Given that I couldn’t find any page on the Internet providing links to scans of alchemical herbals, I thought it would be good to try to fill that gap. Not as many as I hoped turned out to be fully accessible, but there are still a good number.
The basic list I used was the one given by Philip Neal (summarizing Vera Segre Rutz, of course), but extended to include the manuscripts discussed by Alexandra Marracini in her “Asphalt and Bitumen, Sodom and Gomorrah: Placing Yale’s Voynich Manuscript on the Herbal Timeline” paper.
Segre Rutz’s & Marraccini’s trees
Before I begin, it’s important to remember that Vera Segre Rutz reconstructed the cladistic tree of alchemical herbal manuscripts: this framework has dominated discussion of alchemical herbals ever since. The root of this tree was a Manuscript X (now lost), which begat Manuscripts Y and Z (both of which are also now lost). All the “direct tradition” manuscripts derived from Manuscript Y or Manuscript Z.
In addition, here’s Alexandra Marraccini’s tree, which laid out where she thought the Voynich Manuscript sat in relation to alchemical herbal manuscripts. Note that the top part of the tree is Segre Rutz’s direct tradition, while the bottom (yellow) part contains Marraccini’s proposed two groups of derived manuscripts:
Manuscripts in Segre Rutz’s Direct Tradition
The four Z-family alchemical herbals are:
- Fermo, Biblioteca Comunale MS 18 (2 pages on YouTube?, 2 more pages here)
- Florence, Biblioteca di Botanica dell’Universita MS 106 – book by Stefania Ragazzini (as Rene Zandbergen has pointed out, this ms has a simple cipher key on fol. 1r)
- Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Misc. 408 (166 plants, Latin)
- Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldini 211 (this is the herbal that Segre Rutz wrote “Il Giardino Magico degli alchimisti” about)
The four Y-family alchemical herbals are:
- Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Lat. 17844
- Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Lat. 17848
- Vicenza, Biblioteca Bertoliana MS 362 (formerly “MS G.23.2.3”) (Image of the “cleaver and sword” herbal page) (not yet here, sadly)
Manuscripts in Segre Rutz’s Indirect Tradition
- Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldrovandi 151(1)
- Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldrovandi 151(2)
- Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldrovandi 152 (1550-1605)
- Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldrovandi 153 – catalogue entry
- Brescia, Biblioteca Queriniana MS B.V.24 – a page discussed by Marco Ponzi
- Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Ashb. 456 – catalogue description
- Florence, Biblioteca Marucelliana MS 168/C – discussed in the book “I Segreti della medicina verde nell’epoca medicea, da due manoscritti inediti della città di Firenze : (secoli XV e XVI)“
- London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 261 – catalogue entry
- London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 334 – catalogue entry – ‘A contemporary copy of a famous MS herbal preserved at [the] Laurentian Library in Florence. Bought for 700 fr. by Woynich [Voynich] 1912‘.
- London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 337 – catalogue entry
- New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS 22.222 – I believe this is actually “PML 22222.4” – catalogue entry – “Text derives from an herbal in Pavia, see Bühler, “An anonymous Latin herbal.“
- Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Add. A. 23
- Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 604 – manuscript reference looks incorrect (see here)
- Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Hebr 1199
- Trent, Museo Provinciale d’Arte MS 1591 – some images are online here
- Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS It. III.11 (MS 5004)
- Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS It II.12 (MS 4936)
Tractatus de Herbis Tradition
The herbals forming the “Tractatus de Herbis” tradition deriving from Firenze MS 106 are divided by Marraccini into two groups. Firstly, the group she calls the “Non Flattened Asphaltum” group:
- Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chig F VIII. 188 (not yet digitized)
- London, British Library, Egerton MS 747
There’s also a late (1450) copy of Egerton MS 747 which commenter bi3mw thought should be included here:
- Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, Kräuterbuch “Circa Instans” K II 11
Secondly, the “Flattened Asphaltum” group (which Marraccini believes may well include the Voynich Manuscript):
- London, British Library, MS Sloane 4016 – this is described in the catalogue entry as “An Italian Herbal, classified by Baumann as one of the ‘North Italian group’ and as a copy of Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, MS Masson 116 (see Baumann, Das Erbario Carrarese, 1974).“
- Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chig F. VII. 158
- Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Lat. 6823
To this group I expect we should also add the herbal from which MS Sloane 4016 was copied (according to some, though Alain Touwaide vigorously disagrees):
- Paris, ENSBA, Ms.Mas 0116
…and also a closely related herbal manuscript that Rene Zandbergen thinks gets somewhat unfairly overlooked:
- Munich, BSB Clm 28531
Thanks for the link to Masson 116 !
I had been looking for that for a long time.
Note that the argument that Sloane 4016 is a copy of it is often stated, but is strongly contested by Alain Touwaide, who wrote the edition of Sloane 4016.
I know that Marco has a few more links of complete digital scans, at least of Florence MS 106.
Furthermore, there are numerous other copies of the Tractatus de Herbis.
Rene: I tried to capture the gist of that debate without going too deeply. 😉 All additional links to scans much appreciated! 🙂
Nick: Thanks for that list, interesting.
Dear all,
Here’s a link to a full digitisation of Florence, Biblioteca di Botanica dell’Universita MS 106, the site also includes the option to download the images as a pdf.
http://www.internetculturale.it/opencms/opencms/it/viewItemMag.jsp?id=oai%3Awww.sba.unifi.it%3A12%3AIC0003%3AUFIE006694
S: that’s a really excellent help, thank you very much! 🙂
Nick, I didn’t know Marraccini had done a tree showing a possible position for the VMS in relation to others, but this greatly interests me because I’ve created one also. Mine includes a larger number of herbals (it’s taken me over 10 years to gather all the info), so it’s a bigger tree, which is part of the reason I haven’t had time to post it. To fit them all so they are legible takes a rather wide and tall PDF.
Thank you for posting that. When I’m done with work (yes, I’m working Sunday and not happy about it), I’ll compare her tree with mine and see if they agree.
J.K.P.: if you have time, I’d advise reading her whole paper (the link’s at the top of the post). You’re almost certainly not constructing the same kind of argument that she builds up, but there’s plenty of room for everyone to fill their plates at the historical buffet. 🙂
I can’t do more than a quick glance right now, I didn’t do an exact count, but my chart shows visual relationships among more than 70 medieval herbal manuscripts (not just alchemical herbals). This unfortunately requires a sheet of paper larger than 34″ x 22″ to print (even at this size, the boxes are squished very close together and are only barely legible and do not include all the relevant information that is associated with each box), which is why it is better viewed as an onscreen PDF with scrolling.
I have also recorded relationships where a manuscript is clearly a composite from more than one source (exact copies of plants that can be verified to be from more than one source). In fact there are at least two composite manuscripts that are created very close in time to the VMS. I’ve noticed some of the chart-makers overlook this dynamic.
I did not draw direct lines between many of them because the exact lineage is not known (the Masson controversy is one example), but I did use proximity to show probable and possible connections, and also lines in a lighter color to indicate those that are thought to be derived from one another or from a very closely related exemplar.
.
I felt this info would be helpful to the VMS community, but the logistics of researching, creating, and publishing a chart that includes so many manuscripts and so many dubious relationships (ones that historians are unsure about or hotly debate) is a significant challenge (I’ve been working on it for over 10 years).
The dates and origins of many of these manuscripts is unknown, but I have superimposed them on a timeline to help make the lineages more visually apparent, but to do that, I had to find a way to indicate those that were known versus those that were not without cluttering the display and upsetting the visual relationships.
The chart goes one step farther (probably more than one step) than other existing charts in that it actually includes the images of each of the pages of each herbal so they can be directly compared. In fact, I can dial up any plant in a medieval herbal (more than 1,000 different plants x the number of manuscripts in which they appear) and compare them.
I have not figured out a way to represent this large amount of data yet, which is a big part of the reason I haven’t posted it, but it should be possible to choose among a few particularly representative plants that occur in many herbals (for example, ones like arthemisia, viola, aristolochia, mentha, etc.) and use them as examples.
The data can also be filtered for alchemical herbals, so they can be viewed with the non-alchemical ones deprecated, but I haven’t specifically done a pretty-print layout for alchemical herbals yet.
.
Having said all that, I have to run. The problem with global commerce is that clients don’t care if you are in another time-zone, they want it yesterday…
One MS that is mostly overlooked in publications, but which is very similar to Sloane 4016, Masson 116 and Vat.Chig. VII 158 is in Munich: CLM 28531.
It has been digitised (B/W, perhaps from microfilm?) here:
https://bildsuche.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=viewer&bandnummer=bsb00107549&pimage=10&v=100&nav=&l=de
At a glance: these are HERBALS and not ‘alchemical herbals’.
Furthermore, your list shows European Herbals, from the period: Middle Ages.
Perhaps you are also aiming for a particular language?
davidsch: the top set are definitely alchemical herbals, while the bottom set are the manuscripts discussed by Alexandra Marraccini. Sorry if the text doesn’t quite describe that clearly enough for you.
The drawings of Aristolochia (both longa and rotunda) in CLM 28531 are almost identical to Masson 116, Canon Misc 408 and Sloane 4016, and also to one that is sometimes overlooked because it is a composite manuscript… Erbario 106.
Even though the drawing of the plant is different, I think it is also significant that the Udine herbal and Vermont Italian herbal have a dragon at the base of the Aristolochia rotunda root (like the herbals mentioned above) which all of them have drawn so the root looks like a sack of marbles, one of the important details that distinguishes this group from the other herbals.
In fact, in some ways Erbario 106 seems to be a linking manuscript between the two groups in terms of imagery (which is also a characteristic of the later Canon Misc 408).
In contrast to these, one sees a “puzzle-figure” root on the same plant in the Egerton 747/Circa Instans/Tractatus group of herbals (a branch of the northern Italian and French manuscripts). And these have no dragon (although Est. Alpha has a snake).
I have this kind of information for almost every plant in pretty much every herbal that is available as a digitized Ms and it takes about 10 seconds to look it up.
Many (if not most) of the alchemical herbals include in addition a subset of the herbs of the “Tractatus” tradition, with drawings that are clearly copies from one or the other “Tractatus” MS. More specifically, the last two numbered herbs in the alchemical herbals are:
97 / Consolida Maior
98 / Consolida Minor
And these, together with the additional Consolida Media, are standard herbs in the Tractatus tradition, again with almost identical drawings.
It is clear that the two traditions are related.
The stemma of Alexandra Marraccini almost certainly is not intended to be a timeline, because a few of the Tractatus herbals are older than the earliest surviving alchemical herbal, and Egerton 747 certainly does not derive from Firenze 108.
There are many, many more Tractatus manuscripts, but I am not aware of any with the bitumen / flattened city illustration.
Rene: the point of the post wasn’t to cover every Tracatus tradition, but to try to make as many alchemical herbals and herbals cited by Alexandra Marraccini accessible in a single place. I certainly take your point about the timeline, but arguably the fault there is with Marraccini’s presentation that *kind of* implies a timeline (sort of).
Marraccini thinks the Voynich is written on paper and builds part of her argument on this ‘fact’ (note 13 and the text belonging to it, the argument is in itself nonsensical). At the same time she tells us that she is finally introducing academical standards into Voynich research. It is the sort of paper I would not touch with a long pole considering my academic standards. Are we going to call it Academical Cheshireitis? But that would be an insult to the county.
Nick, I understand, so that’s why I didn’t volunteer a list of shelf marks and links of the other manuscripts.
I think the link between the two traditions is important.
