Women as allegory for the life force of plants - or just a plant biology lesson?

[Aurara84]

By now I've seen about every possible 15th century illuminated manuscript type, and I'm pretty sure there is nothing like an allegory about the workings of plants. I guess it could be illustrations of some unknown text, though this again would be hard to prove since we can't read the text...

Perhaps instead I should be looking for allegories of women as a 'life force' or, as you mentioned earlier, as water itself (or minerals/food etc). Although this is obviously not such a hard link to the workings of plants.

Hildegard von Bingen likened parts of plants to parts of the human body in her 'Physica' (1150/55):
“The material in trees and wood, which is made into rope, is comparable to human veins” (Intro to the plants section) 
 Although, again, this isn't much of a link.

Talking of Hildegard, I thought the invention of her 'Lingua Ignota', with it's invented characters, was an interesting aside when thinking about the Voynich Manuscript - how/why/when these types of things were created in this era.

SaveSave