A few years ago, people Googling for “Voynich” started to see a sponsored “AdWord” link on the right hand side provocatively posing the question of whether there might be some link between the Voynich Manuscript and Leonardo da Vinci, and pointing them to www.edithsherwood.com.
Naturally, I pointed out that this hypothesis was a load of rubbish, primarily because Leonardo was left-handed, and the VMs was written by someone right-handed – a pretty good prima facie reason to dismiss the claim. Edith also relied on a particularly partial reading of the month names in the zodiac section (one of them when mirrored looks a bit like “lionardo”): but failed to notice not only that they all read like Occitan month names (which there is absolutely no reason to think that a young Florentine like Leonardo would have used), but also that they were plainly written by someone else.
Still, unlike the majority of Voynich theory proponents out there, she is at least looking in the right century and (I believe) in the right physical milieu (and possibly even the right town, in a roundabout kind of way): and for that I am grateful. No, don’t be like that: I really am. honestly.
Since then, Edith’s website has had some ups and downs (of which being hacked by some kind of Russan spam harvester and having its mail inboxes overflow were probably some of the downs). But over the last month, she has returned to it and begun to fill it with many additional pages detailing her and her daughter’s thoughts on actual plants apparently matching the drawings in the VMs. They refer to some of Mr Dana Scott’s botanical identifications (but repeatedly refer to him as a her, which Dana doubtless finds irritating), though largely propose their own matches.
Unfortunately, at such a large historical distance, finding botanical equivalents is a hugely hazardous way of trying to move forward: and the secondary claim to have localized the VMs’ production to Italy and/or the Mediterranean from the resulting set of highly contentious / non-obvious plants is simply not methodologically sound, however they try to spin it.
Though many people have taken this same tack over the years, that doesn’t make it a sound methodology: in fact, the consistent lack of progress achieved by it is very probably a clear indicator that doing so is in fact brutally unsound.
What is going on? I think that what we see expressed in the herbal drawings is not metaphor (a symbolic equivalent to or conceptual parallel of an original object) so much as metonymy (where component parts stand in for the whole). One classic example linguists give of this is the way Cockney geezers call a car a motor (or, in its gloriously glottal-stopperish glory, a “mo’er”), where a key component (“the motor”) is sufficient to stand in for the whole (“the car”). You may also recall this from Alexei Sayle’s “‘‘allo John go’ a new mo’er… / I keep tropical fish / in my underpants” [etc etc]).
Despite all that, the possibility remains that Edith and Erica might have managed to make some good observations. As I’m not a botanist, all I can say is that I think their reading of colours in the VMs is once again codicologically naive (because there seem to be plenty of reasons to conclude that most of the strong “heavy” colours in the VMs were not added by the original author): which would unfortunately seem to point in the opposite direction.
I think your observation that because LD was left handed … rubish … is in itself rubish.
As a left handed person (and old enough to have communicated via writing) I have observed all of the tricks that lefties do the avoid smearing.
Also a lefty, I have learned to use my right hand in ways the righties have not learned to use their left.
The idea of the book being written by a child makes sense, first he draws plants, and latter he draws naked women. This is especially true if pages were mixed up.
As for your young Florentine comment, my read would be to call him a young hillbilly. Some odd kid who doesn’t relate to his peers who has time on his hands to draw plants and experiment with secret writing.
Maybe Edith Sherwood does have it wrong, but rubish is not the word I would use to pronounce it so.
Hi James,
The only bit of writing Edith Sherwood really flags as Leonardo-esque (his supposed “lionardo” signature) is demonstrably not part of the original document, but was added by a later owner. The main Voynichese writing itself was done in a brisk, well-organized left-to-right manner, with pronounced and very obvious top-left-to-bottom-right downstrokes, which any palaeographer would tell you is a convincing indication of right-handedness.
