The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[LisaFaginDavis]

The fundamental assumption in all of this is that the drawing is meant to depict a real animal, or that the artist was drawing well, neither which is truly justifiable. The manuscript is full of fantastical creatures (e.g. the creatures in the lower margin of folio 79v) so there's really no reason to assume that this must represent something real. All of the animals in the manuscript are marginal in some way - none are the primary focus of the illustrations. They may simply function like the hybrid creatures in, for example, the borders of a Book of Hours, which generally have no semantic meaning but are just there to entertain.