Most certain plant ID's?

[R. Sale]

"Look at the funny violets. Okay, look. Now what?"
Now one is looking for the accompanying text of exactly this plant in various medical books. Now examine this text among themselves and look for similarities.
The more often a match appears, the higher the possibility that it occurs in the VM text.
With this, I may not be able to solve the riddle of the VM, but it gives the possibility to better understand the text and how it is structured. Maybe there is a feature that only this plant has and a word that only occurs once in the VM and that is right there.
Such hits would be wonderful.

I agree. If VMs investigations were to work smoothly, without unexpected difficulties, that is how it might work. But does it really work that way? There were discussions about using this technique of specific botanical identifications a while back. Violets was one of the examples, "hemp" was another, and a couple others. There are matching identifications in various historical herbals, so there is the "opportunity" for text comparison. It was the part regarding the collection, transcription and translation of the historical texts that never got off the ground.

The problem of visual similarity is a real conundrum. In some old herbals, one can read the name of the plant, and yet the accompanying illustration is 'not useful for identification'. It's like a medieval herbal that is some sort of bestiary for plants.

I disagree with the blackberry identification of f46v. The branching is wrong. Blackberries have a central berry, and behind that are branches and sub-branches with other berries, like the blackberry illustration - not like the VMs, and the VMs has no thorns.

I follow the identification of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as costmary. Costmary was called the Herb of the Virgin (Mary). The roots can be interpreted as the wings of Saint Michael in his role as 'conveyor of souls' at the Assumption of Mary. In which case, the text might be religious, not botanical.