There is also little or no visual continuity between any of the pictures in the VMs and any of the drawings in Leonardo’s extensive and well-documented corpus, nor between any of the subject matter to a significant degree. The nymphs are not Mona Lisa, not even close.
I’m sure Edith Sherwood is a lovely person, but my calling her theory a “load of rubbish” is somewhat overgenerous, as it allows people to think I might just be being flippant, and that it’s actually OK. It’s not OK – it’s nonsense.
I have absolutely nothing against lefties. It’s just that, for all the brilliant and interesting left-handers out there now and in history, it clearly wasn’t one who wrote the VMs.
Cheers, …..Nick Pelling…..
Hi Nick,
I am not a handwriting expert nor for that matter an expert on ciphers, nor 2nd century Gnosticism. I did burn several hours reading thru Edith Sherwood’s website, (it does have a poor design which does not lead you to the meat of her thesis). But she does make many valid points, more than other sites regarding alternative explanations that I have encountered.
Granted, VM is not my cup of tea, as I was looking for the Heptarchia Mystica when I came across it.
I fail to comprehend why the no one thinks LD would have used his right hand for writing as a child. As recently as 1940, my left handed father was forced to use his right hand for penmanship under threat of broken knuckles, so was my left handed mother-in-law.
As to the comment that these childish drawings are nothing like the Mona Lisa, I would agree. My original computer program produced “Hello World” and my daughter’s 8 years old art definitely lacks sophistication.
Hi James,
From the VMs’ handwriting and at history, Northern Italy circa 1450-1500 is a pretty safe bet, which is consistent with it being by Leonardo.
But that’s only reduced the odds on Leonardo’s being the author to (say) 1 in 100,000. And given that it was apparently written by a right-hander, you’d have to say that the odds are increased to (say) 1 in 1,000,000.
I would happily flag anything in Edith Sherwood’s presentation that would reduce these odds to a more manageable level of probability. But I couldn’t find any detail or argument there that did this.
Even though the VMs world is full of people who seem to think that one in a million is an acceptable level of probability to be working with, please excuse me if I hold a different view.
Fact: the VMs is written in a sophisticated, unbreakable cipher. Fact: when Leonardo wanted to encipher words, he simply transposed their syllables. A different thing entirely.
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
Sono italiano, capisco poco l’inglese, ma ho capito abbastanza e ho riflettuto sulla faccenda degli anagrammi. Ipotizzando che la lingua sia italiana e va anagrammata, tutti gli anagrammi devono essere di senso compiuto, e non lasciare mai una lettera in sospeso. Inoltre, la signora Sherwood dovrebbe far caso all’etmologia della parola italiana: la figura da lei indicata col termine ROTOCALCO (tradotta da lei con Image) indica non certo una pianta, ma il MAGAZINE. E ancora, la parola rotocalco è documentata per la I volta nel 1939! Come potrebbe l’autore del Voynich aver…precorso i tempi e scritto la didascalia (relativa a un vegetale!) ROTOCALCO, sebbene in anagramma??
Hi Giuseppe,
I totally agree that anagrams should make sense, with no spare letters: but who is to say what the correct spelling of an Italian word was circa 1500? Yet historically, so many attempted Voynich decipherers have relied upon precisely this kind of uncertainty to prop up their creaky hypotheses – and it seems likely that Edith Sherwood’s recent attempt falls into this category.
I would also agree that her grasp of Italian etymology and plant history may not be quite strong enough to support her claims: your example of “Rotocalco” seems, like the example of “soia”, to be but one of many.
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
I believe Edith Sherwood is correct. Let me add the following observation. What if the writer could not write the language he is speaking but is Phonetically writing in his own language so that he could read the text to his audience in the language expected or for his translator to verbally rewrite correctly?! This would explain the variances. Ex..if you try to speak Polish or Russian and you can only write English you could Phonetically write in English the Polish or Russian words and thus speak to your audience or interpreter. I speak Polish but cannot write it.
Nick – is it possible to have a link which lets us know when you reply to a comment?