The close link between Masson 116, Sloane 4016 and CLM 28531 is described in detail in the dissertation of Eva Wagner, in German, here:
https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/data/2936
There are also (at least) two more herbals classified as ‘alchemical’:
Rimini, Bibl.Civica Gambalunga, SC-Ms 8, 1440-1450
Florence, Laurenziana, MS Redi 165
They are related to each other but I have no details.
Helmut Winkler: the whole ‘menses’ thing is indeed a particularly weak side of Marraccini’s paper, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with any of that, never mind the paper/vellum mistake.
But that’s all by the by: the point of this page wasn’t actually to evaluate / endorse / eradicate theories but rather to collect material to enable a series of constructive posts.
Tractatus de Herbis Tradition: A late copy of the Egerton MS 747 is the Circa Instans K II 11 (1450).
https://www.e-manuscripta.ch/doi/10.7891/e-manuscripta-12893
Oh YES !!!!! Bless you Nick !
Either Herbals or Alchemical Herbals are a major interest of mine, especially with my…how can I put this nicely…..meso-American interest entanglements (!).
It’s great to know there are people equally crazy as myself.
Thanks again,
J.
Nick: Having a cursory look, in this instance, at your list it looks like a lot of these herbals are Northern Italian in origin; is that true?
What is the approximate likelihood that if one picked a surviving early 15th century alchemical herbal at random that it would be Northern Italian in origin? i.e. roughly what proportion of these herbals are originally from Northern Italy.
Mark: I don’t know a precise figure for this, sorry. I have in the past seen a list of fifteenth century herbals and their countries of origin, but that was many years ago.
When talking specifically about the alchemical herbals, I am not aware of any that is not from Northern Italy. The only doubtful case is the Vicenza copy, which is listed as ‘Italian and German’. It is the one with the German colour annotations.
There is one entirely in Hebrew and one with Hebrew herb names, but they are still from N. Italy.
@Mark
Alps, Apenin, Pyrenees. Sure, that’s a big part of the herbs in the height. The herbs do not care if they grow in France, Spain or Italy. Now the architecture comes into play, and the language references. Maybe even clothes and hairstyle. Northern Italy is at 90%.
Maybe I should finish the plants once, but right now I’m working on something else, or I’m just too lazy.
When you see them you will know which ones they are.
Veronica alpina
grauer Alpendost
Felsennelke
Langblättriger Ehrenpreis
Akelei
Nieswurtz
bi3mw: thanks very much, I’ve squeezed that in too (and why not?) 🙂
Rene: Minta Collins briefly (in a footnote) summarizes Ragazzini’s thoughts on these (and other) mss, but I’m sure there’s far more meat on these particular bones than can be eaten in a single meal. 😉
It is certainly a very helpful idea to collect links to herbals all together at one place, but I’m somewhat sceptic on how a distinction between *alchemical* and *traditional Tractatus* should have any impact on Voynich research. Taken into consideration that in medieval Mss there have always been fluid boundaries and transitions over the time, and given the fact that there is no reliable hint yet for any only alchemical purpose of the VM, such a distinction doesn’t make much sense to me. Even the shown stemma are far from being convincing because they lack of the most probable sources if one follows a more realistic way back to the roots of the VM.
Just as an example out of a long list: Vitus Auslasser 1497 “Macer de viribus herbarum”
http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/0009/bsb00092488/images/index.html?fip=193.174.98.30&seite=192&pdfseitex=
To me it would be much more exciting to follow the provenance of those herbals as far as possible. Somewhere, sometimes and somehow they have crossed their ways…But yes, that’s really too much of a burden on only one shoulder and would demand for a collective effort.
I’ve read both Ragazzini and Segre Rutz (and have kept some scans). Indeed there is. Ragazzini’s set of illustrations of Florence MS 106 is now superseded by the colour scans, but the Aldini 211 illlustrations in Segre Rutz are still the only ones I know. (Note that Ragazzini’s images were clipped and the cipher alphabet was not included. At the time it was a bit of an effort to get a picture of it, and this indirectly led to the appearance of the final Italian speaker at the Mondaragone conference – another story …. ).
There is useful general background material for people interested in the Voynich MS as well.
The recipes of these herbs are good ‘block paradigm’ test material.
In terms of word count and – variation, they are quite similar to the Voynich MS.
Also, in some manuscripts the figures are in one part of the MS, and the text belonging to them is in a different part, several recipes per page, while there are no obvious cross-references to know which text belongs to which picture. This lack of cross-reference is of course unacceptable to modern minds but apparently not in the 15th century, and this may be going on very well in the Voynich MS, in ways we don’t yet know.
What is the difference between herbs of alchemy and medicine? Is it the toxicity, the appearance or the mythical. I have no idea where to draw a line here. I thought alchemy has more to do with minerals. Precursors of chemistry.
Peter: the so-called “alchemical herbals” don’t have anything to do with alchemy, the phrase is just a (rather misleading) name for a puzzling family of (mainly North Italian) herbals that seem to have been concocted to confuse and frustrate herbal researchers. 🙂
Talking of concocting: Has anyone tried out these herbals as magic potion recipes? Am feeling slightly feeble in this warm pre-summer.
I have not looked into the reason why some manuscripts are specifically called “alchemical” herbals, I’ve been focusing on the plants, but just looking at the particular plants that are included, it’s possible the ones considered “alchemical” are those they thought might be particularly efficacious if prepared as [alcoholic] tinctures.
There were a lot of new alchemical distillation processes being developed at the time (nascent chemistry) and this included experiments in combining alcohol with plants to produce new medicines.
To Thomas I would recommend the potion from alchemical herb #6 (source Segre Rutz):
“Item si quis habet dolorem propter aliquam descensionem de alto, accipe de ista herba et fac pulverem et da ei bibere cum bono vino per spatium XV dierum, et liberabitur a dolore.”
@Thomas
So what is there in the mystical. Hang garlic around your neck when you go to bed. Then your wife leaves you in peace, and you feel much better in the morning too. By the way, it also helps against vampires. 🙂
@Nick
Thanks Nick for the explanation, that makes it all a lot easier. I never understood why people always talk about alchemy.
JKP
“why some manuscripts are specifically called “alchemical” herbals,…” My understanding is that they were not originally called ‘alchemical herbals’ but herbals of a type used/owned/preferred by chemists (then also described as ‘alchemists’ and that the phrase ‘herbals of the alchemists’ was invented by Ulisse Aldrovandi, who collected a group of them.
Altering that phrasing to ‘alchemical herbals’ seems (correct me if I’m mistaken) to be due to Toresella, or to overly-relaxed translations from his Italian.
I daresay Rene or Nick may have better detail; certainly Philip Neal made clear that they aren’t ‘alchemical’ in that strict sense.
My main concern was why alchemists would be interested in these specific herbs. I’ve been pondering that question for years, and the impression I have, so far, from looking at hundreds of herbals (not just the illustrated ones, but the textual ones without illustrations, as well) is that the ones of interest to alchemists may have been the ones that were more suitable for tinctures (there may have been metaphysical choices for some of them as well, such as lunaria).
Processing a plant as a tincture (an alcoholic tincture) through a distillation process has a number of benefits…
• it can preserve the plant and sometimes also the medicinal qualities of the plant,
• it can sometimes make the components more bioavailable, and…
• there could be a monetary benefit as well (as Jakub Horčický discovered) in that distillation processes were both art and science and not available to the average person, which means…
… whether they were real remedies or simply “snake oil” concoctions, they could be sold to the masses. Profit is a great motivator. If you can’t turn lead into gold, you can sometimes turn pharmaceuticals into gold.
JKP: there is no direct connection between “alchemical herbals” and alchemists, it’s just a name that (I was told) Sergio Toresella came up with to describe this very odd family of herbal manuscripts. Perhaps it would have been better if he had instead called them “Mad (And Oddly Pointless) Veneto Herbals”, because that would have been a slightly more helpful term. 😉
Nick, I see you have a lot going on, but still some clarification on my part:
* a herbal shows a list of herbals with names in diff. languages. for example Dioscorides. Most ms you listed are Herbals, Tractatus de herbis.
* an alchemical herbal shows herbals, recipes and ways to make medications and treatments based on preparations.
If the text is “magical” or can not be deciphered people tend to lean to “alchemical”. I think that is often misleading and incorrect.
The term ‘alchemical herbal’ is wrongly used often, even by big libraries.
A ms which has a difficult text, or an image on the root, is quickly identified as “alchemical”, but in fact during the middle ages, this was just a herbal and there was nothing magical or alchemical about it.
I took two examples:
The Bodleian Library is often very good and correct. So for example the MS. Canon. Misc. 408. is listed as a HERBAL.
The MS Hebr 1199. Because of some “magical” formula’s in the text, BNF could state that it is a “alchemical herbal”. Since there seems to be only a small portion of that in the text, I think it was correct of the BNF that they state it is a HERBAL.
erratum: “for example Dioscorides”, must be listed at the Alchemical herbals because his pharmacopia of course!
Sorry.
davidsch: the “alchemical herbals” refers to a specific set of 70 manuscripts that contain similar drawings with similar names, that all appear to have been copied from one another in some (much disputed) copying tree. They don’t actually have anything to do with alchemy. Some “alchemical herbals” have recipes, but many have only a few (or even none).
Herbal manuscripts are most often considered to be manuscripts with drawing of herbals, also often copied from one another according to (much disputed) copying trees. Some have recipes, some don’t; they’re all called herbal manuscripts regardless.
“Alchemical” is to do with a single specific family of herbal manuscripts, and has nothing to do with any recipes.
And not to forget, the “alchemical herbal” often is just one part of a particular manuscript codex. The same MS can have other parts, which are often also herbal in nature. It is true in particular for:
Oxford Canon Misc 408,
Florence MS 106
BN Lat MS 17844 and 17848
BN Hebrew 1199
but certainly several more.
Nick: Do you know where I can find a complete list of the 70 alchemical herbals that you have referred to?
Mark Knowles: I believe they are listed in Segre Rutz’s book, but it is many years since I last saw a copy. It’s a good basic question, though, so hopefully Rene Zandbergen or Philip Neal will be able to give you an answer here.
Toresella published about alchemical herbals in 1995. He had seen the Voynich MS and he considered that the Voynich MS could be related to this tradition. He clarifies in his paper that the term ‘erbari degli alchimisti’ was coined by Aldrovandi.
Segre Rutz published a book about Pavia MS Aldini 211 in 2000. This includes significantly more information about the ‘erbari degli alchimisti’ than Toresella’s paper. On the other hand, she does not mention the Voynich MS anywhere as far as I can remember.
The book is well over 300 pages. From a cursory scan earlier today, I understand that there are 16th century annotations in some of the manuscripts referring to alchemy. This might explain why they were called alchemical herbals by Aldrovandi.
I don’t know how many there are in total. 70 seems to be on the high side. Anyone seriously interested in this topic should really consult both Segre Rutz (first) and Toresella (second).
Rene: ah, so we have Aldrovandi to blame for that name. 🙂 But I’m pretty sure that it was Sergio’s paper that gave the ’70’ number.
Nick: What I don’t understand is if the herbal/recipe part of the Voynich can be classified as an “alchemical herbal” then surely it is vital to have a list of all the known alchemical herbals of the 15th century or earlier. Then we could find out which ones have been digitised and where the undigitised alchemical herbals are to be found(New manuscripts are being digitised all the time). Then they could be inspected to see which are more or less similar to what we see in the Voynich. In addition plant comparisons can be made which could help in identification of Voynich plants. None of this is rocket science, in fact it is pretty obvious, which makes me wonder why it hasn’t been done.
If there are any alchemical herbals in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, that have not been digitised, I would be happy to take a number of non-flash photos, if they will let me.
