Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

From the very beginning my approach to the marginalia was to be optimistic and assume that it provided us with information useful for decoding the VMS.

Thus, I never gave serious consideration to pox leber as German words meaning goat's liver. For one thing, I could not connect those words with anything that would help decode the VMS, and, on the other hand, those words are ridiculous for a manuscript that concerns itself far more with botany than biology.
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Pox leber actually concurs very well with medieval reality. For one thing, the dialects that spell German "nimm" as "nim" are, for the most part, the same ones that spell "boch" as "poch" (they commonly substitute "p" for "b" and "a" for "e"). And substituting x for ch or the other way around is not unusual either since Greek "x" is often transliterated as "ch".

Also, liver of all kinds is a very common ingredient of medieval medical remedies and charms and the marginalia on the last page is formatted very much like a charm, including the crosses. A mixture of vernacular plus Latin is also very common in charms and in medical recipes.

And a medical charm WOULD fit with botany in every way since plants were medicine, there were no synthetic drugs in those days.


It's important to have some understanding of medieval culture to decode a medieval manuscript.