But more to the point, I’d like to use this as a tag on a page about the Vms. May I?
“Even though the VMs world is full of people who seem to think that one in a million is an acceptable level of probability to be working with, please excuse me if I hold a different view”
Diane: you should already receive notifications when someone adds a comment to a post you’ve already commented on, I don’t know why that wouldn’t be happening. Use the tag, what’s there to disagree with? 🙂
Nick, Diane:
It’s a “cock-eyed” world from my point of view. I don’t remember who taught me to read. The same person who taught me to read probably also taught me to write. Today, I suspect it was my left-handed half-sister. What’s my point, you ask? I had surgery on my “wandering” left eye when I was 6 years old. In the meantime, I was reading at the level of a 10-12 year old. I was writing in the “typical” left-hander’s “upside-down” grip on the pen. Southpaw’s usually do this to avoid smearing the freshly-written letters. When my 5-th grade teacher realized my difficulties with writing in ink, she did a VERY KIND act rather than force me into writing right-handed. She very loosely tied a sash around my waist and the crook of my left elbow. She also put Webster’s Dictionary on my desk-seat. (I was tiny–still am.)
What’s my point? Wal, I just got finished reproducing some of the Voynich botanical captioning/writings. I had no difficulty writing the VMs letters once I figured out the starting point and direction of the first stroke or loop. Now, if I can just figure out WHAT I’m writing!
Happy New Year y’all!
Has anybody else discussed the ramifications of medieval left-handedness (shieldry, for instance)?
Nick – I still don’t get notifications btw – I don’t quite see why Sherwood’s identifications get more air-time than Dana’s and even with the side-by-side pictures, I often don’t see the likeness. I’d like to know why a flower is taken as definitive but a root or leaf ignored etc.
Also to get to the point. You speak of metonymy (where component parts stand in for the whole), but I’ve been wracking my brains for the complementary term: where the whole is made from component parts of several related plants. I know, ‘related’ is a relative term! 😀
perhaps there’s no word for it. One might consider Franco-botany or steinobotany.. Frankensteinobtany is just too long. Clonabotany?
I’ve just ‘done’ fol.33v, and I think the relief is making me lightheaded..
Syntho-ecclecto-botany?
Diane: Synecdoche could be reasonably close. Does Sherwoodian faux-botany get much air-time here? I don’t think so! 🙂
Nick – I don’t know how to get in touch with Dana scott, but I assume you do.
Could you let him know that the page listing his identifications has been infected with referral spam, and visitors only get a split second before being shoved off to a dating site.
No idea what one does about this, either.
Correction – the spam appears on to affect the link on ‘Computational attacks’ – if I look up Dana’s page in a separate search, it’s ok
“Does Sherwoodian faux-botany get much air-time here?”
ah, that takes me back.
Sherwood seem to have become the ‘standard authority’ – and as for air-time here.. thanks for posting my first paper.
Diane: the thought of Sherwoodian faux-botany becoming the standard Voynich authority on the subject makes me feel somewhat ill. Specifically, what seems to me to run through it is a kind of botanical ‘presentist’ fallacy, i.e. that the ways that present-day plants are known, drawn, represented, mapped, cultivated, owned, sold etc form a good starting point for how plants ‘worked’ 550 years ago. This is precisely what got Brumbaugh into such trouble with the sunflower identification: basically, what you end up with is a lousy basis for any historical reasoning, one which is overwhelmingly likely to lead anyone gullible enough to accept such presentist non-logic far astray.
Apart from that, it’s not so bad. 🙂
I came to your article after reading Edith Sherwood’s articles on the VM. While I’m not convinced her theories are correct, I find your treatment of the research done by her and her daughter to be less than gentlemanly. One instance: your use of the first names “Edith and Erica” towards the end of your opinion piece is disparaging and is a technique often used by insecure men trying to minimize the efforts of women. If these had been men, would you have said “Edgar and Edwin”? Doubt it.
