RE: Rosettes and Astrology
ololololo > 3 hours ago
To be honest, I didn’t know about almanacs of this kind. Or rather, I didn’t think they could be used in this way.
Here’s what I found from the Wikipedia article:
The prevenance of these folded almanacs among medieval medical practitioners and the basic medical knowledge contained inside surviving folding almanacs indicatedthat's while the astrological and medical tools within were devised by highly educated, probably university trained scholars, most users of folding almanacs had far less training and education.
It seemed to me that this fit quite well with VMS. In that case, its author could have been an ordinary doctor who wanted to make some money.
But in the form you’re describing, VMS couldn’t have been used. First, most plants have no real‑life counterparts, and the supposed quack doctor could at most surprise his patients with these drawings. Second, if everything in VMS is completely meaningless, then it’s unclear how he used it. And thirdly, there is a possibility that after the author’s death or the completion of the book, it immediately set off on a journey across Europe, making a detour from Northern Italy through Northern France to Prague. The only explanation for this, in my view, is that the book was sold or given away.