(26-05-2018, 10:00 PM)R. Sale wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Perhaps it is not the people as plants, but the barrels as pots. With an artistic background, these tub patterns might be compared with certain, traditional heraldic examples such as paley, bendy, barry, chevrony and so on from heraldica.org or other sources.
Rather than images that need to wait till the ability to interpret the text has been achieved, perhaps the illustrations will guide the investigation to the segments of text that are needed to begin that process of interpretation.
That's an interesting perspective - the tub patterns had caught my attention as they seem to disassociate the tubs with ordinary baths/barrels. I thought the various patterns on the tubs could have similarities with patterns we find on parts of some of the plants. And on f70v2 (Pisces), the way the inner circle of people are emerging from horizontal tubs makes them look more like sections of tubes to me. My original post mainly referred to the women pictured 'bathing' in Quire 13 as the zodiac pages seem to me (with my limited knowledge of medieval philosophy) less open to interpretation - or to my interpretation, at least!
I definitely don't think that the women represent real people, or the plants themselves. Some kind of animistic life force, perhaps not distinct to the plants themselves, maybe coming from the stars and bringing with them their associated virtues, as others have suggested (and thereby animating the plant). I still feel there's a stronger thematic link between the bathing pages and the large plants than is usually implied.