could be Turkish, Persian or someplace else and no one seems to be seriously considering any of those as origins.