Plants and labels in pharma section

[Anton]

Anton,
Although I realise that most people are happy to see the plants as forming a medicinal herbal, my conclusions were that many of the plants (or groups) shown were not ones being used in manufacture - in which I include medicines, dyes, perfumes and all that sort of thing - but were materials intended to maintain the men and the modes of transport  used in the east-west trade.

Several, as I concluded after analysing the imagery, were plants chiefly used for food, ropes, timber and subsidiary needs (e.g. the lufffa, which I think I identified before Sherwood did, but I may be mistaken) was chiefly used as a sort of carpenter's sandpaper, and the hemp-plant chiefly for its fibre, even in Europe. The hallucinogenic sort was chiefly grown in north Africa, and even in Europe the chief reasons for cultivating hemp in the middle ages was for its use as ship's rope and caulking.

But this sort of distinction between plants which were intended for processing into dyes, medicines, perfumes, incense and whathaveyou, and those which were meant to be consumed en route (food, ship-maintenance etc.) might explain why so many of the labels in the botanical section do not occur in the 'roots and leaves' section.

Just a thought.

Actually when we first began this discussion with Koen, I was (and still am) interested in the names of the plants depicted in the botanical section. So the question was - if those plants are repeated in the pharma section, then does the pharma section label represent that plant's name?

There may be plants in the pharma section which are not present in the botanical section. Are there? This would have been a good analysis to show which way it is.

Offhand, I'd say that I would expect the pharma section only to re-use plants mentioned in the botanical section, but not to introduce any new plants.

Why? Let's see what we have. We have a document (a book, for brevity) containing several thematical sections - "botanical", "astrological", "pharmaceutical" etc. (the terms are just for formal designation, they may or may not guess the subject matter of the sections correctly).

Being a book in the aforementioned sense, the VMS may or may not be a compendium of older works - that does not matter here.

Now, the book opens with the botanical section. Not only is this section the leading one, but it is also the largest one, greatly overweighting all other sections in size. (I omit the assumption that botanical folios were kept being added later (as if to make the set of plants even more comprehensive) - because, if I am not mistaken, a way to rebind the MS can be shown in which all botanical folios will appear consecutive.)

So the very notion of plant is introduced into the MS by the botanical section and the botanical section looks like a vast reference of plants. It is only natural to expect that this reference is on purpose - to be used in a certain way by the later sections. You first decribe objects, and then their use, and not vice versa.

Now, given that scope of the plants' reference presented in the botanical section, why would the pharma section take over the function of the former and introduce new plants, not described before? This would just mean that the botanical section failed to fulfil its task, that it was a poor and incomplete reference of plants.