(38 minutes ago)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I wonder, are there any examples of medieval MS in which there are obvious signs of inspiration from a vast array of different sources? Like the VMS seems to have bits and pieces of Cadamosto, Taccola, Balneis, Dante MSs, Scot, ...
Weren't (most) MSs in the middle ages simple copies of existing works, instead of a mish-mash of tens of different sources?
It depends on how you mean the "different" with the sources. Plenty of manuscripts were a compilation of different works, but most of the time many of those works had some kind of topical overlap with eachother. In many of the manuscripts I look through I often see the same diagrams, the same texts, the same rough depictions of things, and even a similar order of those works sometimes.
For example, many sources have multiple different sections containing zodiacs with different forms in each section, specifically because they were all sourced from seperate works with different designs taken from different places.
If you mean examples of rather different features being directly incorporated together, such as works containing herbs and pipes and nymphs etc that is harder to say. But bear in mind that there are no pipes or nymphs in the herbal sections, nor herbs in the zodiac section. So if they represent different topics or even different works it's relatively "normal" that different sections will contain different imagery/inspiration.
Edit: Koen beat me to the punch and said exactly what I was going to say