21-08-2019, 12:42 AM
(20-08-2019, 10:59 PM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.arca, you picked a good one to mention ( f44r) because usually plant leaves of that length and shape don't point up like that (unless the plant has been flattened for drying, which is what I thought might have happened).
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Heh, I was looking for the lion plant to write the post that followed the "is this a ladder?" post and all of a sudden I noticed the stem detail in 44r. I don't think my suggestion is anywhere near as strong as some of the other potential IDs, the thing-that's-possibly-a-ladder is faint and enclosed within the stem, but I thought it was worth pointing out as I hadn't seen it mentioned yet.
I didn't know that the 44r plant lacked a convincing ID. As you say (and have the database to back it up) there are a lot of unusual plant structures out there that occur naturally, but even so, some of the VMS plants contain features that don't seem to belong to the natural world. Everyone here will have seen countless medieval herbals where the plant illustrations have been augmented with animals and additional clues about the properties of the plant, so although embedding some sort of additional symbolic info within the plant seems to be an entirely new concept, the idea of herbal illustrations being more than just a botanical study is something that wasn't completely new to the medieval herbal genre.
I think Koen's arma christi idea is really valuable, even if it just forces everyone to look at the plants with fresh eyes. I find myself going backwards and forwards between being very sceptical and fully embracing the narrative layer, although at the moment I think I lean towards an interpretation that includes popular Christian symbolism more generally rather than just the arma christi. Reading everyone's thoughts is really making me think a lot about how I see the plants, especially because there's such a mixure of enthusiam and scepticism.