(04-10-2020, 01:08 AM)Mark Knowles wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You might ask if he wasn't going to label them, why did he draw them, maybe to fill available space.
Yes, that's a very good question. Considering the Herbal section, we find the plants unlabeled, which is in contrast to some contemporary herbals which contain plant names as labels. Moreover, a couple of attacks with different approaches (my search for "potential plant names" and Wladimir's cross search against the Pharma section) did not succeed to indicate that plant names are there at all. After all, they may be there somewhere, but at least that's far from explicit. On the other hand, the way the plants are depicted strongly suggest conveyance of mnemonical message, which (as I argued) would point towards the plant name. In other words, information of "what's this plant?" is to be derived not from any explicit label, but from the image itself by way of visual mnemonics.
Expanding this concept to the charts of f68r1 and r2 which resemble star maps, we may well suppose that, likewise, information of "what's this star?" is to be derived not from explicit labels, but from other pointers, of which, of course, the only one could be the position of a star in the map. One may object that these "maps" look somewhat disorganized and messy, but if they were copied from some other contemporary map well known to the author, he would have no difficulty to recognize from looking at his, albeit messy, depiction, which star is what. So then, if not star names, what are their labels? They are left to be certain references or relations, in general - certain associations of stars with some other objects or notions, whether about use, governance, reasoning or whatever. In this light, some stars, although members of a star map, would be of no "practical" (that is, alchemic, magic etc.) use or no reference, hence they are unlabeled. It is the nightside chart, which would correspond to the southern hemisphere, where some stars are unlabeled, and this is in line with common sense - the southern hemisphere stars would be less incorporated into magical practice of the time, because they are generally less observable for the inhabitants of the then civilized world.