(05-10-2016, 12:25 PM)Diane wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'd like some help from other members to clarify a point for the introduction to a book of essays.
I was unaware until fairly recently that the Friedman group had formed a general opinion that plants in the manuscript's botanical section were formed as composites.
Having discovered the fact independently - and presented an explanation of the way in which the pictures are structured, the system informing the 'pictorial annotations' at the roots and identified about forty folios' worth, I was later informed that the general idea had been stated in d'Imperio's book.
So my question is this.
Between 1912 and the publication of Mary's book in 1978
and
(separately)
between 1978 and when I began publishing my own work (from 2010)
had anyone ever looked into that issue, or defined any of the plants as composites, or explained any folio in that way?
Otherwise it looks as if d'Imperio's general statement was ignored for the first thirty years, and now that an independent investigation has provided explanation and demonstration - now that is being ignored, while the general statement is increasingly repeated...
Is that the case, or is there a precedent body of research that I've overlooked? Please rack your memories..
Thank you.
Except for Tucker and Strong, I haven't read any of the previous research (I prefer not to) but I have looked at some of the previous plant identifications (there are a lot of charts out there).
In my opinion, a very large proportion of the plant IDs are wrong and some are glaringly wrong.
So, you have to ask yourself (while you're looking into this previous research)... If they were unable to identify the plants (whether as singles or as composites), then how can they make the determination that they are composites?
The idea of composite plants is a slippery slope, just as anagrams are a slippery slope when interpreting the text. As soon as one broaches the idea of the plants being composites, then any part of any plant can be selected separately from any other part and matched to almost any plant. There's no way to prove the idea is correct.
I'm not saying the previous research shouldn't be considered or mentioned if the project is to review the research, but as a working theory for actually understanding the manuscript, it's one of those things that should be kept in the back of one's mind as a possibility rather than actively pursued as a theory, because it's not one that can be verified without some external confirmation (like the decipherment of some related text).
My personal feeling about the plants is that they are like other medieval drawings of plants in the sense that some are naturalistic and some are a combination of naturalistic and mnemonic, but I think it's a lesser possibility (not impossible, but of lower probability) that they are composites.
Having said that, I'm one of the people who wondered out loud if they were composites due to the anomalous flower on the one that looks like a water-lily-like plant but there are other explanations for that as well. When flowers are dried, they change more than leaves/roots/stems, sometimes quite dramatically (in both shape and color) and an illustrator might miss the mark in trying to reconstruct a flower from dessicated remains. Another possibility is that the species became extinct before botanists fully described it.