As should be apparent from recent posts, for the last few weeks I’ve had Glen Claston bouncing a number of his Voynich ideas, observations and hypotheses off me. In many ways, he and I are like conjoined research twins – though truth be told, if I happen to say “poe-tay-toe”, he’ll go out of his way to say “tuh-may-duh“. 🙂

But now something a bit, well, unnerving has begun to happen.

I hate to say it, but… we’re actually starting to agree on lots of things. In fact, the formerly vast ocean between what we each see in the Voynich Manuscript is gradually narrowing, if not to a trickle (don’t be ridiculous, tcha!) then certainly to only a small sea. On the one hand, Glen is bringing his characteristically intense eye for detail to bear on the kind of codicology I’ve been harping on about for years: while on the other hand, I’m growing increasingly comfortable with his take on the probable content of various sections of the manuscript.

In many cases, it turns out that we’re seeing basically the same thing but from wildly different angles, and using quite different kinds of evidence and chains of reasoning. And if we perpetually feuding twins can form a broad consensus, it’s hard not to conclude that the beginning of a new period of Voynich research might well be at hand… exciting times, indeed.

One fascinating example of this is the question of what the Herbal drawings encode. In “The Curse”, I put forward a lengthy, textual argument about why I thought the Herbal-A pages were actually Antonio Averlino’s (lost) secret book of agriculture: but without any useful idea how the two were connected, it was somewhat hard to take forward. Glen, however, has been reading an entirely different literature: and sees the Herbal drawings as encoding secrets of herbiculture – that is, he believes that particular details of the drawings show where best to prune the plants in question, along with (presumably in the text) various other tricks to grow them most effectively.

Are these two readings so very far apart? Personally, I think not: and believe they will turn out to be two very different sides of the same thing – as always, individual details may well turn out to be wrong (history is like that, basically), but the overall sense of ineluctable convergence I get from all this is hugely powerful.

For further reading, I’ve added a page to the site which discusses secret books of agriculture in the fifteenth century (mainly culled from fleeting references in Lynn Thorndike’s many books). Averlino’s book is perhaps the most notorious, but there are a few others too… Enjoy! 🙂

6 thoughts on “Secrets of Herbiculture or of Herbal Medicine?

  1. infinitii on March 30, 2009 at 7:06 pm said:

    I would suggest the court of Frederick II as another place to maybe look at as well (check the link below, esp. pages 218-220). While definitely too old (not a deal-breaker, considering the Voynich is almost certainly derived from older sources), I like this for a number of reasons: someone somewhere has already suggested the balneological section to be related to the Baths of Pozzuoli, it might explain why a lot of the cosmological and other symbols are not familiar (done before things were ‘codified’ in the ‘Renaissance’ period), and Frederick II seems almost like a Rudolf II of his day. I’ve yet to come up with anything except speculation, but maybe it might be of interest to look further (plus hey! Lynn Thorndike has a Michael Scot book):

    http://books.google.com/books?id=s7c2EaxDYjUC&pg=PA218&lpg=PA218&dq=frederick+ii+herbals&source=bl&ots=2CuqvbofSv&sig=CIe2SYG9BB4IIEsrqSBvxpA_8hM&hl=en&ei=vBTRSZGzCKDutQOk-OWhAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA218,M1

  2. I’m pretty sure that Frederick II’s name appears many times in the old (pre-2001) VMs list archives with this basic idea in mind. It was Adam McLean who most recently suggested a link with Pozzuoli (though again, that’s another suggestion that has been hanging around for decades, to the point that I even have a copy of C. M. Kauffmann’s classic 1959 book on my bookshelf).

    As for Renaissance “codifying”, I think you’re perhaps referring to books of emblems such as Alciato etc, which were used & abused by countless jobbing artists: if my memory serves me correct, the bulk of these came after 1530, more than 50 years after the likeliest date for the VMs. Circa 1450-1500, everything was still up for grabs…

    Of course, via the tricksy notion of manuscript copying you can wind back the manuscript’s date to any time in the distant past you like, but you’ll have to excuse me while I leave the room… 🙂

  3. infinitii on April 1, 2009 at 4:17 pm said:

    I didn’t notice Frederick II mentioned in relation to the Voynich in too many places, but I didn’t look too hard. Either way, it’s just weird to me that there seems to be almost no similarities between the plants in the Voynich and the plants in surviving herbals, considering how they were prepared. I can see how you came up with the theory that they encode information, since that would seem to be logical.

  4. Dear Nick, re manuscript copying in the early fifteenth century.

    It’s hardly a ‘tricksy’ notion. One only has to look up the contents of any rare book library to realise that copying older works was the rule rather than the exception in those days.

  5. Diane: what I meant was something quite different to your own project – that I think the palaeographic and art historical evidence points to the VMs as having been instantiated around the middle of the 15th century, and that we still have a long way to go to lock down the origins of the manuscript itself. Of course, the ideas in it may well ultimately have originated in antiquity – but unless you can show how an individual VMs drawing fits in to some kind of overall manuscript tradition, I suspect doing so doesn’t really help move our overall understanding forward.

  6. Diane O'Donovan on March 28, 2012 at 6:53 am said:

    I don’t see why the tradition has to be a manuscript tradition, but what they hey..

    I’ve been looking for Philip Neal’s list of the 98 plants of the alchemical herbals. Voynich central’s gone. I gather you have inherited the material. Would you consider putting up a post/page containing that list?

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