Matching Plant Images Internally

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I took the most convincing matches to see where they came from

Fantastic, tanks!

It's also interesting that most of the best matches are clustered on one foldout page which has matches with plants from scribal hands 1,2 and 5. ... why are so many of the rather poorly drawn Hand5 plants in Pharma?

Hands may or may not be relevant.  The Herbal may have been scribed in installments, over a long period of time, and a scribe presumably was recruited anew for each installment. And one of those scribes, or a different one, was recruited for Pharma.  Then, whichever of the two sections was done first, the process of copying from one to the other (or copying both from the same sketches) could have been independent of the scribes.

More interesting would be to compare Herbal-A and Herbal-B in this regard.  The "language" differences must be connected more to the Author rather than the Scribe.  Like, he changed the spelling rules, or copied from two different source books, or recorded two slightly different pronunciations of the same language...

All the best, --stolfi