Women’s Anatomy

[nablator]

Why are there wolkenbands around the nymph legs?

Why did they use blue to colour the parts?

What are the dangly things and why are there 3?

Why not show the other parts of the system?

I would be interested in any answers you might offer to these questions.

An allegoric-folkloric interpretation makes much more sense in the context of water flow that we see on many connected folios. Cherry-picking ovaries and Fallopian tubes out of our knowledge of anatomy, as tempting as it is (everyone had the same idea) does not go well with the standard symbol of air (wolkenband/cloudband). The Greeks populated rivers with nymphs, Slavic folklore had spirits of the air, vilas, and there were many local variation of folklore that made sense out of mysterious natural phenomena with the intervention of magical beings. Which particular medieval folklore this comes from is unclear, because only a few bits survived in written form. Writing down forbidden folk tales may be a good reason for using cryptography. For example in the 9th century bishop of Lyon Agobard wrote a scathing rebuttal to folk beliefs about hail and thunder "De grandine et tonitruis". If he had not written this book we would not even know about them. Paracelsus wrote, however briefly, about sylphs, elemental beings.