New research paper

[Digitalgoldfish79]

For what it's worth, my personal hypothesis based on the work I've done is that it's exactly what it looks like. It's a manuscript written by a small workshop in the Padua/Bologna region, probably connected to the university.

Hi!

Why Padua/Bologna specifically?

It's the right time period and intellectual milieu, the language appears to be closer to Latin than anything else (I also looked at Hebrew and Arabic but didn't include them in the paper yet).. although I couldn't directly link to medieval notation ,  I did some work with Capelli, and it's that kind of thing.. the different sections of the document match Practica Medica, Herbarium Carrare, Compendium Medicinae..

 The plant illustrations in the Herbal section:

thick black outlines

green fill with red marginal accents

bifurcated roots

stylized tubes

heavy ink contouring with herbal exemplar patterns

These match:

• Manuscript Group III of the Italian herbal tradition

especially:

Carrara / Lombard workshop traditions

Padua (Herbals c. 1400–1430)

Veneto region illustrated exemplars

The zodiac roundels match Italian astro-medical tradition:

30-female star-nymph design = Bolognese astro-medical manuscripts

Circular bathing cosmologies = Padua therapeutic diagrams

Flow-tube hydro-mechanic imagery = Ferrara/Pavia traditions


This shared motif family is regionally clustered in the Veneto–Emilia corridor.


Again, just a theory at this point but I see converging lines of evidence...