Here are a couple of items for you that turned up this week. In my (thoroughly unexalted) opinion, I think both demonstrate something I’ve been arguing for years: that trying to infer things about the Voynich Manuscript based in its colours is, sadly, a sure path to madness.
Why? Well, ever since Jorge Stolfi pointed out the disparity between the Voynich’s various paints (in terms both of the range of painting materials used, and of the degree of skill employed) and suggested that a “heavy painter” may have added his/her paint much later (say, a century or more), there has been significant doubt about how much paint the manuscript originally had – really, which paints were (deliberately) original, and which were (speculatively) added later? And given that there is now strong evidence that many of the bifolios and even quires were scrambled several times over the manuscript’s history (apparently by someone with no understanding of the system) and yet nearly all the paint transfers appear to be between pages in their current order, it seems that a great deal of the Voynich Manuscript’s paint was added later on in its life by someone who similarly didn’t understand what it was saying.
It would therefore seem highly likely that the Voynich Manuscript was even more of an “ugly duckling” in its original ‘alpha’ state than Wilfrid Voynich realized – a particularly plain-looking artefact. As a result, I think that trying to reconstruct the mental state or attitude of the author based mainly on the colours used but without an in-depth grasp of the codicology is an approach that surely has ‘big fail’ written all over it.
Yet some aspect of human nature drives people to persist in employing this wobbly methodology. And so my first exhibit, m’lud, is something that popped up on Scribd this week: a 22-page document by Joannes Richter called Red and Blue in the Voynich Manuscript. I can do no better than give a sample quotation:-
The illustrations seem to follow a strange color convention, in which the primary color bright yellow is missing in all flowers. This is an uncommon practice in a manual for herbal flowers, as statistically there should at least be one singular flower colored in a yellowish paint. A missing color yellow (amidst an abundance of red, blue and green) for flowers suggests to consider the idea of a religious document, which had to be encrypted to avoid conflicts with the Church. In the Middle Age the primary color yellow had been used as a traitor’s color and an evil symbol.
Well… given that you already know my views, I needn’t add anything to this at all: I’ll just think my opinion really hard for a couple of seconds for you… … … so there you have it. But all the same, if you want to know more about how this fits into Richter’s research on the ancient androgynous sky-god Dyaeus, I can do no better than refer you to his blog Spelling Thee, U and I. Eerily, this turns out to be an anagram of “Need Pelling Hiatus“, make of that what you will. 🙂
My second exhibit is from Lincoln Taiz (Professor Emeritus in the Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, Sinsheimer Labs, University of California) and Saundra Lee Taiz, whose ideas I first flagged here back in March but who have now published their paper in Chronica Horticulturae, Vol 51, No. 2, 2011. Essentially, despite having countless herbal and pharmacological pages to work with in the Voynich Manuscript, they’ve instead focused their horticultural attention on the ‘balneological’ quire 13, with all its curiously-posed water nymphs and funny coloured pools.
Their working hypothesis is that quire 13 visually expresses the ideas in “De Plantis” by Nicolaus of Damascus, who lived two millennia ago. Ultimately, they somehow infer that in this particular section, the Voynich Manuscript’s “…author depicts a philosophical scene in which women represent vegetative souls located within the very marrow of the plant, driving the processes that make plants grow and reproduce.” Errrr… sorry, but I just don’t think you can build that lofty a tower on top of the use of the colour green in Q13.
And here’s why: if you codicologically reconstruct the original page order of Q13 (as best you can), I’m 99% sure that f84v sat facing f78r in the original gathering order. Here’s what they looked like:-
Voynich Manuscript, f84v placed next to f78r
Here, one set of pools is blue and faded (my guess: original paint), yet the other is green and vivid (my guess: heavy painter, added a century later by someone who had no idea about what the text meant or signified). Yet all the Taizes’ inference chains here are based on the – probably much later – green-coloured pools. As for me, I simply don’t think there’s any significant chance that any historical or horticultural reasoning based on this green colour will have any validity: but feel free to make up your own mind.
