RE: My Queries about the Manuscript
-JKP- > 02-02-2020, 06:39 AM
When I was researching this region, I found it very important to look at how differently the Tirol, Bavaria, Lombardy, Bohemia, Dalmatia and the Veneto thought of themselves in the Middle Ages, because borders and allegiances were quite different.
Not only was there no Italy as we know it today, there was no Germany either. There was a Germanic-speaking collection of nations united mainly through the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was a bit like today's EU (not a particularly good analogy since towns were much more independent and monarchies prevalent, but you can get the general idea).
Latin had been the lingua franca for centuries, but some of the HR emperors chose German rather than Latin as the official language. This probably impacted the allegiances of some of the non-German-speaking areas, just as the imposition of specific religions would sometimes attract or alienate certain areas. It also complicated life for non-German-speaking intelligentsia who had learned Latin as their second language and now had to learn another.
There was a huge variety of languages in those days (many of which have gone extinct in the last 200 years and many of which will be extinct in the next 30 years). People from one village often could not understand those in the next village. In Switzerland, they spoke many languages and dialects, as they did in other parts of the Alps, as well as Provençe and Dalmatia.
Also, there were significant Greek colonies in Venice, Florence, Marseilles and the southern boot of Italy, as well as Arab culture (and many Arab traders) in the south of Spain.
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And, as Koen mentioned, people traveled. They traveled to attend different universities. They traveled to offer their services (unless they could find a wealthy long-term patron, stone masons, teachers, scribes, doctors, and many others traveled regularly, and entertainers traveled as part of their lifestyle). Poggio spent five years in England. John Dee and Kelley spent years in Bohemia. There was nothing unusual about this.
The person who designed the VMS could have been from anywhere. The persons who wrote the text were not necessarily the same as whoever created the drawings. The text was not necessarily added at the same time as the drawings (although I suspect the two were contemporary).
There was probably a mastermind for the VMS (there's a certain consistency to it) but unless it was a family project (which I think is possible), it may have been created by a group of people from very different backgrounds. Universities and monasteries were quite multicultural. There were strong ties between St. Gall and Bury St. Edmunds in England, even though the walking distance was considerable. Some of the staff at St. Gall came from Bury St. Edmunds. There were strong ancestral ties between southern Scandinavia, parts of Lombardy, and colonies in southern Italy, just as there were strong ancestral ties between Marseilles and Greece. The reason I was interested in ancestral ties is because they affected how heirlooms (such as manuscripts, which were luxury items) were passed from one person to another.
It's difficult to know where something originated based on where it was found. Look how many treasures are pillaged in war. The crusaders brought back many middle eastern treasures (including herbal manuscripts), the 30 Years War resulted in whole storehouses being carted off. Treasures from Egypt went to England, treasures from Rome ended up in America.
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I'm quite firmly convinced that the scribes were familiar with Latin scribal conventions (not just the alphabet). Based on my research, I'm also convinced that the exemplars for the zodiac figures were from a subgroup that originated in northeast France/Flanders/Normandy that gradually migrated east and south through the Holy Roman Empire over a period of several centuries.
Other than that, I have no idea who might have made it or where it might have been made. Manuscripts often lay unbound for decades or centuries, so the binding often does not tell us where something originated, only where it has been at some point in its life. I am hopeful that there might be a DNA test of the skin to see if it belongs to an identifiable species of bovine. This might give us some good regional data.