One suspects these botanical additions were meant to stage a conversation with the original manuscript. A dedicatory Latin poem wishes the princess happiness and that she continue “growing for a long time like a little blossom”, while the accompanying watercolor marginalia shows various flowers in full spring bloom. On the next page, the poem envisions the princess’s honorable name “flourishing” in the land and bringing forth flowers — verse that is framed by racemes of asphodels. There are textual pastiches aplenty, such as a dialogue staged between the shepherds from Virgil’s eclogues, who dwell in the Arcadia of old, which recounts the knightly games held during the christening and couples floral imagery with martial themes. In a subsequent German text, Dilich portrays the grim state of human nature — “From the beginning of the world, human stupidity has been thoroughly observed” — before commemorating the princess as a kind of fertility goddess come to renew the fallow state of mortal affairs: “for after the rain comes sunshine, and after the sorrowful hard winter comes the lovely spring . . . if we rightly consider her life and fortunes, we see clearly that the Almighty has visited us with his fatherly chastisement and has given us the noble Lady Elisabeth.” It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the name “Elisabeth” partially derives from a Hebrew root that means both “seven” (as in the days of Creation) and “abundance”.