Sandra L Hale: on the one hand, it would probably be fair to say that a lot of that post is directly disparaging for the simple reason (as I think I wrote quite clearly in it) that a lot of what Edith Sherwood tries to argue in her website about the Voynich Manuscript is built on extraordinarily shaky historic grounds. Moreover, given that I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that genuinely suggests that Leonardo da Vinci wrote the Voynich Manuscript, I don’t honestly know how best to get that point across in any medium without being disparaging of the theory itself in some way.
On the other hand, using “Edith and Erica” at the end was not some kind of sexist construct as you propose, but simply because I found the two “E”s linguistically appealing to write down in close proximity. And I would almost certainly have enjoyed the opportunity to write “Edgar and Edwin” even more, had that blessed chance arisen. 🙂
As an aside: in return for running a cipher mystery site that (shock horror) actually tries to understand and assess theories about cipher mysteries, you should understand that I endure an extraordinary amount of abuse aimed at me personally. As a breed, cipher mystery theorists seem entirely unable to accept criticism (however mild or measured) of their treasured theories, preferring to recast that criticism as ad hominems that need to be returned tenfold. You doubtless won’t have to look very far to see evidence of how this whole sad ‘theatre’ plays out in practice. 🙁
Nick and ants. Your attempt to identify plants is bad ! The author drew you a picture. Which looks like a plant. And everybody will look for the plant. This is what is called the pictorial suggestion !
You have to use your eyes. Then you will see more.
Manuscript is not herbarium. Not plant !
( Hudyny had already been able to divert attention in different direction so that the wiewer did not see how he was doing his trick ).
The author manuscript ( Eliška ). It diverts attention in another direction. It will draw you a plant. And anyone who looks into the manuscript will look for plants. 🙂 🙂
This is called a pictorial suggestion !!
Plants = trick !! 🙂
ants – Turkish is not one word in the manuscript. Turkish ant writes wrong.
Sandra & Nick: Nick tends to sarcasm, but often in a very amusing and well-written form. He can can often seem somewhat rude or brash in his manner, however that is his style which can make for a more entertaining blog rather than a perhaps more dry formal style. Nick’s point about his brusque manner being born our of having to deal with a fair few brickbats himself and the trials of having to confront numerous seemingly half-baked theories seems fair.
He has recently been accused of racism and now sexism; these are really spurious claims. I would say he is very much equal opportunities when it comes to his barbs.
Do I think Nick can be overly confrontational at times in his writing? Probably, but we all have our weaknesses.
@Champolione
I really do not need to be a highly decorated scientist to know who’s behind the name. At the writing silence and a keyword.
Turkish or not, but it will never be Czech either. 🙂
I guess you can see where Champolione is coming from with his plant = trick warning. You can’t help but notice that most of the herbal plants could be classified as not depicting anything known to botany, now then or indeed ever. A number of the pharmaceutical root formations appear rather risque, encouraging sensual titillation and perhaps even stronger sexual overtones, even by modern standards. I note that the stylised straight root formed flemingos appear to be of the variety common to North Africa, Middle East, India and Southern Europe. This could be significant in terms of satisfying those punters amongst us who would dismiss VM origins having a central or north Europe derivation; though somewhat tenuously in my opinion.
As a fan of alliteration I am satisfied with your explanation. As a beleaguered person myself, I applaud your politeness when responding.
Sandy Hale: I’d perhaps prefer “As an alliteration aficionado…”. 😉
I have just been looking at the labels attached to the roots of plants in the botanical section and I must admit I have been a bit concerned by how many of them are unique according to voynichese.com So how would I answer this?
Well first of all a plant label word which is never referred to isn’t worth much in practical terms and a plant root without a label isn’t much use unless it is drawn in such a way that it is easily recognisable, which most of those drawings are not.
I cannot say it seems easy to explain.