Hi, Nick:
Have you had a chance to review our latest (yesterday) responses to your Amirdoviat post?
I will be attempting to contact Professor Gates after the holidays.
Have a great Winter Season!
Nick
You’re probably right. Or then again maybe the colours *are* meaningful to a degree. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they represent the Damascena’s text, though.
Green doesn’t always change to blue with age.
Some early western manuscripts are in black and white. I particularly like this one, with the ‘ship of the church’ and herbal type people being allowed in by a great angel, supposed Michael.
http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=bodleian&manuscript=msjunius11
See little floriate-tailed dragonish critters
http://www.archive.org/stream/caedmonpoems00bodluoft#page/n9/mode/2up
I remember thinking that the black colors applied were so sloppy and dense that they were redactions?
Bobbi
The plant you want is probably
Indigofera arrecta “from east and southern Africa” see http://www.kew.org/plant-cultures/plants/indigo_history.html
Perhaps we should correspond directly?
* A mi parecer, el orden de las laminas del manuscrito, no es correcto. Hay ejemplos mas sorprendentes.
¿Es posible, que la encuadernación no es la original? O el orden tiene una razón?
* In my view, the order of the sheets of the manuscript is not correct. There are more striking examples.
Is it possible that the binding is not original? Or the order has a reason?
huff-huff, pant-pant
tryin’ to identify those plants
while trying to catch up with you
only to find that you’ve already
discussed Leo Africanus, too?
Awful rhyming, I know. But–have y’all already followed Leo Africanus’ travels and writings?
Diane, I’ll try your link, now.
Diane. I tried the link; many pages inoperative. Yes, I definitely would like to give Nick a break (from my nagging — am I nagging, or just trailing ve-e-e-ry far behind the pack?).
So, if you have a webpage to which I could link and communicate directly with you…..
Bobbi: you’re not nagging, it’s just that Edith Sherwood is the person positing some kind of diffuse West African connection – as for me, I’m far too busy working on the Voynich’s actual art history. 🙂
Yellow flowers. Here in the US desert, yellow flowers abound — and are used as dye plants. Not necessarily for yellow tones on the handspun yarns.
The lack of yellow flowers in the Voynich color palette is interesting to me from a dyer’s point of view. What color are the blossoms on the indigofera plants (European AND African? The color of the blossoms would be a chief identifying feature for many “weeds”. European woad, or Africa’s and India’s “weeds”. So, if the dyer’s “guilds” in any location wanted to protect their natural resources (botanical or mineral), they would probably be somewhat “vague” in their written or painted details. (?) Medical practitiioners just about anywhere were highly esteemed (except women “witches”). I won’t go into a rant except to say that I once got a gorgeous rose-pink dye from the fruit of a prickly pear cactus. (While the dye-bath was fermenting it gave off a delicious smelling fragrance. I didn’t taste-test it only because (regretfully) I had put some unwashed fleece into the bath.
Bobbi: are you saying that the Voynich’s plant colors are to dye for? 🙂
“We three kings of Orient are….
Nick (and y’all):
Besides having a large “bump of curiousity” I am often driven to finding out as much as I can about a certain puzzle. So, I once again refer you to a particular website that discusses another “Leo”. No, NOT da Vinci.
Here it is (it is still active as of this morning):
http://said.hajji.name/en/book-leo.html
I’m hoping you’ll find it interesting, if not as exciting as I find it to be. Merry XMAS!
Bobbi: rest assured I have already read up on Leo Africanus – he’s a fascinating, well-connected, hyperliterate character, with a wide range of interests and skills. But that merely puts him in the top 100K of Voynich suspects, not quite enough for me to lose any of my Christmas rest over… these days I’m more interested in actual evidence (however tenuous) than in speculation, sorry if that’s unhelpful. 🙁
Happy Holidays, Nick : )
The colors (colours) used in the VMS appear to be the same as map maker’s used. Perhaps yellow paint simply could not be spared…
Stinginess has its advantages : )
cj: my best guess is that the Voynich was originally painted with pale, organic paints, most of which faded away to nothingness relatively quickly. Some we can still see, but I suspect others would probably require a multispectral scan to find and sample. But that’s another story… 🙂
Makes perfect sense, particularly if vegetable dyes were used. Vegetable dyes, w/the exception of Indigo, degrade quickly.
