Can... : Transcriptions

[R. Sale]

@R.Sale

There is a whole Corpus of plant descriptions, not only in herbals and you will have to take the trouble of sorting them out like other people who think there is contemporary information in the herbal texts, Cannabis is a bad example, even if the id is correct, there is not much information on hemp

Greetings Helmut,

My original contention was that - for a variety of reasons - botanical investigation in the VMs, particularly botanical investigation as a way to access the VMs language is a waste of effort. The idea of being able to identify a plant from it's illustration, and then take the plant name and find the corresponding word in the VMs 'monograph' is a task of impossibility stacked on impossibility. That, in effect, the task of botanical identification functions as a sort of intellectual flypaper; it keeps the excessively curious away from the more important parts of the VMs.

"Oh, no!", say the knowledgeable botanical investigators, with their various examples. So now we have this investigation. How can it be shown that the plant image to text connection is valid? And in order to make such a demonstration, what is the best candidate to examine further? At present, the best identification with significant literature is Cannabis / Hemp.

The second part is the selection of the best historical monograph that might have served as the VMs proto-type. The VMs 'monograph' demonstrates a short section format style with its three short sections. There are clear chronological considerations with VMs C-14, though older sources would have been in use. 

If correspondence is to be found in the texts, as others have suggested, those more familiar with the specific, background literature could propose and describe their stronger potential candidates for further comparison, if collaborative investigation works for them.