-JKP-
You are absolutely in the right. I shouldn't have addressed it to you. The comment was a frustrated response to a general problem - that we can't advance in this side of the research because as soon as something is established reasonably well, it's tossed aside when it doesn't agree with some theory. I was wrong to address the comment to you, and it's perfectly understandable that you took it as a personal criticism. I apologise sincerely.
The thing is that Tiltman's group surveyed the whole of the not-terribly-large corpus of Latin herbals and said - rightly - that the Vms imagery found no substantial echo there. The subsequent sixty years haven't seen that change. Tiltman - individually or on behalf of that group and its years of work and consultation with acknowledged experts such as Sprague - also recognised, even if a little dimly, that there were composite images here. He still supposed it an authored work, rather than a transmitted one, so supposed the composite figures partly real, partly imaginary.
But that's just background, explaining the frustration I feel after donating so much time and research to what I hoped would be an advancing study. Not your fault and not your problem. Apologies again.
You are absolutely in the right. I shouldn't have addressed it to you. The comment was a frustrated response to a general problem - that we can't advance in this side of the research because as soon as something is established reasonably well, it's tossed aside when it doesn't agree with some theory. I was wrong to address the comment to you, and it's perfectly understandable that you took it as a personal criticism. I apologise sincerely.
The thing is that Tiltman's group surveyed the whole of the not-terribly-large corpus of Latin herbals and said - rightly - that the Vms imagery found no substantial echo there. The subsequent sixty years haven't seen that change. Tiltman - individually or on behalf of that group and its years of work and consultation with acknowledged experts such as Sprague - also recognised, even if a little dimly, that there were composite images here. He still supposed it an authored work, rather than a transmitted one, so supposed the composite figures partly real, partly imaginary.
But that's just background, explaining the frustration I feel after donating so much time and research to what I hoped would be an advancing study. Not your fault and not your problem. Apologies again.