Okay, I’m off to read about the German cyphers…
Bobbi my email address is in the sidebar at
http://www.voynichimagery.blogspot.com
Please feel free to email
As you’ll see there, I agree that the interests of dyers and dyeing inform the botanical section and fol.86v
Cheers
Nick,
I’ve been banging on about the manuscript’s palette lately, and am starting to write up a post for the New Year about secrets as trade-secrets, specifically medical ones. Checked ‘recipes’ here and found this post of yours.
So that research-tree yield anything useful? I see that I’ve also failed to credit Stolfi as coining the term ‘heavy painter’ and first addressing this issue in terms of chronological strata. I’ll go back to that post and add a correction.
I don’t know if you bother with my posts – they are only about the drawings – but if you happen to notice an incorrect credit, I’ll be grateful if you’d pull me up.
So – did your colour recipes investigation go far?
oh – by the way. The range of a palette, including what colours are not included is a very useful yardstick. What drives Voynich theorists mad is the effort to force-fit the evidence into some settled Voynich doctrines, or their own set of untested presumptions. You have to let the physical evidence lead towards an opinion. So a low incidence of yellow is interesting, as if absence of anything in the pink-purple-black range for the pigments. It means that you can rule out certain time-place-situation combinations (e.g. not a manuscript made in a mid-fifteenth century French atelier). But to presume the absences are driven by cultural factors, rather than simply pragmatic ones (e.g. war interrupts trade, or plague interrupts local production etc.) is where things get complicated, especially when it is simply presumed, and not argued that the manuscript’s content was first created in the same time and place as the fifteenth-century artefact’s manufacture. Better to look around and see where, and when, you find a palette with comparable absences, and see what explanations the specialists have given for those. In some cases, certain colours are prohibited to certain classes of people; in some cases certain colours are associated with death or other unlucky things; sometimes its because as e.g. certain pigments cost so much that they were used only by wealthy people in a position to advertise that wealth without censure. All sorts of reasons.
Diane: the key recipe-related question (which I addressed in other blog posts) is whether Q20 can be divided into Q20A and Q20B, where the two halves are two different books. Trying to reason from two gatherings/quires shuffled into each other seems like a guaranteed path to madness, but here we are.
I read this post as a prelude to your colour related post of 2016, but perhaps I should have put the comment under that one:
https://ciphermysteries.com/2016/01/29/the-italian-colour-recipes-research-tree
Did that line lead anywhere interesting, or have I missed finding the relevant post(s)?
Diane: ah, ok. I went deep down that rabbit hole back in 2016, but never found a good source for either Alcherius or for 15th century recipe fragments.
https://ciphermysteries.com/2014/12/24/voynich-block-2-the-recipe-section
https://ciphermysteries.com/2016/01/24/the-book-hidden-inside-voynich-quire-20
https://ciphermysteries.com/2016/01/28/quire-20-this-is-how-the-book-is-found
However, I should add that there is now an excellent source on Alcherius which I don’t think I was aware of back in 2016. Search on academia.edu for “Copies, Reworkings and Renewals in Late Medieval Recipe Books” by Inès Villela-Petit, translated by Jilleen Nadolny: it’s an excellent article, that made clear numerous things about Alcherius’ work that weren’t clear to me at all.
To my mind, Alcherius’ collection is still every bit as good a “block paradigm” candidate for the source of Q20 as it was back in 2016, so it’s probably coming round to time I pick this strand up again and see where I can take it.
Thanks for reference – look forward to reading any more you might post about it.