Mark Knowles: that’s a very kind offer, thanks!
Of the alchemical herbals I listed before, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Add. A. 23. is the one I’d most like to see. It’s in Segre Rutz’s indirect tradition: first half of 15th century, there’s a brief description here…
https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_44
…and here in a little more detail (entry 24721 near the bottom of the scan)…
https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/images/ms/aam/aam0087.gif
It has 86 plants including descriptions of their appearance and medical properties; its incipit is: “Macer el qualle te scriue li vertu de alchune herbe”.
I think it would be extremely interesting to see any images at all of this – I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t been digitized already. According to the Bodleian catalogue: Segre Rutz, Minta Collins and three others mention this ms, but unfortunately I’ve misplaced my Minta Collins, which is annoying.
Nick: Well, that’s good luck. It is in the interests of all of us for these resources to be widely and easily available. It would be nice to be able in the long run (maybe in some cases short run.) to do this for all alchemical herbals as yet undigitised.
I would hope to be able to go to the Bodleian towards the end of next week to take the photos. If they will let me I would happily take photos of every page of the manuscript.
If you can track down a complete list of all “alchemical herbals” that would be nice for people to see I guess.
Mark Knowles wrote: “Then we could find out which ones have been digitised and where the undigitised alchemical herbals are to be found(New manuscripts are being digitised all the time).”
You make it sound like this is a new area of inquiry.
In addition to those who went before me, I have been studying the medieval herbals for more than 10 years and have almost every plant in almost every online-available illustrated manuscript cataloged so they can be compared side-by-side in a few seconds.
I have also read quite a number of unillustrated herbals (from reading them, I’ve noticed they contain essentially the same information, but no pictures).
.
I occasionally wonder if the VMS illustrator was working from an unillustrated list of plants (or from a local garden scheme) and supplied his or her own drawings, but there are signs that he or she had seen other herbal manuscripts, so it’s difficult to pin down… but I consider it possible that many of them might be original. Perhaps he had seen other manuscripts, gathered a few essential ideas from them, and then rolled his own.
There is an herbal manuscript in Greek (Grec 2183) that has original drawings (from what I can tell) and includes a number of additional plants not often found in western manuscripts, so herbal literature with original pictures does exist.
Look at Grec 2183 drawings of Borax, Phu, and Cyclamen. They are quite different from any other and they look nothing like the Greek Juliana Anicia drawings that came before them.
JKP: You say: “You make it sound like this is a new area of inquiry.”
As I said I would expect that it is far from a new area of enquiry.
Clearly I am pretty ignorant of the subject of “alchemical herbals” and herbal manuscripts in general. However I have just been asking what I see as some fundamental questions on the subject; if we can be confident that the Voynich has been significantly influenced by some/one alchemical herbal then it would not seem a bad idea, as far as is reasonably possible to determine where the non-digitised or newly digitised are to be found and come up with ideas of how to bridge this gap. If I am permitted I would be happy to takes a complete set of photos of all and every alchemical herbal in the Bodleian. If you have found links to all the digitised alchemical herbals online then perhaps you could share those links or better still upload all the images to Dropbox or wherever so that other people can download the whole set from you rather than the less convenient process of going through the, at times clunky, digitised manuscript pages on the various sites.
Nick: Are there any other relevant manuscripts in the Bodleian that you would like me to take photos of? The Bodleian is literally a stone’s throw away from where I live. I am not saying I will be able to do them all at once, but given my location it is one way that I could help. I plan to take photos from the first manuscript that we have discussed at the end of next week, but after that, all long as there are a reasonable number, I could do more.
The Voynich MS is definitely not an alchemical herbal and Toresella was also not saying that it is. Just that it seems related.
Other herbalists don’t agree with him, and I find it easier to agree with that viewpoint. However, that doesn’t count for much, because I don’t know what exactly Toresella’s view was based upon, and I would not be in any position to argue about it.
Rene Zandbergen: the point of my follow-up post was to try to explore the nature of that possible connection. Ultimately, Sergio’s judgement was probably no more complex than pointing out that the Voynich Manuscript is a puzzling herbal that seems to have come from the same time and place as a larger family of puzzling herbals: I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t based on specific matches between individual herbal drawings.
Rene: Well I guess the question is why do you say it is not an alchemical herbal other than it also having other non-herbal content and being written in cipher?
And if it is not an alchemical herbal then what is it?
And how do you think it is related to the alchemical herbal manuscripts?
Mark Knowles: perhaps it would be best to try out Bodleian Library MS Add. A. 23 first, and see how you get on. Because of book thiefs (who cut out pages of old books and sell them on the black market), the British Library has stopped allowing non-specialist researchers from looking at lots of manuscripts, which is a huge shame. 🙁
When I was at the market by the Champs-Élysées I saw many many parchment sheets that had been cut out of manuscripts. Sometimes they sell them right out in the open. Tragic, really.
Mark, even if they let you look at the manuscripts, not all the libraries will let you photograph them, it varies widely. Nevertheless, I wish you good luck with getting access. They have many treasures at the Bodleian Library.
Nick: I spoke with someone in the Special Collections department, where that manuscript is kept, this morning and she seemed to think that there shouldn’t be a problem with me seeing it at the end of next week. She seemed to think it would most probably be OK taking non-flash photos. I have to send them a formal request by email to book a viewing and state my requirements, but I think this should be a formality. I haven’t yet done that, but will do it today. I need to check that my Bodleian library card is up to date, but even if it isn’t then I should be able to sort that out quickly. I agree one step at a time, but if this wotks out I could do the same with others, if there aren’t too many. If they was someone in Milan who could do the same that would be a godsend for me, but I don’t think there is anyone that I could reasonably impose on in that eay.
Nick,
I noted that Florence, Biblioteca di Botanica dell’Universita MS 106 (mentioned by S on 16th June above) contains a simple substitution cipher (folio 2r) and the drawings of the various herbs all have coded labels. The Index (F127r to F129v) has codes attached to each of the herb names. Do you know if the meanings or reasons for these codes has been established?
J.K.P. I agree that the term alchemical herbal probably arose because herbal extracts were usually made with alcohol as you have said, and the preparation of suitable alcohol water mixtures would have been mostly restricted to alchemists in the 15th Century. The preparation of suitable alcohol water mixes (in the range 25% to 95% v/v) required the use of an alembic. The ownership of an alembic, and suitable distilling skills, would have been the preserve of the alchemist in the 15th Century.
Byron, it’s a while ago, but I think I tracked down the cross-references on each folio.
The drawings in Herbario MS 106 are almost identical to Canon Misc 408 in the Bodleian library, which includes the same cross-reference notations to the right of the plants.
Mark:
“Rene: Well I guess the question is why do you say it is not an alchemical herbal other than it also having other non-herbal content and being written in cipher?”
It is sufficient to read Philip Neal’s page to understand this:
http://philipneal.net/voynichsources/alchemical/
One could almost say: “seen one, seen them all”. This is how similar they are.
Of the seven oldest copies, the only one I have not seen is the Fermo MS.
Nick: All sorted. I have found some time next Thursday to go take the photos of the manuscript and the Bodleian have confirm this time with me and are happy for me to take those photos. So all going according to plan I should be able to share them with you next weekend.
The “codes” written near the herb names of the Florence MS seem to be by a later owner (De Ruel?). They say “fo” followed by a roman number. Those of you (probably just one) who were at the Mondragone conference may remember that I wondered if the scribble above the second paragraph of Voynich MS folio 2v could also be an abortive folio reference.
Rene: I remember that. 😉
Mark Knowles: that’s really good news, looking forward to it. 🙂
In the meantime I’m planning to find my copy of Minta Collins and see what she has to say about the ms…
Nick, I checked this morning. It is in a footnote to the very short section about alchemical herbals. In essence, she says that Segre Rutz is publishing a thesis about this topic, and she prefers to delay the discussion until after that has appeared.
Mark, well done! In order to make the best out of your visit, I would recommend looking at as many other copies of the alchemical herbals online, using the links provided here.
Rene: excellent, thanks for that. Given that it is at the Bodleian, I thought there was a (small) chance that Collins would have seen it, and might even have included an image of it, but it was not to be. 🙁
Mark Knowles: also, it’s often worth asking the librarians if they have additional records relating to a given manuscript. For example, some rare book & manuscript libraries keep a record of everyone who has called up a particular manuscript (partly this is out of academic interest, but also to keep a track of book thieves, sadly), and if the last person to call it up was Vera Segre Rutz, you’d be in good company. 😉
Collins has a list of herbal manuscripts at the end of the book, and indicates which ones she has seen. At least in 2000 she had not seen this MS.
Nick: I will bare that in mind. I must confess I am not quite as excited as you are. When it comes to Voynich research I would much prefer I lived a stone’s throw away from the Milan State Archives than the Bodleian. But who knows this herbal manuscript may prove to be interesting.
(If I could pop into the Milan State Archives when I fancy that would be amazing; visiting them as a one-off isn’t the same thing.)
For my Voynich research it would be much more preferable to live within a stone’s throw from the Milan State Archives (and near other Milanese archives.) than to live a stone’s throw away from the Beinecke. The guys in the Milan State Archives have been really helpful, but the truth is that I need to carefully work through the archives, I can’t expect them to do that. The Visconteo-Sforzesco archive is key, but being near other archives like the Pavia archives would be invaluable. However for many reasons relocation is not an opportunity at this time. However I can help others when it comes to the Bodleian archives.
@JKP
Based on the occurrence of many VM plants stands for me today (Erigeron) before the (ordinary daisy). Maybe it’s even (Erigeron alpinus).
F44r is certainly a primrose (Primula vulgaris). Why the famous sister (Primula veris) is not in the VM, for me a rustling.
Just so you may be able to sort out the vegetables (and some fruits) which Rudolph would eat ONLY. One way to find which foods he enjoyed, you might be able to find a portrait of Rudolph (and the painter of that portrait). Have fun !
bdid1dr
I will be taking photos of the Bodleian alchemical herbal tomorrow. I will try, if they let me, to take photos of all 86 pages, but I am not much of a photographer, does anyone have any suggestions that they would be useful to get best results; remember no flash photographer or anything that would damage the manuscript allowed.
If this goes well I could potentially do the same for other manuscripts or documents if anyone else wants something from the Bodleian. At a pinch possibly if there is a document that is particularly important I could take photos at the British library in the future.
Similarly if anyone could do the same for me in the Milanese archives that would be greatly appreciated.
Quality is very much dependent on good light.
If you have to photograph in low light or uneven light, the images will be blurred and the colors will be off unless you can do things to try to compensate.
At minimum, you will need two things… 1) some kind of tripod (there are tiny ones) or SOMETHING to brace the camera so it doesn’t shake.
Ideally photo lights and a tent are best (the tent bounces the light around to eliminate shadows), but this isn’t practical in a library so…
2) something to reflect the light (a piece of white card stock can be used if you are photographing in less than ideal conditions), so that the light will be more even across the page.
Scanners, of course, have built in lights to prevent uneven light distribution.
Photographing near a light-colored wall can sometimes help reflect the light more evenly. A light-colored wall on one side and a piece of light-colored card stock on the other can sometimes prevent the problem of a bright spots in the middle of the folio and shadows on the edges. If you use a piece of card stock, you’ll need something to prop it up.
Also, the length of the lens is important. 35mm and there will be distortion. around 55mm is close to what the human eye sees but you also have to be the right distance away from the folio. I don’t know if you are using a point-and-shoot or an SLR, but the point-and-shoot may not be good at short distances (macro distances). They might be out of focus.
