(23-04-2017, 06:41 PM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Individually, these might seem like coincidences, but stacked up one after the other, there certainly is a resemblance.
The uterus pictures are especially interesting. I had never thought to associate the rounded arcs over the nymphs' heads with the inside of a uterus, even though some of the bottom tubes looked a bit like the birth canal. Put alongside these pictures, however, the contours are very similar.
Thank you for your comments, JKP.
Personally I find detail K (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) particularly interesting. Some of the drawings are quite difficult to interpret.
With the help of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ("Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400–1400" edited by Dr Conrad Leyser, Dr Lesley Smith), I managed to read a small passage from the top of the second column of the left page (near the blue diamond):
Et si mulier velit impregnari, desiccat testiculos verris, et inde faciet pulverem et bibat in vino post purgationem menstruorum, et tunc coheat cum viro et poterit concipere.
"If a woman wants to be pregnant, dry the testicles of a swine, make a powder of it and let her drink it with wine after the ending of menstruation; then she can lay with a man and will conceive".
It seems interesting that these page are about woman fertility and pregnancy: I have seen several references to fetuses and birth in both pages. From the illustrations, it wasn't at all clear to me that the subject would have been birth in particular.
Marraccini referred to menstruation in her recent Oxford speech and I am sure the subject of woman fertility has been often mentioned in relation with the balneological section, as well as the "nymphs in cylinder" in the first zodiac wheels. I will have to read more of what others have written on the subject.
As always, the similarities are interesting, but the differences too. The differences are another subject about which I hope to be able to comment in the future.