20-08-2026, 12:30 AM
(19-08-2026, 09:55 PM)JustAnotherTheory wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.None of the alleged previous owners of the VMS mentioned any of the peculiar aspects of the VMS. Baresch, Marci, Kircher talked about an unreadable manuscript with herbal and cosmological diagrams. But everybody failed to mention the hundreds of naked nymphs, though. One would think that this distinguishing feature of of the MS would be the first thing to mention in any correspondence. After all, no other MS exists with so many weird naked ladies. Why didn't anybody write: "Hey, help me decipher this manuscript with... 300 b*tt naked ladies from the 15th century". Let's face it, the VMS is not "only" a herbal. There are thousands of herbals. Not one has this many nymphs.
I have a fairly narrow question about this, and would like to hear from people with knowledge of correspondence of the time. Would this kind of sexual (or potentially sexual) description have gone in a letter in that era? I know as a rule people were fairly guarded about sexuality in letters through history---but for when they weren't---and it's an actual impediment to historians of sexuality. Would men of this era advertise that they were swapping drawings of naked women, even if the actual explanation was much more innocent than that summary?