And I probably don’t have to say this, but getting up high enough above the manuscript so that the lens is not at an angle to the surface is helpful. Sometimes it’s easier to have the volume on the floor, but… they may not let you do that. Sometimes getting up on a chair will let you position the camera more closely to “flat” in relation to the manuscript’s surface. Once again a tripod is best. There are some that let you mount the camera under the legs (I’ve actually done this to photograph books and to copy other photos). The legs fit nicely outside the perimeter of the pages and once you get the focus set properly, then you just turn pages and shoot.
It depends on the camera, but manual focus is better on some, if it’s available (but again, the camera needs to be braced).
If you are simply holding the camera, with no support, I strongly suggest taking 2 or 3 shots of each folio because some are not going to turn out. If it’s digital, bring extra memory sticks (or use a very big one).
Good luck.
JKP: Thanks for the advice, it is very much appreciated. You can pay for the Bodleian to digitised a manuscript for you in their imaging services department, however they would charge at least £200 to do it, I think, which is certainly more than I am prepared to pay. If the manuscript turns out to have extraordinarily significant contents then I would be prepared to pay for digitisation, but I doubt it will turn out to be so.
I have taken lots of photos of the manuscript.
I think the photos have come out well. There is a rule that they cannot be uploaded to a public website. However they can be shared privately. So what I propose to do is if someone makes a direct request to see the photos then I will email them a link to a cloud drive where there can download them. However I cannot post a link here. So I would imagine the standard crew Nick, Rene and JKP would want to have a copy of them. I would then that provided they do not make the public downloadable then they would be free to share those photos privately on request of other people. I don’t know how interesting other people with find this alchemical herbal manuscript, but I would think it is probably worth adding to the list of alchemical herbal manuscript imagine. To reiterate I could potentially do this with other manuscripts.
Mark Knowles: excellent, that’s really generous of you. I’ll email you when I get home and we can figure out an even more specific plan… 🙂
Mark, I know it is hard work and tiring to photograph a manuscript, so I very much appreciate that you are offering to share it.
You can message a link privately on the forum.
Many thanks, Mark!
I will contact you by E-mail.
I have uploaded the images from the manuscript, Nick, and emailed you and Rene the link.
Nick: What are your initial thoughts about the herbal? Having a cursory look through the images it seems that there are some parallels amongst some of the drawings and what we see in the Voynich. It appears having looked briefly at some other alchemical herbals that there are standard ways of representing the roots of certain plants. On the first 2 pages of the manuscript there is a list of plant names with the corresponding folio, so it should be easy to identify each plant. Therefore one would hope that when comparing it with all the other alchemical herbals it would be possible to identify certain plants in the Voynich. Though it seems hard to see how specific plant identifications will help push research forward.
I have uploaded some more pages of the manuscript and I will upload more soon. (These pages that I have just uploaded are only the right hand pages with plant descriptions.)
Mark: sorry for not commenting sooner, I’m a bit unwell at the moment, so everything’s taking much longer than normal. 🙁
I think your Bodleian MS ADD 23 A may turn out to be a very interesting herbal for Voynich researchers, in that it is of the right kind of period and is in Italian rather than in Latin. The logical first step would be to see how this herbal fits within the ‘tree’ of alchemical herbals, which would basically involve comparing it against Segre Rutz’s seven main alchemical herbals and seeing if there is one (or perhaps two) of them that it obviously inherits from.
After that, my intention is to carry out a kind of ‘single detail search’, in much the same way that I pursued catoblepas illustrations recently. Specifically, my plan is to collect together many drawings and textual descriptions of Herba Bososilles (which I recently speculated might be somehow connected with the Voynich herbal page with the red-outlined eyes in the roots – Herba Bososilles is described as being good for the eyes) and see what can be learned by putting them all together. PS: the textual description of Herba Bososilles is on a page which you don’t seem to have uploaded yet?
It includes many of the same plants as the other similar herbals, drawn and named in much the same way. It is more complete than some of them.
I glanced through it. Most of them are pretty easy to identify. I can’t do it until after work, but since Mark took the time and trouble to take the photos, I’ll write up a list of the names and send them to Mark (yes, I’ll send to Nick, Rene, and Marco, as well, since I know they are particularly interested in plants).
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to my images/scans of any of the alchemical herbals for another two weeks, so I cannot write in great detail about the images of Bodleain Add. 23A.
It’s worth looking at the general information in various places, including the little that Segre Rutz writes about it. First of all, the MS is on paper. Some of the other alchemical herbals are on parchment and some on paper. Its dimensions are almost the same as the Voynich MS, which is also the case for Firenze MS 106.
Several sources give just the 15th century as the date, but the first catalogue link by Nick is the only one that says: first half of 15th century.
Segre Rutz surprisingly suggests central to Southern Italy, but I have good reason to doubt this. Inputs I received from two people suggest Northern Italy with a German influence.
With respect to the herbs and the drawings, the list is shorter than the usual set of 98. Not only that, more than half the names are not of alchemical herbs. Segre Rutz says that the majority of the herbs is alchemical, but it will require a closer look at the drawings to be certain of the exact number.
Furthermore, the drawings are very simplistic. Even in the earliest alchmical herbals they are already more ‘stylised’ than in the Voynich MS, but here, it is even more the case. Segre Rutz uses the phrase: “estramamente trascurato e rozzo”: extremely careless and crude.
The few that I could compare do not really look like the drawings of either variety of the direct tradition. A comparison with the Vermont herbal might be of interest. I remember that Marco identified another herbal with some affinity with the Vermont herbal, but I can’t remember its name. Also that one might be a good source for comparison.
The one thing in common with the Voynich MS is the careless way in which the images have been coloured. That is also the case for some other alchmical herbals.
Udine and Vermont herbals are very similar.
@JKP
Udine? Do not draw the devil on the wall. This is the area where I am most worried. A 4-language corner, and if I still Latin to take it is 5. In addition to the dialects, where you are not even sure from which side the words come.
That’s exactly what makes up the Voynich Curse.
I forgot to add one point. Those “alchemical herbs” whose names are easily identifiable in the table of contents of the MS appear in a completely arbitrary order.
I have uploaded the final pages of the Bodleian Herbal Manuscript. (I have noticed that I have missed 2 pages of descriptions for 2 rather unremarkable looking plants; folio 41 recto and folio 42 recto. Anyway that is 2 pages of out about 180 pages total, I think. If someone thinks it is a good idea then I will go back and take those 2 missing photos.)
Regarding the Bodleian herbal, I was told that they have no record of prior individuals who have viewed the manuscript and purely hypothetically that even if they did it would be confidential (under data protection?).
Thank you again for taking the time to do this, Mark.
OK. Are there any other manuscripts either in the Bodleian Library in Oxford or the British Library in London or in any other library within a reasonable travel distance of Oxford that Voynich researchers collectively believe would be useful to have photos of? I am possibly open to specific requests from individuals, but generally I would only be prepared to take photos for manuscripts for which there is a general consensus as to their value.
Is there anyone in or near Milan or planning to spend quite a bit of time in Milan who could help me track down some documents?
Mark: I’ve been thinking about this. There’s an early 15th century Catullus ms at the Bodleian that Koen was interested in, but I need to give a broader check.
I’ve been trying to get back to Milan since 2006, and would love to be able to scan a load of mss there. :-/
Nick: Yes, when it comes to Milan, as you know I have been planning to visit the area for sometime, though I am worried that I will need quite a bit of time there to do what I would like, so I have been trying, when I have the time, to obtain as much source evidence as I can from the UK. I know Marco Ponzi lives in that area, but I am not aware of any other Voynich researcher there. Anyway it would be completely unreasonable to impose on Marco to track down documents from the Milan archives.
If there is a reasonable consensus or a strong opinion on the part of one individual of the value of taking photos from the early 15th century Catullus ms then I would be very happy to do so. Obviously I have a finite amount of time, so I would be reluctant at this time to take photos from more than 3 other full manuscripts, unless a strong reason emerges for doing so. In the situation where a small number of pages are required or photos are requested for a brief document then I would be happy to take photos from a larger number of documents.
@Mark, I emailed you on the 22nd june: “As we talked & mailed before, I still offer my assistance and have time to visit libraries” but either a) you do not read that hotmail account or b) you choose to ignore my mail.
Either case. Let me know. Nick has my email.
Mark,
I’d be interested to see images of any pre-1450 mss containing plant pictures that are in the libraries of Genoa, Venice and/or Padua. They’re not the only important libraries with little or none of their mss online, but I should be most interested to know what they may hold.
For some time, I’ve been tracing and reading the regional studies for medieval material medica – or more exactly the routes and means by which non-Mediterranean species were brought in to the west so early as they were. Genoa, Venice and Padua (as of course also Sicily, Ancona and Pisa) are important to that historical transmission but without going to Italy, at present, its difficult to discover what, if anything, they might hold.
I’m not asking you to fly to Padua and photograph a dozen mss – just putting the wish out there.
PS – Mark, in case you wonder whether I’ve seen it, I have read Kyle’s book:
Sarah R. Kyle, Medicine & Humanism in Late Medieval Italy: the Carrara Herbal in Padua ( 2016)
Dear David
I have looked through my emails for your email. I didn’t notice it before, these days I don’t check my hotmail very often and I get a lot of Spam emails. I open emails usually when I anticipate specific emails or spot people who I correspond with. So apologies for that!
Thank you very much for your offer. I would never decline the offer of anyone to seek out Northern Italian documents.
When do you plan to travel to Italy?
I am planning to travel when I have satisfied myself that there is no other way to view documents that I am very interested in, so as to best use my time there.
As I said my own particular interest is in the Milan State Archives, but there are other archives that interest me.
As far as relevant documents to find I suppose it depends on different people’s Voynich theories. Clearly some people would welcome more photos from undigitised alchemical herbals, though that is not my primary focus. I am personally interested in tracking down an undeciphered letter in the Milan Archive amongst other things and probably other undeciphered communication.
I will upload many scans from the book “Medieval Maps” by Professor Harvey for those interested. I know Professor Harvey won’t mind.
You can also find scans of the Bodleian herbal on my OneDrive where I think you found other documents before.
Thanks again,
Mark
@JKP
I just read your fight about the moon phase theory by Ninja. Since the cccc side supposedly symbolizes the waning moon, where is the increasing? 🙂
Nick: What are your top 10 manuscripts/documents from anywhere in Italy, that you would ideally like photos of? (I mean known documents or manuscripts, not hypothetical ones that may or may not exist.) Also I think with a focus on manuscripts/documents of general interest, rather than of specific interest to your own research, e.g. documents relating to Averlino. In addition it would be nice if they are ones in the same geographical area as other manuscripts you can think are of. I cannot say you will get photos of these, but it would be worth knowing.
Nick: Or maybe it would be worth having a general list of known documents/manuscripts anywhere that it would be worth having photos of. In fact rather than just your own specific opinions it would be worth having general opinions amongst all researchers.
I suppose one could also list which archives could be searched for which kind of documents.
All these ideas could be of interest.
So far have got to over 60 small plant to large plant matches as well a number of possible matches. There are still some to go, but I think this constitutes a large majority of the small plants. I want to do some crosschecking for things like duplicate matches. There is also the question of small plant to small plant matches independent of whether there is a large plant match. So there is still quite a bit more work to do to be completely thorough.
However I was thinking about the Ventris towns matches. My understanding is that Ventris when deciphering linear b noticed that certain words only appeared on inscriptions from certain locations and so concluded that those words corresponded with the names of those locations I.e. the towns they came from. As a side thought I wonder to what extent this has been explored with the images in the Voynich e.g. a certain word only appears on the herbal pages of plants with berries or a certain word appears only on pages with stars on them or a certain word only appears on pages with naked ladies on etc. These are just examples, but not necessarily suggestions. More generally if one can list the properties of an image on a page can we compare the commonality of the Voynichese words for pages with images with the same properties? Then the question becomes which properties are the best to look for? Ideally if one finds an example of a common Voynichese word can we map the corresponding property to a clear specific real word or precise meaning? I don’t know how much this line of thought has been explored.
