[split] Could the manuscript be a copy of older documents?

[davidjackson]

I'm dealing with a rather dynamic two-and-a-half year old at the moment so I can't answer as elaborately as I should, but I'll give some initial comments already.

Amen to that, bro.

One thing I still don't understand is why people discard the possibility that the manuscript's imagery was copied from an older tradition instead of a 15th century creation. This is not a hypothetical scenario, it happened a lot. I will again refer to the various traditions of astronomical manuscripts, where we see 15th century copies of 9th-10th century manuscripts. These, in turn, were relatively accurate copies of Greco-Roman imagery. So once again, "ancient sources" is a valid possibility that should be considered as much as "medieval creation" and renaissance.

For the simple reason that one would expect more sources to have survived. If one copy was made, why not two? Why are we not finding more references to this mysterious line of manuscripts across the corpus of medieval manuscripts we have access to? 

The copying hypothesis doesn't explain anything away. Either we find ourselves in a situation where only one copy has survived of an entire literary tradition (which isn't mentioned anywhere else) - or we have one mysterious manuscript written centuries before this copy, in which case nothing has changed, we're only pushing back the date of creation. Either way, it doesn't give us a clue as to the meaning of the text.

In either case, it's not my argument. My argument is that we are seeing medieval tendencies in the creation of the images, but that these images aren't being presented in the way we expect.

If these nymphs were all holding crosses or giving devotion to a central figure, there wouldn't be a problem, we'd all recognise the tradition and go with the flow.

When medieval scribes copied older sources, they would often put contemporary clothes on the figures. Clothing is a huge cultural marker, so adapting it to a "modern" equivalent will make it easier to understand for your audience. This is why it's not unusual to see Hercules as an armored knight sometimes, or rulers as medieval kings. This has happened in the VM, but only in a minority of the figures.

Perfectly correct. Why would this be? If it is a copy, why would the copyist do this on some and not others? Is the nudity important? Or are the clothes important? We have no way of saying with the facts at our disposal.