28-01-2018, 06:19 PM
(This post was last modified: 28-01-2018, 07:20 PM by Morten St. George.)
(28-01-2018, 08:22 AM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."BTW, who wrote "abrival" (surely meaning April) below the ram?"
That's not a "v", no one wrote v like that in medieval Gothic cursive. And there's no "a" at the end. Look at the "a" at the beginning, how big and round it is.
It's aberil. There's no dot on the i at the end, which is quite common. It was frequently omitted.
Inserting the subscripted shape after the "b" was common. It stands for a missing letter.
There's a small possibility that it's abiril, but it's less likely as the dots on "i" were never drawn like a "c" or "e" shape.
So aberil or abiril and yes, it means April.
Who wrote it? The handwriting and ink do not match anything else in the VMS and it is disrespectfully written over parts of the drawings, so probably a later addition (marginalia). The style of the writing and form of abbreviations are consistent with handwriting from the 15th and very early 16th centuries.
Since you are unable to say when and by whom the Latin names of months were entered in, I fail to see how you can claim that it cannot include the letter v. I see words like "vn" in early publications and that must have come from a handwritten manuscript. Most of all, I think it important that the interpretation of the handwriting be made to comply with word spellings that really existed, which you fail to mention for abirel and abiril. In contrast, abril, abrial and abrival are real words.
Several month names are written in the Latin alphabet inside the VMS. I was able to associate one or more of them with the Occitan, Provencal, Catalan, and French languages. However, I could not associate any of them with Italian. How do you wish to explain that considering that everyone is claiming that the VMS was born in Italy and lived most of its life in Italy?
BTW, by my theories, it is also impossible for these month names to be "handwriting from the 15th and very early 16th centuries" as you claim because during that time frame the VMS lived in Peru. The handwriting is likely post 1584, when it arrived in Europe, though the possibility of written in Peru after 1533 cannot be ruled out.