I was thinking about crossmatching labels. The small plant drawings appear as best one can tell to be split into root focused drawings and leaf focused drawings. Although it is possible that some are intended to equally illustrate both. If so then one might expect a large plant in the herbal pages to map to a small plant in the roots pages of the botanical pages and a small plant in the leaves pages of the botanical pages. Now I say “small plant” as sometimes a root can be drawn with a leaf attached and sometimes just the root is drawn, likewise sometimes leaves are drawn but also a root is included in the illustrations and sometimes just the leaves are drawn.
So if Herbal Plant A is the same plant as Root B and also the same plant as Leaf C then obviously we can say that Root B and Leaf C can be matched to one another. In addition this may mean that we can associate the Root B label with the Leaf C label. Now I haven’t yet really explored these match ups, but being able to associate 2 distinct labels could be interesting.
One thing I have been wondering is if anyone is aware of another herbal manuscript with this kind of small plant botanical section in addition to the large plant herbal section that we see in the Voynich??
By comparison with other texts it would help to be able to say what the small plant labels in the botanical section typically represent. By default my inclination is that they represent plant names as that seems the standard purpose of labels in these kind of situations and also due to my impression that these labels are much more frequently rare Voynichese words than we find elsewhere.
Comparing how labels function in general in other medieval texts could elucidate how one might expect labels to function in the Voynich I.e. do they tend to represent nouns such as names or do they often represent something else.
I have just been wondering about plant identification in the Voynich. It appears from what I little I am aware of that people have found this very difficult or near impossible. My instincts, which I am sure others have considered, would be to compare the drawings in the Voynich with those of similar herbals presumably the alchemical herbals maybe with a very cursory reference to pictures of the actual plants. Then naturally one would try to match the plant drawings in the Voynich with the plant drawings in the other alchemical herbals and thereby put a name to each plant. Now this is pretty obvious, so I would be shocked if someone has not already tried this, presumably with little success. This makes me wonder if it is as difficult matching one known plant drawing with another known plant drawing in different non-Voynich alchemical herbals or whether it is particularly difficult matching the Voynich plant drawings with those of the other alchemical herbals. My guess would be that the Voynich is not unique in the difficulty in matching up alchemical drawings, but I don’t know.
Looking through many of the alchemical herbals listed above the plant drawings are often much more crude than we see in the Voynich. Leaves can be very generic and specific details lacking. Having said that there are clearly some exceptions to this.
Another thought. I don’t know if someone has produced a list of common features between the illustrations of an individual plant across the non-Voynich herbals. This might help with the identification of a given plant in the Voynich.
Again one senses a degree of sophistication in the Voynich lacking amongst many contemporary texts; many other herbals seem less impressive.
It is often said, particularly by Rene, that the Voynich is nothing special for the time. However I don’t get that impression, it does seem to stand out in terms of its contents as quite distinctive from other contemporary manuscripts specially in it’s being a compendium of many subjects.
Nick, I think I’m getting old.
I’ve asked a lot of people today if they know the ultimate answer about the whole universe and existence of being.
no answer.
But I’m sure you won’t take five minutes.
Mark
The problem with berries is that they have a lot of water.
The mold is quicker than the drying. Shock freezing and vacuum drying did not exist. Only fast processing was the solution. Think like in 1400.
Mark – yes you are right, I think. Despite the long years of the Friedman groups’ study and their consulting specialists in medieval manuscripts and herbals, both John Tiltman and Mary d’Imperio speak of finding nothing ‘like’ in the fairly limited range of medieval Latin herbals, a conclusion confirmed by more recent specialist opinions. One has to distinguish between the way a ‘hand’ is trained and the content in a drawing, of course. Some Voynich writers hypothesise that the vellum had not been used before the twentieth century, but in general it is not doubted that the present ms was inscribed during the early fifteenth century, nor that the book-block’s binding is in the style of Latins’ or Armenian mss, or that the 15thC scribes themselves were very likely Latins. So though the images find no place in the stemmata for Latin herbals – sequence being most important here, as was well noted by Salomon almost a century ago – it shouldn’t surprise us if some show images show some points in common with habits of Latin scribes. We have no idea when the written part of the text was first composed, either, though again the version we have suggests fifteenth-century ‘hands’.
Mark Knowles: “I don’t know if someone has produced a list of common features between the illustrations of an individual plant across the non-Voynich herbals. This might help with the identification of a given plant in the Voynich.”
Yes, I have catalogued just about everything that is available online as digital scans. I’m an avid gardener and very interested in plants, and also have a personal herbarium that I’ve been working on since my teens.
I have the species indexed so they can be found in seconds and compared side-by-side based on traits, colors, shapes, numbers of petals, leaf margins, etc. It’s an enormous task because it includes all the plants that might qualify for each drawing (which can sometimes be large numbers of look-alikes).
It took me a dozen years of very dedicated effort to accomplish this because first you have to spend several years learning medieval drawing traditions and then you have to read the text that comes with each plant and be very careful about getting the right ID.
Unfortunately, it does not help with some of the more stylized VMS drawings or those with mnemonics that are different from what was used in other medieval plant books. There’s still a great deal of work to be done to understand the VMS plants.
JKP: I have been very thorough with matching up the large plants in the herbal section with the small plants in the botanical/pharma section.
And I was thinking there may be cases where we can have some degree of confidence in the identification of the large plant, but also a high degree of confidence in matching that large plant to a small plant whether in the case of root or leaves or if one is lucky both. And so one might be able to associate the small plant labels with a known identified plant and if those labels specifically relate to that plant such as in the case of the plant name or the name of a medicine extracted from that plant then we might have some scope for generating crib words. Of course this requires thoroughness in plant identification and thoroughness in small plant to large plant matching.
Mark, that seems very logical if the labels were names of plants. But they may not be.
It would be helpful to have a good list of correspondences between the large and small plant sections, but only a small proportion seem to be undeniably the same (or very close). Unfortunately, those that are identifiable in the large-plants section don’t all have equivalents in the small-plants section.
It’s possible the two sections serve different purposes, in which case the overlap might be minimal.
Still, the process of trying to match them helps one become acquainted with how they are drawn, so I don’t see it as wasted effort. It’s part of the learning process. And sometimes someone sees something others have missed.
JKP: It is very logical IF(as you correctly say) they are names of plants. That is why I posed the question on Ninja regarding manuscripts with similar “small plant” pages, to see what their labels may represent. Having looked over those, from what I could translate they appears to be names on other manuscripts. This supports, though it does not prove, that they are names. I also mentioned the question more generally of what labels on medieval manuscripts tend to be, whether names or something else. In fact one could ask more generally what labels are in general whether in medieval manuscripts or modern books. Are they nouns, adjectives, adverbs etc.?
Given also the low frequency in the Voynich of the botanical label Voynichese words, them being nouns such as names seems more likely.
None of this proves that they are names, but would make the hypothesis seem very probable.
I have been very thorough looking at small plant-large plant matches and have come up with over 60. In the case of other matches, I have listed 2 or 3 alternatives or in rare cases no realistic match. Obviously all drawings lie to some extent on a spectrum of similarity, however I think one can have a high degree of confidence with many. I have not yet finished this matching task to my satisfaction and the matching specific plant names is just one possible avenue of many to explore using this information.
One thing that quite interests me at the moment is the scope for matching roots to leaves. If I can match a large plant to a root drawings and also match the large plant to a leaf drawing then obviously I can match the leaf drawing to the root drawing. I can then ask the question if there is any relationship between the leaf drawing label and the corresponding root drawing label for the same plant.
If I have a very thorough small plant to large plant matching spreadsheet and someone else has a large plant name or names spreadsheet then I could do a JOIN on these, which might be interesting.
Nick has suggested an instance of a sequential relationship between two small plant drawings and two herbal pages, I have expressed scepticism about this specific relationship, however it would be interesting to explore the idea of whether there is a discernable relationship between the sequence of plant in the botanical/pharma section and in the herbal section(s) so far I have seen little evidence of this, but I haven’t studied the question in detail. It might be worth asking what if any rationale there is behind the sequencing of small plants. Is there a relationship between the sequence of leaves and roots for the same plants? With good quality matching data there are a lot of avenues to explore.
I will not get properly stuck into these kinds of enquiries until I have produced a very thorough spreadsheet of all the small plant to large plant matchings. I have done a lot of work on this, but not all that I want to.
JKP: Looking through my matches, with more work I could well get to over 80 small plant to large plant matches, which does not include my list of possible matches. I think that is a significant number to work with. I am quite confident with the vast majority of my matches. I thoroughly dispute the notion that few plants match.
Mark wrote: “I have been very thorough looking at small plant-large plant matches and have come up with over 60.”
That’s good if they stand up to critical review.
JKP: I can’t say whether that will be the case as I am not quite sure what “standing up to critical review” means in practice as I imagine that could be said to be in the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless I would say I am very happy that they stand up. However if one is deliberately looking for a reason to say any match is not the case there would pretty much be a reason to reject every or almost every match even the most clear. I think the question depends on whether the reviewer looks at the matches objectively or whether with the purpose of finding justifications for dismissing them. This is not a Voynich theory, but a very careful unbiased attempt to see if there are sensible plant matchings.
Matching roots is generally harder than matching leaves due to the not infrequent lack of specific detail in root drawings. Nevertheless I can see ways around this.
Mark: I’d be really interested to know whether you have been able to match the f1 verso obliteration root ball sans standing plant to anything in the herbals section.
John Sanders: Well there are some drawings which have been close to obliterated in the botanical pages, though off the top of my head I can’t think of one completely obliterated, but of course if there was I suppose I wouldn’t know as there would be no evidence of it.
Mark, the root on f1v (that John mentioned) is more than likely mnemonic rather than literal.
On the one hand, it looks like claws (but the rest of the plant doesn’t match any of the plants called bear claw or cat’s claw… etc.—I searched the whole planet for possible matches that related to feet and paws). There are many that fit the idea of the root, but I couldn’t find any really good matches for the rest of the plant TOGETHER with the root.
On the other hand, the root could also be interpreted as a textile.
The idea of textiles would fit the rest of the drawing better. The two plants that seem most similar to f1r (in my mind) are Hypericum and Solanum. I have a few others on my list, but these two are at the top.
Either one fits fairly well in terms of general shape, except the shape and color of the leaves fits Hypericum better than Solanum (quite well, actually).
Several of the Hypericum species have bicolor, slightly-clasping leaves, and berry-like fruits at the ends of the stalks. Several were used for medicinal purposes (especially H. androsaemum), but the Hypericums were also used as dye plants (they would crush the leaves to get a reddish-brownish dye), so it’s possible the cloth-like root is a mnemonic indicating a dye plant.
.
So the f1v root is not “obliterated” in the sense of being unreadable. One just has to “read” it the way they did in the 15th century, which is probably as a mnemonic.
JKP: You say “Unfortunately, those that are identifiable in the large-plants section don’t all have equivalents in the small-plants section.”
From what I have studied so far I would be inclined to concur with this statement. However it is possible that the vast majority do, more research on my part could elucidate this.
You say “It’s possible the two sections serve different purposes, in which case the overlap might be minimal.”
From my research I do not think the overlap is minimal at all, in fact I would be inclined to say that at a minimum there is a large overlap.
