bi3mw > 26-12-2018, 02:18 PM
-JKP- > 28-12-2018, 12:33 PM
-JKP- > 28-12-2018, 12:47 PM
bi3mw > 28-12-2018, 01:33 PM
-JKP- > 28-12-2018, 02:27 PM
ReneZ > 28-12-2018, 03:33 PM
Quote:It is tremendously difficult to learn anything from the pictures in medieval herbals. There is debateamong the herbalologists about the actual utility of the pictures.
John Riddle, Sergio Toresella, and my wife (whom I take to be the heavy hitters in the field) all have somewhat different takes. My impression is that you sometimes have to regard the whole thing as a specialized kind of iconography: just as we can study the relationship between different pictures of St Jerome (say) in medieval painting, and can form an impression of what he looks like (large square forehead, balding, red hat, accompanied by a pet lion) while knowing that the actual person might have looked completely different, so we study the plant pictures in herbals, noting similarities between the pictures (which sometimes agree with the written text, and sometimes not) even though the actual plant might look quite different.
bi3mw > 28-12-2018, 06:07 PM