My ideas are that there could be some kind of homophony going on whereby the plant is referred to elsewhere, but it is spelled in different way. Or as has been suggested the word is written in a abbreviated form elsewhere; I have argued this with the Rosettes T/O versus the f68v3 T/O. However I am wary of abbreviations that could apply to many different words for reasons of clarity.
Another possibility could be the difficulty in producing exact transcriptions due to the illegibility of the text could mean that it is hard to determine that 2 words are spelled the same way; the more I look at the text of the Voynich the more it strikes me as often being unclear what the correct transcription should be as with the 9 Rosettes T/O.
Obviously a proponent of a hoax/nonsense text hypothesis could point to this as fitting there own theory. As someone who has proposed that some words in the Voynich are null my notion has been that common words are more likely to be null whereas rare words are much less likely to be, so the idea that there are many rare words that are null would not fit my current thinking.
Most of the text is legible, and there are many pages, so I don’t think illegible text is too much of a hindrance. The text that is unclear will probably become clear once the overall lay-of-the-land is better understood.
Nick – your comment November 4, 2012 at 12:06 pm
still the final word.
JKP: Well you say that, but just on the basis of a lot of what I have seen there does appear to be a not insignificant amount of text where it is uncertain what the correct transcription should be, such as:
Is the letter an EVA-o or EVA-a or EVA-e ?
You were arguing recently that something was a “skipped” gallows/bench i.e. what looked like an EVA-ee was in fact an EVA-ch
Then again, as I was looking at this page recently, the first character of the bottom half circle of the T/O on f68v3, well is than a glyph scrubbed out or an EVA-o or what?
Obviously if one looks on voynichese.com and the same word has a transcription one glyph different then the match between the 2 words as being the same will unlikely not be spotted unless they are in close proximity.
I haven’t been through the whole manuscript looking for possible transcription ambiguity, so I can’t estimate the extent to which it exists, but it can certainly be problematic when just one glyph transcription difference makes everything harder to spot.
I am not complaining or pointing the finger at the transcriber, but trying to emphasise how problematic this ambiguity can be.
The unique occurrence, according to the transcript, of quite a number of plant root labels, I have found quite disturbing. Now to be fair there are quite a lot that do occur elsewhere, though one would expect them to occur more in the herbal sections than astronomical, however I don’t know the extent to which that is the case. Likewise there are labels which may be unique in and of themselves, but are just 2 common Voynichese words joined together.
I definitely feel that studying labels, I.e. labelese, poses the most challenges, given that not only do we find the issue I have mentioned, but also we see the same label not infrequently against quite a few very different drawings as I have pointed out before.
Diane: Trouble with Sherwood’s plants is that you can’t see the trees for the forest!
Thinking about the idea of abbreviations. Clearly if there is widespread use of abbreviations there are Voynichese words that it seems unlikely to have been abbreviations of other real words given their length. So it is hard to imagine that all words are abbreviations, though it is possible that some long words contain null strings or hidden spaces rendering them much shorter. So if abbreviations are used significantly it begs the questions of what their relative frequency is and if the same word appears in an abbreviated and non-abbreviated form in the text.
I think what I like most about the plant root labels in the botanical section is that in some cases it makes it easy to associate a given drawing with a given single word of Voynichese. Now with quite a few plants the plant root drawing is so indistinct that the label word is much less relevant. Obviously the ideal scenario would be when the drawing is clear to associate a given label word with its corresponding plant root drawing and then link that to the equivalent drawing of a plant in the herbal section and so hopefully connect the label word with the text of the corresponding plant in the herbal section; however this is easier said that done.
Now the first idea that naturally occurs to oneself when looking at plant root labels is that they could possibly each correspond to the plant name. So one would hope to find that word in the text of the corresponding herb. However on first inspection not unsurprisingly with Voynichese it doesn’t look as if things are as nice as one might hope.
I would expect that labels ought to be mostly functional, so how does it serve the author to draw say a plant root if that plant root label is never referred to? Again one would expect that Voynichese plant label words would be referred to amongst the recipes.
