(23-03-2020, 01:17 PM)Tobias wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Maybe the issue here is the other way around: A christian book which had to look like it has nothing to do with christianity. So what if the author originated from central/southern europe, but lived e.g. in the Ottoman Empire or any other place where there was a certain persecution of christians, and tried to make his work look like something that may have been more tolerated in that area?
Hi Tobias and Koen,
I have been wondering about a different scenario. The intolerance may not have been so high in Islamic countries as it was in Europe, against some Christian books that were hunted down until very few or none survived. Not just heretical texts (many possible pre-1420 heresies) but also some apocryphal texts were suppressed, for instance some (lost) gospels.
So the idea of making a fake herbal, etc. compendium that looked, at first glance, as if it was written in an unknown foreign language instead of a cipher, to make it less conspicuous, and whose content looked completely tame and non-religious, from the abundant imagery, could appeal to people who wanted to preserve a book from destruction. This is highly speculative of course.
This seems more likely to me than the idea of a hidden pagan content because ancient pagan Greek/Latin texts were actually very much in fashion, under the impulse of the Humanists, even those that could be considered problematic, advocating Epicurean values for example: such texts would not need to be disguised.