You say: “Still, the process of trying to match them helps one become acquainted with how they are drawn, so I don’t see it as wasted effort. It’s part of the learning process.”
I can’t say that I have significantly more acquainted with how the plants are drawn as that has not been my focus. I very much wanted this matching information and I have not been able to find more than fairly cursory research done on this already, so I have been forced to do it myself. It is a long and tedious task, but for my purposes necessary.
You say “And sometimes someone sees something others have missed.”
Given the limitations of the work done before I am pretty confident that I have seen quite a bit that others have missed. I haven’t yet been able to track down Jorge Stolfi’s work on this that Rene mentioned.
I must confess that I thought John was referring to the previous page and it was one of his jokes.
There are 2 matches in amongst the herbal pages to that plant, one which is very obvious though the root is coloured in blue. The other is in the middle right on the first page of botanicals, but less obvious. From my memory I cannot think of more than those 2 matches, however 2 matches is what I would expect.
JKP: I would very much like to avoid having to make any plant identifications and would hope to rely on the research of others. However if necessary where I am not satisfied with the work others have done on this I will have to make my own plant identifications, but I really would like to avoid this as it would be a really big job.
Anyway plant matching could tell me a lot.
The small plants are:
Row 2 Column 4 f88r
Row 3 Column 2 f102r1
The point I was making Mark, was not so much about identification, it was that the root on f1v is not “obliterated”, it is probably mnemonic (mnemonics are supposed to help rather than hinder). It was an alternate viewpoint to John’s post.
The information I included about identification is there to show WHY a root might be mnemonic (mnemonics make more sense on some plants than others).
If f1v is Hypericum (and we don’t know for sure, but it’s one of the more naturalistic drawings so it’s easier to ID than many of them), then the root might corroborate why the leaves are bi-colored (in other words, some thought may have gone into how the parts relate to one another).
I also posted this because mnemonics in one plant section might not be repeated for the same plant in the other. Some are very clear matches, but it doesn’t mean this has been systematically applied.
JKP: I agree the word “obliterated” seems inappropriate. The root has not been obliterated it just looks weird and animalistic, but then lots of the roots look weird and animalistic, as per the Alchemical herbal paradigm.
When I have my full list I could discuss the extent to which the roots are replicated in the way you mention. Generally it seems quite common as I wouldn’t have been able to match so many, though often when illustrating a root the drawing may also include a leaf which helps a lot in the identification.
Anyway as you know my real interested is the botanical labels and how they relate to other labels and text, everything else is one big means to an end. I am ultimately trying to get to grips with the text, I have no interest in the plants except as a vehicle to understanding the cipher. As I have mentioned, to me plant matching provides connections between different small plant labels themselves and also herbal blocks of text, though links to recipe or other pages could be relevant. The botanical labels given their association with very specific drawings seem to me the best labels to work with and I think labels are much better to work with than sentence text as labelese is a simpler framework to work with in my opinion.
Mark & JKP: It has long been my contention that my badly worded obliteration stems from the post publication attempt at concealing the Tepenec signature on f1r and associated bleed through effects which were cunningly used to create my so called root ball on f1v and to cover some visible outline of the signature verso. Close scrutiny of both pages will show clearly what I’ve described and I’d also contend that the original root formation would likely have been qite typical just as those defined in the immediate following pages.
John, it was very common for new owners of a manuscript to obliterate the old Ex Libris marks.
I see it every day in manuscripts. Sometimes it is completely removed, other times it’s mostly removed and you can’t read it. Sometimes it is partially removed and you can still read some of it (with some effort).
So it’s difficult to know if the de Tepenecz name was removed as a matter of normal practice, or for some other reason.
One thing that I was wondering is that it is often said that the first word on the herbal pages is the plant name. Clearly there are issues with that notion e.g. first character is a gallows character. However putting all the issues to one side just for the moment I wonder how common it is for the first word to be the plant name in Alchemical herbals i.e. in what percentage of (alchemical) herbals is this the case? Then in those herbals for which the name is not the first word where does it tend to appear?
JKP: I can well understand your contention on covering up of a previous owners name for favour of inserting ones own, hence obliteration for such purpose. In the case of the Tepenecz signature there doesn’t appear to be another inserted in it’s stead which one might expect which would tend to defeat the purpose in that case. Regarding the root ball on f1 verso, my layman’s identification suggests South African Protea of which I’m sure you will be rather familiar, especially in that the genus did not become common in mild Mediterreanean nurseries until about the early 19th century. Rootballing of the species was quite common when left to it’s own devices in a potted setting, without the cats claw add on ie. f1v which of course might well be passed off as an artistic effect as noted in other botanicals. I note that ELV’s own identification of belladona does not include the typical dark berry clusters which suggests that I may be mistaken and so I’d appreciate your take on that.
Mark, in many herbals (not just the ones called “alchemical” herbals), it is very common for the name of the plant to be the first word (sometimes the name is the only word on the folio).
But the VMS is odd in a number of ways…
There is a character that I think might be a pilcrow as the first character of each paragraph, and for almost all the ones at the beginnings of paragraphs that look like they are unique, if you break them in two, you usually get two very common tokens. It would be unusual for plant names to be compound words of extremely common words in so many instances (they sometimes were compound words, but not this frequently or in this way).
JKP: On the face of it one would imagine that the name of the plant on herbal pages is included in the text of the page. Whilst it is possible that the name of the plant appears nowhere on the page it does seem strange that some kind of name does not appear whether as the plant’s true name or some kind of nickname for the plant.
If the name is to be found on the page one would expect that that word is significantly rarer than most other words; this of course assumes that Voynichese words are really words and Voynichese spaces are really spaces.
Mark: imagining is all very well but…
Nick: Imagination is vital I would think. Human civilisation wouldn’t ever have emerged without imagination.
JKP: If, which seems unlikely, the plant name is not on the page then I would have thought there to be some reference to it elsewhere such as “Page 1 – Rose”. The only other scenario where the name of the plant does not appear on the page that occurs to me at the moment is one where we have some kind of hoax situation, but that as I have already written I doubt.
JKP: You say: “for almost all the ones at the beginnings of paragraphs that look like they are unique, if you break them in two, you usually get two very common tokens. It would be unusual for plant names to be compound words of extremely common words in so many instances (they sometimes were compound words, but not this frequently or in this way).”
I think for the time being I am inclined to put those kind of considerations to one side as they require assumptions about how Voynichese maps to a real language. That is not to say that those concerns are not significant and worth observing.
The plant name could be the 2nd word on every herbal page or who knows less likely the last word or the plant name could be on the 1st line of every herbal page. Now if Voynichese words and real words don’t map to one another then the plant name could be spread over many words. Whilst it is possible that the name appears nowhere on the page that seems to me to stretch credulity.
Mark: if you have a specific example in mind of how imagination has helped move any aspect of Voynich research forward, I’d like to hear it.
Nick: I would suggest that the most importance advance is Voynich research has been the carbon dating. The extent to which imagination was involved in the history of the development of the carbon dating technique is something that can be explored, but I would have thought it crucial. As far as pushing other aspects of Voynich research forward one has to ask to what extent we can say with confidence that in each case research has moved forward. At the moment we have a collection of observations, but most inferences from those are not certain. Don’t get me wrong, many people have come up with imaginative theories of all aspects of the Voynich, but they have normally neither been proven or disproven yet. Often I think imagination comes into play when we ask “What if” questions.
Mark: it’s not obvious to me whether that was an answer to my question. Perhaps I lack the imagination to do so. :-p
Nick: I struggle to answer the question as to objectively how far and where we can say Voynich research has moved forward. I suppose the discovery of the Marci letter can be said to be a move forward, I don’t know what imagination was involved in its discovery. You have constructed an interesting and highly imaginative theory of the manuscript and its authorship, but your theory, like many, has neither been proven or disproven. I think the difference comes down to what we can say with near certainty and that is not an awful lot. Whether f57v is a nocturnal is an idea which may or may not be correct and in that sense one could argue that ideas even if unproven or disproven constitute an advance; in that case research has moved forward as there are lots of ideas about the Voynich. Different people has made different objective observations about the text and about the drawings, but I would be cautious in most cases saying they were advances(maybe very small ones).
Mark: we actually know an extraordinary amount about the Voynich Manuscript, but almost all of it has emerged from sheer historical graft. Imagination seems to have played no role in this.
My 2006 Voynich theory was simply an extended exploration of what it might mean for the Voynich Manuscript if it was in fact an encrypted version of Filarete’s books of secrets. That involved a ton of historical graft, whatever you might think.
Nick: If someone who knows nothing about the Voynich Manuscript were to come to me and ask me what advances have been made in understanding the Voynich since its discovery then I think I would answer:
1) It has been carbon dated to the early 15th century. (I might possibly mention the Marci letter)
2) The illustrations and the text imply a European origin or European influence to the manuscript.
3) The peculiarities of the text point to there being more going on than just a known or unknown language in an unknown script.
Then I would probably list the various different plausible ideas that people have about the manuscript.
I would then probably conclude by saying that we really don’t know very much for certain yet.
I have been looking at the Voynich and reading what others have written about it for some time now and I would not say that “we actually know an extraordinary amount about the Voynich Manuscript”, unless you are looking at a different edition. I would say there have been a few interesting observations made and a lot of sometimes interesting speculation. I suppose it is all relative. If what we know now is “an extraordinary amount” then I wonder if mankind will have developed the technology to measure the quantity that we will know when we find out what it says and who wrote it.
I am not trying to be negative about progress so far at all. And I do view some of the variety of imaginative theories, whether yours or others, as part of that progress despite them not having been proven or disproven.
Mark: we now know a great deal about the physical construction of the ms, about the sources of a fair few of its drawings, about the reordering of its bifolios, about its history in Prague and its subsequent provenance, and even a certain amount about its pre-Prague existence.
We also have multiple transcriptions that have enabled literally thousands of researchers to run statistical tests.
But… because they don’t happen to answer the question you have in your mind today, you feel free to airily dismiss the lot.
The “we know nothing” assertion was extravagant dismissive rhetorical bullshit conjured up and honed by the late Stephen Bax to distract attention away from the elephantine flaws in his idiotic and self-important Voynich theory: and the sooner I hear the last of its toxic self-satisfied echoes finally die away, the happier I’ll be.
Nick: I don’t think “we know nothing” and have never said as such, nor do I think “we know an extraordinary amount”. I think we know a little, but not a lot. I guess ultimately this is just a: is a pint “almost full” or “almost empty” kind of question and as such probably comes down to one’s own perspective.
I agree we have quite a few transcriptions and certainly producing a transcription is quite a lot of effort and if accurate an achievement. Running statistical tests is great, but the key is what the results can tell one, there we are much more limited.
I have for some times felt that the history of the manuscript in Prague and its subsequent provenance, whilst a fun topic, it is very much a side issue like Wilfred Voynich’s biography.
Overall from what I have gathered it doesn’t appear to me that we know a lot for certain, but nevertheless there are many interesting ideas some of which may well turn out to be correct.
I think we differ in that it seems you are working more from the basis that need to implement an algorithm for understanding the Voynich and that if we merely crank the handle hard enough for enough times then a solution will drop out the other end. I think we all need to exercise our imagination and whether I agree with them or not I think the imaginative ideas of others have value.
Mark: stick to summarizing your own thoughts, you’re not doing a very good job of summarizing mine. 🙁
On the subject of “we”
Diane, now I just have to agree with you. 🙂
Mark
You write “we know nothing” I wouldn’t say that.
Because the answer to every basic question in the universe is “42”.
Nick: I was summarising my own thoughts, but then you objected to my using my imagination and I sought to justify the value of imagination.
