(14-08-2016, 08:46 AM)Koen Gh. wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What was the reasoning of these experts to say that MS Beinecke 408 was "clearly modelled after medieval herbal MSs"? Why not an example of an earlier tradition of which all other examples are lost? The "lost tradition" part is really not so extraordinary, taking into account the massive amount of works that have been lost and the extreme coincidence by which one or two copies of others have survived. Many works are only known to us because of one surviving copy, and we know, for example by mention in other texts, that many others are completely lost.
It's plants with text. To say that it is clearly modelled after the medieval tradition is like saying that tigers are modelled after lions. Who can tell, without years of study and the proper methods, which came first and what is the relationship between both?
I suspect that what I wrote about the Leo image in the other thread also applies to the botanical imagery: it's fundamentally foreign/ancient imagery that has undergone a bit of modification after its transmission to medieval Western Europe.
From what I've seen, there are probably more similarities between the VMS botanical imagery and medieval herbal imagery than can be attributed to coincidence or even to underlying similarity in the plant forms being depicted. But it's a leaf here, a root there, a dragon eating leaves that could have easily been a recent addition, etc. Obviously the vast majority of what's in the VMS botanical imagery has no parallel whatsoever in the medieval herbal tradition, either in the overall plant shapes or in the small-scale stylistic conventions used to depict them.