04-02-2017, 11:51 PM
Why are there no more references to this tradition? Well, most of the elaborately illuminated manuscripts we study were made for rich patrons and cared for in libraries. This is why they survived and we can still see them. But the VM is described by the Beinecke library as a work in "provincial" style, which means that it does not appear to have been made in a major scholarly centre. Manuscripts made for kings, and copies of those manuscripts, were much more likely to survive than any "provincial" works.
If the foldout format, like you say, points towards a travelling profession, isn't it to be expected then that these documents survived less often? Constantly on the road, or god forbid, on ships? If the plants relate to intercontinental trade like Diane argues, and other sections to things like navigation, then it is normal that these documents remained under the radar. It's like Coca-Cola keeping its recipe secret: you don't want your competitors to know the way you make money. (I know the Cola thing is mostly marketing nonsense but you get my point). They would have been maintained by a select group of traders who manned routes which in essence hardly changed since the Hellenistic period, especially on the eastern end.
So the problem is not that there are no more references to this tradition. The exceptional circumstance is that somehow one of these documents was copied in the 15th century and survived and is now the subject of this forum
And we don't know what to do with it, since it's the only survivor of its kind and on top of that we can't read the text.
The attractiveness of this paradigm is also that it explains why the documents were copied with remarkable accuracy, again (probably badly) paraphrasing Diane here: because they told one exactly how to make money by buying and selling goods, which ports to visit, how to maintain the crew and ship in exotic locales and so on. This means that an "update" would only be performed when conditions changed, and all other adaptations were undesired. Of course we see medieval influences as well, since copyists were only people and they saw what they saw through the lens of their world view.
The reason why I do kind of elaborate on this is that it is extremely relevant to explaining the nymphs. If we allow for the hypothesis that the imagery have its base in the first centuries CE, then the nudity and relative absence of clear christian imagery makes sense, and is indeed to be expected. Especially if our explanation requires that the matter be copied relatively accurately.
Now I would understand the criticism if "medieval creation" offered a straightforward way to explain the nymphs. In that case, looking at the possibility of earlier sources would be far fetched, or at least unnecessary. But it doesn't. Our reality is that all explanations require some stretch of what we deem likely.
There's a leaf in the small plants section that shows the shape of an African elephant more accurately than most medieval Elephant drawings. An exception to this rule is when the artist had seen an elephant in real life, which is usually a documented event since it was so rare to have one paraded through Europe. In Greco-Roman imagery though, decent elephants are not exceptional. Sometimes they even showed up at the gates of Rome. And the Romans got so hands-on with Northern subspecies that they drove it to extinction.
Just to say, there are many things in the manuscript that suddenly become normal if one accepts early sources as a base. And these things are weird when they have to be attributed to a medieval auteur. For starters, he'd have to be a heretic elephant expert who confused goats with sheep for Aries...
If the foldout format, like you say, points towards a travelling profession, isn't it to be expected then that these documents survived less often? Constantly on the road, or god forbid, on ships? If the plants relate to intercontinental trade like Diane argues, and other sections to things like navigation, then it is normal that these documents remained under the radar. It's like Coca-Cola keeping its recipe secret: you don't want your competitors to know the way you make money. (I know the Cola thing is mostly marketing nonsense but you get my point). They would have been maintained by a select group of traders who manned routes which in essence hardly changed since the Hellenistic period, especially on the eastern end.
So the problem is not that there are no more references to this tradition. The exceptional circumstance is that somehow one of these documents was copied in the 15th century and survived and is now the subject of this forum
And we don't know what to do with it, since it's the only survivor of its kind and on top of that we can't read the text.The attractiveness of this paradigm is also that it explains why the documents were copied with remarkable accuracy, again (probably badly) paraphrasing Diane here: because they told one exactly how to make money by buying and selling goods, which ports to visit, how to maintain the crew and ship in exotic locales and so on. This means that an "update" would only be performed when conditions changed, and all other adaptations were undesired. Of course we see medieval influences as well, since copyists were only people and they saw what they saw through the lens of their world view.
The reason why I do kind of elaborate on this is that it is extremely relevant to explaining the nymphs. If we allow for the hypothesis that the imagery have its base in the first centuries CE, then the nudity and relative absence of clear christian imagery makes sense, and is indeed to be expected. Especially if our explanation requires that the matter be copied relatively accurately.
Now I would understand the criticism if "medieval creation" offered a straightforward way to explain the nymphs. In that case, looking at the possibility of earlier sources would be far fetched, or at least unnecessary. But it doesn't. Our reality is that all explanations require some stretch of what we deem likely.
There's a leaf in the small plants section that shows the shape of an African elephant more accurately than most medieval Elephant drawings. An exception to this rule is when the artist had seen an elephant in real life, which is usually a documented event since it was so rare to have one paraded through Europe. In Greco-Roman imagery though, decent elephants are not exceptional. Sometimes they even showed up at the gates of Rome. And the Romans got so hands-on with Northern subspecies that they drove it to extinction.
Just to say, there are many things in the manuscript that suddenly become normal if one accepts early sources as a base. And these things are weird when they have to be attributed to a medieval auteur. For starters, he'd have to be a heretic elephant expert who confused goats with sheep for Aries...