RE: Phonetic Theory about the VMS
-JKP- > 13-02-2020, 07:24 AM
I think the critter on 25v is disputable, it's not clearly drawn, but after collecting hundreds of medieval dragon-drawings, I think the VMS critter probably is meant to be a flower-tail dragon. What it is doing, we don't even know. Is it tasting the plant, smelling the plant, or pulling the plant, or is it indicating something about the use or the name of the plant?
Dragons were used for many things in the Middle Ages. They were used to indicate toxicity or heat, or to indicate something that was used to ameliorate burns or bites in numerous manuscripts with plants, or for dozens of other reasons in both religious and secular texts, heraldry, sculpture, and textile crafts.
Sometimes they were purely decorative. There's one herbal manuscript where there are dragons on almost every folio (including folios with plants that were not depicted with dragons in the exemplars). The illustrator obviously liked drawing dragons and wasn't giving them the usual mnemonic significance.