17-01-2026, 04:31 PM
I think what we should be saying is that unfortunately, a lot is unknown and there's a lot of speculation.
About the subjects at hand, I personally believe the following:
It's unclear how many corrections there actually are, or what we should expect if there actually were many corrections. I never understood why people get so hung up on this. What do corrections in regular manuscripts look like? Would we, as amateur researchers, always be able to point them out? Would we even recognize them if they stared us in the face? Would we go "ooh" in the same way when a regular manuscript doesn't have obvious corrections?
And if it does not contain corrections, is that because the scribe worked with utmost care, or because they just left mistakes in? Or because the system is some kind of flow of consciousness where mistakes aren't possible?
You see how "lack of corrections" can be leveraged in three different ways: scribe cared a lot OR scribe did NOT care AND/OR the text doesn't mean anything.
The quality of the drawings is generally bad. You notice this when they depict something of which we know what it's supposed to look like. The artist(s) had difficulties with human and animal anatomy and maintaining a coherent perspective. However, I am not certain of how many artists there were, or if every scribe did their own drawings. I can imagine that the person who drew the Rosettes was not the same as the one who drew the bull from the Zodiac section.
The drawings are coherent across sections. Having different sections in manuscripts like these is the norm, not the exception. Elements like nymphs, stars, patterns... betray some degree of cohesion across subjects.
I personally believe that the images in the MS are adapted from traditional images of the type that would have been found in German-speaking regions. I believe that progress can be made by pinpointing the type of source materials and investigating how the VM changed them. But I also advise caution and restraint to anyone attempting this.
Regarding "written by anyone", I'm sure some things can be said about the makers of the MS, but those things will be different for everyone you ask
About the subjects at hand, I personally believe the following:
It's unclear how many corrections there actually are, or what we should expect if there actually were many corrections. I never understood why people get so hung up on this. What do corrections in regular manuscripts look like? Would we, as amateur researchers, always be able to point them out? Would we even recognize them if they stared us in the face? Would we go "ooh" in the same way when a regular manuscript doesn't have obvious corrections?
And if it does not contain corrections, is that because the scribe worked with utmost care, or because they just left mistakes in? Or because the system is some kind of flow of consciousness where mistakes aren't possible?
You see how "lack of corrections" can be leveraged in three different ways: scribe cared a lot OR scribe did NOT care AND/OR the text doesn't mean anything.
The quality of the drawings is generally bad. You notice this when they depict something of which we know what it's supposed to look like. The artist(s) had difficulties with human and animal anatomy and maintaining a coherent perspective. However, I am not certain of how many artists there were, or if every scribe did their own drawings. I can imagine that the person who drew the Rosettes was not the same as the one who drew the bull from the Zodiac section.
The drawings are coherent across sections. Having different sections in manuscripts like these is the norm, not the exception. Elements like nymphs, stars, patterns... betray some degree of cohesion across subjects.
I personally believe that the images in the MS are adapted from traditional images of the type that would have been found in German-speaking regions. I believe that progress can be made by pinpointing the type of source materials and investigating how the VM changed them. But I also advise caution and restraint to anyone attempting this.
Regarding "written by anyone", I'm sure some things can be said about the makers of the MS, but those things will be different for everyone you ask
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