Hidden animals in the roots

[DG97EEB]

Good point. And there is certainly a whole group of herbal manuscripts where botanical features are an afterthought at best, both in the image and the textual description.

One issue here might be that most of the many roots are unique. So why not more snakes, for example? In manuscripts that use them as part of their visual language, there may be a lot of them. But here it would seem that each plant has a unique property, or a unique combination.

The answer may be something really simple, and that this is actually a more straightforward pharmaceutical manuscript that occasionally uses symbolic conventions (mandrake-style) for a few specific plants - the dangerous ones, the really powerful ones, whatever warranted special marking.