Here are two German papers (from 2007 and 2008) by Dr. Michael Mönnich on the Voynich Manuscript I stumbled across a few months ago, both of which place it within the context of the history of pharmacy:
Pharmazeutische Aspekte im Voynich-Manuskript.
In: “Drugs and medicines from sides of the Atlantic Ocean”
38th International Congress of the History of Pharmacy, Seville, 21st September 2007Das Voynichmanuskript aus pharmaziehistorischer Sicht
In: Geschichte der Pharmazie 60 (2008), Heft 1/2, S. 9 – 14.
Dr Mönnich works at the Karlsruhe University Library (his homepage, his publications): I contacted him to ask if he had electronic copies of these articles he could email through for review here. He replied…
Unfortunately the article did not appear in an electronic form, so I could provide only photocopies, and it is in German. Then, I do not intend to publish anything on the Voynich in the near future.
So… if any Cipher Mysteries readers have access to a decent research library and are not put off too much by the idea of reading pharmacy history papers in German, please feel free to have a look at these and tell us all what Dr Mönnich’s particular VMs angle is. Thanks! 🙂
Well, I would certainly be happy to read his papers. I will contact him.
Karlsruhe ist just round the corner from here, but that actually doesn’t
play any role anymore nowadays, which I’m old-fashioned enough to still
find fascinating.
René
Great – his email address & phone number is on his home-page, so it shouldn’t be hard to make contact. 🙂
Dr Mönnich interviewed me by email about my optical theories in August of ’07… I answered his questions, and also sent him a copy of my original (outdated by then) article.
I forgot about this until I read his name in your post. Of course I would be very interested in reading a summary if you can find a copy, and the time, to report back… Rich.
Hi Rich,
Though I’d be somewhat surprised if a pharmacy historian looking at the VMs’ pharma section ended up seeing microscopes 🙂 , it has to be a good thing that he was looking across to current Voynich research – let’s hope René is able to get hold of his paper(s) and in due course lets us know what it says / they say.
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
I have just been to the Wellcome Library where I read the Geschichte der Pharmazie article. It is an up to date introduction to the Voynich MS with footnotes referencing all three of you, but it seemed to contain no new research. I couldn’t locate the other item, but conference proceedings are always hard to track down in catalogues.
Thanks, Philip! 🙂 It’s just a shame there wasn’t more to find. 🙁
As the Geschichte der Pharmazie article is from 2008, I’d guess that the chances of there being anything else of great substance in his 2007 paper are fairly slim. Ah well – all the same, I hope you found time to enjoy the Wellcome Library’s painting of John Dee exercising his allegedly necromantic mojo. 🙂
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
Today, I received a copy of the article which Dr. Monnich had kindly sent
me. I agree with Philip’s overall assessment. A few observations from
Dr.Moennich I do find worth highlighting.
Based on the overall consistent and elaborate construction of the MS, he
is not much in favour of the hoax theory.
He writes that more analysis of the plant illustrations (style) is
warranted. He considers them as not drawn from nature. He rejects the
identification of the Sunflower and Pepper. He finds the plant
drawings more reminiscent of some of the older herbal MSS kept in
UK libraries, although a clear correspondence with the various pseudo-
Apuleius MSS cannot be found. He notes that the root systems in the
Voynich MS appear quite consistent with those MSS.
He does not agree with the classification by Toresella as an alchemical
herbal, since there are far too few cases of faces and animals hidden
in the root systems.
He agrees that the phameceutical jars really do look like early
microscopes, but also that this is chronologically very difficult.
He sees pharmaceutical jars.
He also finds it significant, that many whole plants are found back
in the pharma section, occasionally repeated down to some detail.
Hi Rene,
Thanks very much for adding your notes on Dr Monnich’s article here: as a general rule, the pharma pages seem to have received the least amount of critical attention over the years, so it is at least a good nudge in our general direction to take a fresh look at them. Can you recall anyone making a concerted attempt to match up pharma pictures with the herbal pictures? While there are a handful of strikingly positive matches to be found, my own impression was that these were in the minority.
Cheers, …Nick Pelling…
Theodore Petersen did. I recorded them on a page, which I just rediscovered
at my old web site. This is the normal page for Quire 19:
http://www.voynich.nu/q19/index.html
This is the alternative one, with the matches:
http://www.voynich.nu/q/q19.html
I can’t quite remember why it ended up like this… 🙁
Rene – second link doesn’t work now.
Diane O’Donovan try
http://web.archive.org/web/20040609082857/http://voynich.nu/q/q19.html