The marginal path

[-JKP-]

One of the difficulties is knowing whether the person who designed the text is the same person who drew the illustrations. It could be two different people.

Also, the exemplars come from different places, so either the illustrator had access to a library or a social circle with a somewhat diverse collection or a lot of artistic architecture, or the person who created the drawings was someone who traveled and was exposed to different cultures.

The VMS is a size that was usually used for portable manuscripts (books of hours, physicians' handbooks, reference books).


I see a lot of different people in the manuscript:

Main portions

• illustrator (most of the manuscript)
  
• illustrator finisher or mentor (a few touches here and there)
  
• text designer (and possibly one of the scribes and maybe also the illustrator)
  
• additional scribes
  
• plant annotator (not the same person who wrote the 1r column text or the text on 116v, it's a different style of handwriting)
  
• at least two painters (the careful painter MIGHT be the same person who drew the plants, the sloppy painter might be a child or someone who didn't really want to do the job and didn't have the patience for this kind of task)
  
• the child-like scribbles (if this is a family project, maybe there was a young child, if it's not, then maybe some of the parchment was scavenged)
  

Difficult to categorize, either original or later...

• quire-number writer (very difficult to tell if this person was involved in the main manuscript or when the numbers were added, usually they are added sooner rather than later BUT there are some that get added at the binder's shop, after the manuscript is done, so this might belong in the following section)
  
• 116v writer - based on the paleography samples I've been collecting for years, I think Switzerland or the Swiss borderlands is quite possible, but probably the French or Italian sides rather than the German side (although St. Gall had a diverse population from all over, including England. It was multicultural even though it's on the German side.) This might be the same handwriting as 17v and this person MIGHT belong in the previous section if the writer had some involvement in the creation of the original manuscript and the main text.
  

Portions possibly added later

• ven mus mel writer (MAYBE the same person as 116v but I have doubts... the "m" is a completely different style)
  
• bits and pieces of added letters in the main text
  
• the folio numbers (I have been trying to narrow down the region and have collected a large number of palaeographic samples)
  
• zodiac-figure labels (I think this is someone from southeast France/Provençe or an area of France close to the Swiss border)
  
• the column text on 1r (an attempt at decipherment?)
  
• de Tepenecz name (Ex libris?)
  

So we are looking at more than a dozen contributors.


But... did they contribute in different geographical regions?

Or was there a magnet (like a university or like a patronage spot in the HRE capital?) that brought together a diverse group of people. Maybe the manuscript was created almost entirely in Prague (or Trento/Padua region), by people from all over Europe who came there for the same reason or different reasons?