Re: VMs: Similar Plant VMS and The Herbal of Dioscorides Pedanius

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 31 Jul 2004, DANA SCOTT wrote:
> This is a good example of the complexities of making a match between a plant
> drawing and a plant as it exits in vivo.
>
> http://becker.wustl.edu/ARB/Exhibits/Herbal/1/codex1.jpg
> http://www2.uah.es/farmacia/images/histor3.jpg
> http://www.godecookery.com/tacuin/tacuin20.jpg
> http://www.magdalin.com/herbs/plants_pages/m/mandrake.htm

Well, the first three are presumably early and the last contemporary.
The first three depict use of a dog to pull the plant out of the ground
without hearing the plant's maddening scream.  All four are more or less
consistent in representation of foliage with more or less imagination
applied to the root.  The modern drawing, particularly, reveals what those
red objects hanging off the plant in Dioscorides Pedanus are - the fruit.

DP doesn't win any prizes for representation of the plant as a whole, but
he has the pieces there, connected in a wholely artificial way to produce
a generalized plant.  His threes of leaves presumably imply the bunching
of the leaves of the actual plant, for example, and he has the leaves, the
root, and the right fruit reasonably well presented.  But his drawing
doesn't follow the rule that the whole as well as the pieces shall be
accurately represented.

The f17r plant could be the same plant, represented along DP's lines, but
with the bluish flowers depicted in a group at the top instead o the red
fruit depicted attached in rows along the stem as in DP.

> While mandragora does seem to appear in the VMs
>
> f100r: (second row, plant sprig on the right)
> http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dlxc/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2002046&iid=1006248

Hmm.  I'd have to say that within the limits of the DP approach, almost
all of these plants could be Mandragora officinarum.  For example, the
roots are right in essentially all cases, ditto the leaves.  The blue
things in 1.5 might be the flowers.  The vine-like 1.2 and 2.2 seem to
stray from the paradigm.

> I am not swayed to consider f17r as a correlation to mandragora. There are,
> however, examples of faces drawn in the roots of plants seen in the VMs.
>
> f33r:
> http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dlxc/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2002046&iid=1006138
>
> f89r1: (bottom middle of second folio)
> http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dlxc/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2002046&iid=1006233
>
> f101v2:
> http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dlxc/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2002046&iid=1006138

Hmm.  I'd say the same of these.  F33r gets the roots and leaves right,
except for those spurs at the base - emphasizing the arrow head metaphor?
The arrangement of the leaves is better, and the flowers are going into
fruit.  In f89rl only teh roots and basal stalk are depicted.  (The link
for f101v2 seems to be the same as for f33r and I'm not sue how to find my
way to the top and get the right link.)

It might be worth remembering that folk taxonomies work rather differently
from the Linnaean taxonomy and sometimes lump together as similar things
that seem quite different to Post-Linnaean man.  Two different plants with
fleshy roots found in similar environments might be regarded as similar,
which might enhance the fuzziness of the representations from a modern
perspective.
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