Mark & Nick: As some fool once mused, to know nothing is to know f a, which is exactly why sooner or later some screwball like you or me, having a fairly good understanding of advances in technology along with a lively imagination and a little intuition will surely rise above the many negative aspects of Voynich research and bring home our Roger Bacon, for better or for worse.
Mark Knowles: “If the name is to be found on the page one would expect that that word is significantly rarer than most other words; this of course assumes that Voynichese words are really words and Voynichese spaces are really spaces.”
This may seem logical, but in actual practice a plant name was not necessarily rare. It was common for slight variations of the plant name to occur numerous times on the same folio (slight variations of a name would be difficult to distinguish from slight variations in grammar if you don’t know the source language), and It was very common for the same plant names to occur next to many different plants.
It depended on the focus of the manuscript. If the text were full of medicinal recipes, for example, then plants that were common ingredients, like calendula, the various mints, oregano, etc., would show up on numerous different plant folios.
Apparently at some point in the 1940s ELV aquired a copy of non sequential Latin index to all plants in the botanical section totalling 92 which she used for her own identifications. My own belief is that it was provided by her nephew and regular correspondent Sir Geoffrey Taylor, son of artist Edward and Maggie nee Boole both of whom were by then deceased, a keen botanist in his own right. I’m of the opinion that there was likely to have been an original VM index page separate from the manuscript to enable quick reference to species in both Voynichees and new Linnaeus flora Latin script….PS. It’s also possible that nephew George Hinton the foremost Meso American botanist, well known as a contributor to both Harvard College and Bronx botanic gardens New York, could have been ELVs source for the index.
JKP: Obviously rare is a relative term. One would expect these words to be much less common than words like “and” and “the” as plant names are specific nouns. It is perfectly possible that that word appears on the specific page of the corresponding plant more than once, but across the manuscript as a whole I think more debatable, so over the manuscript as a whole rare, even if not rare as a specific word on a specific page. There are of course many pages of the Voynich that seem to deal with subject mostly separate from plants. We could say “rarer”.
I think you raise an interesting point about plant names having slight variations in spellings; this is something I have thought of. In fact the broad subject of the same word being written different ways is something I think worth thinking about; this could manifest itself as slight variations in spellings, abbreviated forms and non-abbreviated forms being used interchangeably and straight up homophonic differences i.e. cipher features that allow the same word to be written 2 quite different ways.
Mark: given the ongoing failure to identify “and”, “the” or even any number system, I’m extraordinarily unsurprised that plant cribs too evade all raking eyes.
With that in mind, the point of the block paradigm idea was to find candidate matches at a higher level, and worry about the language mapping issues later. 🙂
I’m sorry to put a damper on anyone but just as a point of fact – no-one has ever provided a balanced argument whose conclusion is that the plant-pictures were intended by the maker to depict any living plant, or single specimen or that their purpose had to to with medicine.
The ‘herbal’ idea, like the assumption of a Dioscoridan model, was only ever a combination of assumption and subjective impression.
It wasn’t reached by any process of elimination – no-one asked if the images might be embroidery designs, or part of a fresco-painter’s notebook, or copies of designs meant for stone-work, wood-work or mosaic, none of which necessarily aimed at literal depictions of real plants.
I notice that John Sanders speaks of sorting out the Voynich problem with just
“a fairly good understanding of advances in technology along with a lively imagination and a little intuition.”
A little more time spent thinking can be good too. And even reading.
It does appear that attempts so far to match small plants have not been incredibly thorough.
One thing I was thinking about was that given from what I understand there are herbal pages missing there still may be scope for matching small plant “root” drawings to small plant “leaf” drawings and conceivably using these drawings to hypotheses what the missing herbal pages might be.
I have put a lot of time to systematically work through these matchings, but I think there still is quite a bit more to do if I am going to be satisfied that I have done everything I can. If the standard pattern is Herbal-Root-Leaf matchup then I should try and find each of these. However there may be instances where there is only a Root or only a Leaf or Neither. I would not expect for a given herbal there to be more than 2 matches amongst the small plants and so far I don’t think I have an example of this.
The impression that I have so got so far is that all or almost all the small plants were intended as redrawings of plants from the original complete set of herbal pages. Having said this there certainly appear to be some herbal plants not to be found amongst the small plants.
Nick: I think what I am focused on is arriving a some textual associations:
Herbal Page Text – Small Plant Root Label – Small Plant Leaf Label – Common Botanical Pages Text – Recipe Pages Text(Maybe)
Actually correctly naming the plant is something I haven’t looked into.
The question for me is then looking at shared features or commonalities of the different associated texts with specific emphasis on the small plant labels.
Mark Knowles wrote: “It does appear that attempts so far to match small plants have not been incredibly thorough.”
Thanks, Mark. You haven’t even SEEN my match-set (or that of others) and you make this judgment. I have a lifelong passion for plants, so I’m pretty fussy about what can be identified (or matched) and what can’t, so I am interested in seeing what you have when you are ready to show it.
I’ve been studying the VMS plant drawings since 2007 (maybe late 2006, I would have to check my files to know the exact date, it’s what attracted me to the VMS, and I have a database of more than 21,000 plant species (accompanied by more than 1/4 million reference images), in addition to a herbarium. This info can be searched by any individual plant trait (leaf shapes, flowers, roots, stalks, colors, habitat, etc.). By most standards that is pretty thorough.
D.N. O’Donovan wrote: “– no-one has ever provided a balanced argument whose conclusion is that the plant-pictures were intended by the maker to depict any living plant, or single specimen or that their purpose had to to with medicine…”
I think there are a number of plants that are naturalistic enough to be considered drawings of individual plants (not necessarily living, since some artists worked from dried specimens). Viola, Centaurea, Tragopogon, Ricinus, Scammony, and a number of other drawings appear to be single plants. They are relatively well drawn for their time.
It’s generally accepted that some of the plants might have mnemonic components, and some are stylized, in which case they might be single specimens and they might not. More research will probably answer the question of whether there are combination plants. I don’t see why that possibility would put a damper on anyone’s research. As usual, you talk as though we are all of one opinion or that we are incapable of revising our opinions, which is not the case.
You frequently criticize people for using the word herbal. The word “herbal” has nothing to do with the use of the plant, or whether it’s medicinal. There are trees and fungi. There are herbaceous plants. It’s a botanical designation for a widespread category and most of the VMS drawings resemble herbs more than fungi or trees (there might be a handful of trees and maybe a fungus, but most are drawn like herbs).
As for medicinal plants… there aren’t many people insisting the VMS is a book of medicinal plants. I’ve never insisted they are medicinal plants either (in fact, I’ve pointed out that Viola with palmate leaves and Tragopogon were considered low in terms of medicinal value and were omitted from many books of medicinal plants). The list of medieval medicinal plants is very long, so there is bound to be overlap, maybe some of them are, but it might not be the general focus of the collection. There might be plants from several categories, or a different over-riding purpose.
As for whether the drawings were intended to depict plants… show us your “balanced argument” that they are not intended to depict plants in some literal or allusive way.
Mark: Perhaps you might find some herbal comparison ideas from Kohler’s 19th centuary Medicinal Plants which has eighty or so complete plant break down colour plates on line.
JKP
You say, ‘It’s generally accepted that some of the plants might have mnemonic components, and some are stylized.’
Why is it generally accepted, now, that “some of the plants may have mnemonic elements”? When did it start to be accepted? It wasn’t accepted in 2007, or in 2008, or even in 2017… so is this another osmotic thing, or does the change in opinion have some rational reason – some body of research and evidence… and if so why does no-one refer to the seminal studies… and logically there must be some… which brought about this sea-change so quickly after more than a century of the very opposite assumption?
Could you define what you (or anyone) means when they say ‘stylised’. Do they mean ‘stylised’ as adopting some regional artistic convention, like the ‘tudor rose’ or do they mean something with no particular connection to the look of any plant like a stylised ‘vine pattern’? And once again, when you say ‘generally accepted’… by whom? Why? And with what reason – where’s the research and can you direct me to some particular definition of ‘stylised’ and any particular body of work which argues this case.
I’m not trying to make you feel personally attacked, but I do tire of having it ‘generally accepted’ that such-and-such is so one week and then for no reason admitted or acknowledged we hear another ‘borne on the wind’ edict that now ‘it is generally agreed.. by whom? .. that everyone is to believe something else.
It was ‘generally agreed’ for a century that Roger Bacon wrote the manuscript; it was ‘generally agreed’ as recently as the Yale facsimile edition that the plant-pictures were a version of an ordinary medieval herbal.
But let’s tell tell the truth here. You know, and I know, and Nick knows, and Rene knows, and about 78,000 other people know both who first explained these things and had to cope with the reaction because – at that time ‘what it was generally agreed’ was the exact opposite.
A wise man once said ‘a crowd doesn’t speak the truth’ – so meaningless memes such as ‘it is generally agreed’ mean absolutely nothing. I would be interested to see exactly who has decided to agree, and where they have published research explaining how they came to agree, and what evidence they’ve adduced, and whether or not they pretend no precedent studies exist.
And now perhaps Nick will tell me off for annoying his readers. 🙂
Diane: I hope my readers are smart enough to form their own opinion.
The odd thing is that I remember all your posts about Dracaena and the like: I also recall that these seem to have been expressed in the specific kind of theory-first way you now seem to spend all your time clambering up to the moral high ground to criticize in others. :-/
As for the issue of precedence: people proffered all manner of opinions about the herbal pages throughout the 20th century (e.g. literal, symbolic, stylized, metaphorical, deceptive, merged, steganographic, New World, etc) and beyond. Even my much-derided suggestion that a book of machines might have somehow been concealed in plain sight in the Herbal-B pages was – to a modest degree, at least – anticipated by Mary D’Imperio, 3.3.1 p.15:
All the same, I can confirm that “it was generally agreed” that I was mistaken about dating the manuscript to the 15th century, so a certain aspect of what you’re taking about is correct, though probably not about herbals.
JKP: Well, share your plant match set then. If something is not shown then I will work on the basis that it does not exist. I have seen what Rene has put on his site regarding plant matches and that is quite limited. I have not found a thorough match set elsewhere. If you know of other match sets that are publicly available do let me know where they are.
I can assure you that if I could find someone else’s thorough match set I wouldn’t be putting the effort into constructing my own.
Why should I share my match set with you when you seem so reticent to share yours with me if you have it? I don’t actually think a lifelong passion for plants is relevant here, we are essentially comparing drawings and as we know they are not accurately representative. Matching the plants up is not something that requires great intelligence, but rather care, attention to detail and hard work. I wouldn’t be doing it if I could find the results elsewhere.
I think I only put the ones of Th.Petersen there, though I should check. I have my own list somewhere, but it is not the result of a thorough analysis.
Of course: a greater number of proposed matches does not equate: more thorough….
Of the two matches presented further above for the plant on f1v, I agree with one (It’s on my list too) but not with the other. It’s an interesting one, because it shows that the copies are reasonably exact in some detail and quite different in another.
As regards: “generally accepted”, in all the years that I have been around I have really seen few cases where anything was “generally accepted”. The few cases I can think of are associated with something or someone being wrong rather than right.
A better term is probably: “largely believed”. This could still be too strong, because it is not always know what people believe.
In the specific case of the use of mnemonics in the herbal drawings, I know that there are a few people in the Ninja forum who consider this, but I wouldn’t call it “largely believed”. I am not even sure if everyone has the same understanding of what is meant with the term mnemonic.
The most obvious case would be (for example) to draw a venomous animal near a plant that should help against animal venom. This is such an obvious thing that has been done since antiquity, that it is hardly worth making a big point over. Still, we have no way of telling whether the snake and dragon in the Voynich MS have this purpose. We can “believe” this but have nothing to confirm it.
