Theory: it says "visch" for fish, not the month of the year.

[Damiro]

Translation to English is "Fish"

Language is Old High German form and variations are:
[*]
fisc
[*]fisk
[*]fisch
[*]fish
[*]fisg
[*]variants beginning with v, including visc, visch, and visg

- Most likely phonemic ?



Theory derived from:
- The amount of letters/symbols.
- The assumptions regarding the origin of a scribe
- The year it was written (1400s to 1500s)
- In my language (Slavic) we say "fish" for this zodiac as well.

The only thing that does not match well is the shape of symbols...

[Koen G]

So "it would say visch if the letters were different"? I guess it would, yeah.

[ololololo]

The only thing that doesn't add up is the symbols
At least the first letter is m or n, v is only a stretch, and it is definitely not f. The last letter is not t or h, but s.
Why would this inscription stand out? When the author saw the Pisces, he decided to mark them as Pisces? Why didn't he sign all the women in balneology as "woman"?

[Aga Tentakulus]

   
"pissis"

   
"pistis, von dem zeichn des visches"
pistis, from the sign of the fish

   

[JoJo_Jost]

@ Aga, if you want to read “pissis” from “maris” (or whatever)? — that's going to be tough 

@ Aga aus "maris" (oder was auch immer) willst du pissis lesen?  - wird schwierig 

[Aga Tentakulus]

@ Aga, if you want to read “pissis” from “maris” (or whatever)? — that's going to be tough 

I know, it should actually say ‘vissis’ fisches.
I have six books with exactly the same text. I think the copyist made a mistake here.

[Koen G]

That's like when we had those lobsters labelled "canter", probably caused by c and t looking similar in certain scripts.

[JoJo_Jost]

@ Koen i think u re right: Latin fish = piscis

[eggyk]

Whether it's visch, visk, visg, fish, pissis, pisces, piscis, or anything else, this still doesn't explain how that word reads as anything other than "Mars".

[rikforto]

As is often the case with a "looks like" theory, the thing that is missing is comparisons to other manuscripts showing the letters formed this way. This is going to be an especially uphill battle in this case because the rest of the sequence, for all its strangeness, is months and so "mars" fits