f18v...Dioscorides...something about those leaves

[Bernd]

How did you get from peucedanum to parietaria ?

Look at the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Juan posted.
The huge problem with pre- Linnaean plant names was that several unrelated plants were often addressed by the same name and the same plant by different names - which caused considerable confusion. Another example would be Helleborus which in the Dioscorides is used to describe both the Christmas Roses we assign to the genus Helleborus today but also the Corn Lilies Veratrum, commonly still called 'falses Hellebores' today. So the mix- up is no wonder.

Also the currently favored hypothesis regarding the creation of Dioscorides copies indeed appears to be that text and images were compiled independently from distinct text and image sources each time and not copied from existing books. The original Dioscorides of antiquity is believed to have been un-illustrated, later, perhaps already during Imperial Roman times, the beautiful life-like illustrations were created and most likely preserved and copied as relatively large paintings on wooden boards, hence called 'pinakes'.  Such pinakes source must have existed at least until the creation of the Morgan Ms around mid 10th century in Constantinople.

The later manuscripts created in medieval Middle Europe show considerably poorer or generic drawings often completely unrelated to the actual plant. Still all Dioscorides copies have their unique plants which means that images were compiled from additional stock sources or novel creations of the artist. It is quite likely the same happened in the VM.

I am still not convinced the author of the VM had an actual high-quality Dioscorides copy as source, it may very well have been a later derived herbal. Still I believe it was Diane who described the VM imagery as distinctively 'Byzantine'.