Getting close to a source for f85r2

[Koen G]

About the insertion of the doctor, there are these lines from the text that seem to me to draw a parallel between the physician and the wisdom of old age. Could something like this be the reasons for inserting a doctor at the end(?) of the ages of life?

Marco: I will try to explain what I mean here. First of all, a "doctor" in the Middle Ages can be both a medical doctor, a scholar or a teacher. It was possible to specify, but there was more overlap between the groups than today. (Even though in some languages, we still might run into confusion over the word Doctor sometimes: PhD or medic?). 

It looks like these manuscripts sometimes placed an image of an authoritative figure (named authority, generic doctor or scholar) at the start of the book and/or various chapters, presumably to underline the authoritative nature of the work. The German text is also filled with phrases like "as the master tells me" and so on, stressing the idea that the information comes from a learned source.

In the Berlin MS, as you showed, the pointing Doctor/Teacher sits at the beginning of the chapter on the seasons, just to visually underline again and again that this is a good text. The doctor inspecting the urine flask has exactly the same function for the next chapter, which is not really about urine. The initial D with the author's portrait I shared in the other thread has the same function again, in a related tradition.

Therefore, my reconstructed order for the source manuscript would be:

* It has the learned, pointing man introducing the seasons chapter, just like Berlin
* It has a combination of flowers and canes, certainly including one "cane and rosary" image.
* It has the urinoscopy immediately following the cane lady, as is standard in the tradition

The weird thing about the VM sequence is that for whatever reason, the most redundant images are removed. But the pointing scholar, flower lady, cane lady and urine-doctor appear in the correct order counter-clockwise.