Re: VMS -- Botany (f51r) Henbane

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dana,

> "Ps.-Apuleius, Dioscorides, Herbals (extracts);
> De virtutibus bestiarum in arte medicinae,
> in Latin and English England, Bury St. Edmunds;
> 11th century, late"
>
> http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/jpegs/bodl/1000/17461201.jpg

This looks like a near-perfect fit to me as well - good job! :-)

The only odd detail is the dotted line down the middle of each leaf in the 
VMS' version: do you know if this corresponds to a characteristic feature 
of henbane's leaves (missing from the Dioscorides version) or was it simply 
a stylistic quirk?

This might give us at least some idea of whether it was drawn from nature 
(however haphazardly) or simply copied from another herbal. :-)

> Dioscorides classified plants as "as aromatic, culinary, and medicinal".

Thanks for digging that up! Perhaps I/we should ask Sergio Torresalla if 
other alchemical herbals showed any logical grouping (or classification) 
within each quire? There might be a hitherto unnoticed pattern there 
waiting to be found, which might assist in identification etc.

> I wonder how the plants
> in the VMS were classified (perhaps toxic, culinary, and medicinal)?

Perhaps: "fanciful", "impressionistic", and "misleading"? :-)

Still, it would be nice to have *some* kind of guiding principle according 
to which these were collected. :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

PS: as a quick aside, f33r (the heads-in-the-roots / mandrake page) shows 
signs of bleed-through (from f33v) and bleed-across (from f32v), even 
though this is a start of a new quire: which I would have thought is a 
reasonably good indication that these two quires were foliated in the 
correct order. I can't see any other examples, though - but I thought I 
ought to mention it. :-)