Whilst there are words amongst the plant root labels that are the same as labels attached to drawings of quite different things, as I have discussed before, many plant root labels seem to be rare or unique words according to voynichese.com I would expect labels like these to be much more likely to be rare words as I would expect them to be more specific words., but not so rare as to appear nowhere else.
I don’t have complete trust in the transcription used. In fact I have recently spotted a possible error. I searched for EVA-asal and I saw something that to me looked more like EVA-aral though I guess distinguishing between EVA-s and EVA-r can be difficult. The longer a word the more scope for error in its transcription as there are more glyphs that could be incorrectly transcribed, because either which glyph it is is unclear or due to transcription error or a mixture of both. As I said before only 1 glyph that is incorrect is enough to screw up a word search either at the end of the word searched for or at the end of the result found. So if we have an 8 glyph word that we are searching for then if one of those 8 glyphs in the original word is wrong or one of those 8 glyphs in the searched for word is wrong then they won’t be matched when searching the transcript; this means that there only needs to be 1 out of 16 glyphs mistranscribed for that matching to fail.
It is worth noting, I think, that some of the plants in the botanicals section do not have labels attached, so given what I have said before what is the purpose of those drawings? It looks like they tend to be drawn in a way which makes it more obvious which plant in the herbal section they correspond to, so maybe they don’t need labels. One might hope that the text on a given botanical page relates to the various plants drawn on that page.
Mark: my estimate from nearly a decade ago was that roughly one glyph per line is clearly miscopied, and that this is not taking into account all the ambiguous glyphs (e.g. a/o, r/s, d/r) that can be so hard to transcribe.
Mark: careful with those expectations! No point making an assumption without any obvious evidence and then getting upset when your attempts to build on it all immediately fall to pieces. :-/
Nick: You are absolutely right about expectations! I am fully aware that when it comes to the tricksy Voynich manuscript that the evidence may point in a different direction. For me I think it helps to come with what on the face of it seem to be reasonable expectations. The evidence that one finds provides one with the opportunity to test those expectations to see if they are consistent. If one finds the evidence contradicts an expectation then it forces one to ask the question why it differs. So these expectations are not quite assumptions in the sense that I am not certain they are the case, though to be fair any assumption is subject to re-examination. I think it is useful to me to formulate ideas as to how I expect labels like these to behave as it gives me a basis for asking questions or the evidence. Over time I may come up with new expectations which I can test against the evidence.
I am currently continuing the very arduous task that I started earlier of trying to match plant drawings in the herbal section with those in the botanical section.
As far as labels not in the botanicals section go, I see the problem is that the drawings they mostly tend to be next to are quite non-specific and so it seems harder to make an association with the label text. So amongst the astrological drawings I think unless one can understand the whole drawing determining what an individual label says seems almost impossible as I doubt the labels have much bearing on the adjoining woman in tub drawing. The labels associated with the naked women and pipes, bathing etc. again seem hard to associate with a specific meaning. Some of the cosmological labels may be easier to associate with a meaning though many still require one to understand the whole drawing to understand a specific label. Regarding the labels on the Rosettes page well it’s hard to know what to say as I have said so much elsewhere, I would be inclined to say that one would have to understand the whole page to make progress with the labels though even then it is not always clear precisely which drawing a label is attached to.
Some of the drawings next to labels in the botanical section are unclear as that lack much detail, but some are quite clearly drawn. The more clearly drawn the picture next to the label the more useful one might expect this label to be.
One thing I think one should consider is there may be plants in the botanical section not featured in the herbal section.
Anyway continuing to try and match herbal plants to botanical plants.
I should add that when matching I have tried to find the most similar looking plants, so someone might doubt how similar the plants look, but I would ask someone to suggest an alternative plant matching which looks more similar.
The presence of frequent plant matchings seems to me to count against the idea that the manuscript is a hoax.