Of course, if one does not believe that the plants in the MS are medicinal, one should not propose this type of mnemonics……
Rene: Certainly a greater number of proposed matches does not imply more thorough. I could have picked matches at random and have a complete set, but that does not mean thorough. However that is not what I have done. What I have done is taken every single small plant and done the painstaking task of comparing with every large plant, so as to produce a shortlist of matches. In some cases on the shortlist there is a match which is much closer than any of the others on the shortlist and quite close to the original. In other cases there is not a closer match on the shortlist. In some other cases none of the items of the shortlist comes close. In reality, as to be expected, to some extent the closeness of matches lies on a spectrum.
Concerning the two matches one person might reject them both, arguing that the botanical match you accept is different as the root is drawn in blue and there are no yellow leaves. However I like you think they are a match. The other case stands out to me as of the items on my shortlist for that small plant my large plant match is much more similar than the others on the shortlist in both leaf and root on the drawing. In addition overall I think it is close enough to count as a match. Ultimately this is a question of opinion as to whether on consider any match similar enough; I can’t prove that any 2 drawings match even the most obvious examples. Initially I was concerned by this match just, because I already had another match for the large plant, however I have concluded that there can be up to 2 matches for a plant. There are cases when there are obviously 2 matches, a “root” match and a “leaf” match, so 2 matches does not concern me. I think it is not unreasonable to imagine that the author would not produce a perfect reproduction of the large plant drawing in each case, so the question of whether they were intended to be the same plant or not is an open one; I have made a careful judgement in each case, but other people could certainly disagree.
On the subject of “generally agreed” or “largely believed”, well I suppose you can conduct a quiz of opinions as happened recently on Ninja, but of course not everybody completed that quiz; I haven’t got round to doing it. However if something is “generally agreed” it doesn’t make it right. It seems there is little that is universally agreed when it comes to the Voynich with a very wide range of opinions on almost every aspect of it. Some people might regard themselves as authorities or experts on the subject, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily right on any given question. Newbold would, I am sure, have regarded himself as an expert. I suppose there are broad consensus on some basic things, but as things become more specific opinions seem to diverge rapidly.
D.N. O’Donovan wrote: “so is this another osmotic thing, or does the change in opinion have some rational reason –”
Of course there is “some rational reason” (as opposed to irrational reason??). More data comes in. More ideas come in. More Voynich researchers join the study, which broadens the spectrum of opinions. We learn. We share.
You always seem surprised and indignant when things change (or when you assume they have changed).
Science doesn’t stand still. We build on what has gone before. Did you expect it to be otherwise?
Mark, I’m not reluctant to post it, it’s a logistical challenge to post it.
The data is extensive—there’s no easy way to present it because it includes commentary, confidence levels, and tentative IDs. Plus I have to double-check to make sure I correctly copied all the labels (I think probably 99% of them are correct but I still need to double-check before posting on the Web) and I have to convert them to EVA so other people can understand them because I don’t use EVA, I have my own system.
Also, I set up my own system for numbering (folio, row, column) but it’s based on the main container on the left, not necessarily the literal row, and stretches horizontally across some of the pull-out folios, so we need to agree on how to locate each plant as well. I think my system is pretty good, but you might think otherwise.
And I have other research I need to work on… I’ve been trying to finish my long paper on the structure of the text for over two years now, and trying to find a way to share the VMS concordance (which is over 1100 pages), and to finish 48 unfinished blogs, and all the script results that I’ve been trying to write up literally for years.
By the time you finish your analysis maybe I can format and double-check the labels and find a way to lay it out so it will fit on paper (it won’t work on a blog, it’s about 25 pages long). I will try to convert the labels to EVA and double-check them, and it might be possible to fit 5 x 3 on a page, but I cannot promise an exact date for this. My paid work has to come first.
At some point we can compare—I’m quite interested in comparing them.
JKP: Of course I am interested in comparing my matches with those of other people to see if there is scope for improving my matching or exploring arguments for and against the various matchings or whether it is correct to say there is a matching after all.
I am not particularly excited about matching plants the only reason I have done so is that I have not found adequate data out there and I want that data for exploring textual relationships.
Rene wrote: “I am not even sure if everyone has the same understanding of what is meant with the term mnemonic.”
I’ve been assuming people understood the word mnemonic to be a memory aid, but maybe there isn’t as much consensus on this as I’ve been assuming.
I think of symbolic drawings as a superset of mnemonics.
Mnemonics are symbolic, but there are other things that are symbolic that are not necessarily mnemonic. I think these might also exist among the VMS plants… drawings that incorporate cultural symbols without express intention as memory aids.
I don’t get the feeling the VMS was intended for general consumption. If there are mnemonics, they might be at a more personal or familial level.
John Sanders wrote: “Mark: Perhaps you might find some herbal comparison ideas from Kohler’s 19th centuary Medicinal Plants which has eighty or so complete plant break down colour plates on line.”
John, that sounds like a great project for you. If you don’t want to do it, you may find it hard to motivate others into thinking that it is a worthwhile effort.
@Rene
You write…..
“I think I only put the ones of Th.Petersen there, though I should check. I have my own list somewhere, but it is not the result of a thorough analysis.”
I have looked at it, a new revision would surely be appropriate.
Rene: I’d love to but unfortunately with my limited visual capabilities, it leaves me somewhat out on a limb, worthwhile project or not. Thank for your very kindly suggestion though and you never know a post from someone of your exulted VM qualifications may serve as motivation for others.
Having looked over my matches so far I am at 80 small plant to large plant matches. Now there seems to be some debate as to what are “real” matches and what are not. There are some matches that are widely believed to be matches and that I concur with, but when one looks at those one can see discrepancies. The presence of these kind of discrepancies says to me that we cannot assume a small plant match is going to be a perfect reproduction of a large plant. Personally that seems reasonable unless the author was copying exactly from the large plant drawing. One obvious example is that colouring can vary, whether in shades of colour or in more striking colour differences. Also there may be differing numbers of roots between the small plant and the large plant.
In conclusion I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that actually all the small plants are intended in each case to match a specific large plant, bearing in mind that there are missing plant pages. Something like the “blue cube” in the small plant section may seem to go against this idea that I have presented, as regards that I cannot say. And again I am inclined to the notion of there being 2 matches a “root” match and a “leaf” match, though in some cases it may not be apparent which is which. Unfortunately still plenty more work to do on this to satisfy my idea of being completely thorough, but I do think I have probably done the bulk of the work at this point.
@Mark
If you have now compared all the small sketches with the large drawings. What about names ? Did you also look around there
Even the author would have had to use small names to ensure a secure recognition. Is there a connection ?
The cube is definitely tartar. Already seen, exactly what I am looking for in old books again. There was an exact description. I didn’t think it necessary to secure it years ago. I’ve looked in hundreds of books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_bitartrate
Nick – thanks for your reply. About your impression that I began with a theory – I’m afraid you’re mistaken though the mistake is understandable when it is obviously true that most people seem to have resorted to theory on realising that the pictures are not easily read.
I understand why cryptographers must begin by forming a theory of how a cipher might work, and then testing it, but that’s not the way explanations of pre-modern images are normally reached.
For myself, I’ve never understood why anyone should suppose it necessary to invent an entirely new methodology just for this one manuscript; it seems pretty obvious that when the images are unreadable according to the conventions of one tradition, then one is trying to use the wrong key and the job is then not to invent a hypothetical key but work to find the time(s) and place(s) that provide the right one.
d’Imperio, by the way, had no talent for this sort of work and it’s no more easy for people without a talent for it than is cryptography, or science, or music. Tiltman had a little more natural talent. He was genuinely interested in other ways of thinking and seeing the world, was able to recognise ability in areas where he could admit he had none, and was able to observe dispassionately without feeling obliged to assert that he understood immediately what he observed. I wonder how things might have gone if he, rather than Friedman, had been in charge of the group… but I won’t speculate/guess/form a theory about it. 🙂
Diane: your blog and your online comments were full of your theories for many, many years, and it is apparently my curse that I remember all that nonsense when others would prefer it forgotten.
As far as Mary D’Imperio goes, anyone who has a dismissive word to say about her on my blog can take that word and stick it up their own hairy yellow arse.
And that includes you, no special pleading allowed.
102r is of course the ‘Blue Cube’ page which has in past years been commented on variously by the likes of JKP in his Voynich Portal and of course folks on the Voynich Ninja network with wrong ref to 102v….Alicia Stott and Charles Hinton, ELV’s sister & brother in law, were very much into cubes as I recall, blue ones in particular which was paramount to their sexy four dimesional geo/math Tesseract display. Rene Z anors would of course be familiar with Charles who was known to be kinky in his slightly off appreciation of female nudity and explicit bestial solid art forms. He was a proponent and creator of the term Science Fiction, a collecter of wild herbage for homeoeopathic use and invented both the ‘Jungle Jim’ and a baseball pitching gun for his college students. In the eighties, he hi-tailed it to Japan to avoid bigamy charges, mum and the boys tagging along for the experience. Prior to that he and Maggie Boole’s husband Edward Taylor, attended art camps in the Italian foothills with other new vogue followers like Wilfrid perhaps..Some have suggested that the VM cube looks for all money like an old apocetharists alchemy concoction book which I have no problem with, likewise I’m a huge fan of Mary D’Imperio’s and pooh on anyone who puts shit on her.
Nick,
All I can say is that you’re mistaken. I’ve never theorised, merely explained and with as much of the historical and technical information as was feasible.
Mary d’Imperio had no talent for reading imagery. That’s not a moral or a personality judgement, any more than to say a person has no talent for cryptanalysis, or musical composition.
The work I put online may have been difficult to follow, and its conclusions opposed the theory which you and others espouse, but the fact is that the amount and quality of criticism were both quite low and a great deal lower than those of imitation and plagiarism.
Any informed debate is welcome, and I’m glad of informed corrections. So far, the point-scoring has relied on ad.hominem and the parroting of information-zero generalisations, with ‘nonsense’ the mildest.
I’m sorry to see you reduced to it.
Has anyone counted/estimated the number of large plants and small plants that existed in the original manuscript I.e. including lost/missing pages?
I haven’t counted the number of large plants and the number of small plants, though potentially I could.
If we have a root drawing and leaf small plant drawing for each large plant one would expect there to be something like double the number of small plants compared to the number of large plants, if every large plant if represented amongst the small plants. It would be interesting to see if we have something like that or far from it.
I guess the question is how many large plant herbal pages are missing? And also are there any small plant botanical/pharma pages missing? If there are any small plant pages missing guessestimating how many small plants there would be per page is difficult, but I suppose it could be done on the basis of some kind of measure of how many small plants there are on a typical botanical/pharmaceutical page.
It would be instructive to know the relative proportions of small plants to large plants. If there are roughly double then I think it would support the notion that the large plants are reproduced in the small plants and that “foreign” or “fantasy” plants are not generally reproduced and there is a clear mapping from the large plants to the small plants albeit in a different sequence.
O’Donovan wrote: “All I can say is that you’re mistaken. I’ve never theorised, merely explained and with as much of the historical and technical information as was feasible.”
In the upper right, there is a little drawing of a rectangular tower with a saddleback roof with two finials (a very common architectural style through much of Bohemia). Around it are several others in the same basic style.
Just around the corner there is another saddleback in a compound with Ghibelline merlons (a common style of merlon in medieval Lombardy and parts of Bohemia but virtually nonexistent elsewhere).
The bottom pathway also has walls with Ghibelline merlons.
These architectural structures did not exist in Africa in the 15th century, so if you want to identify a tower as the lighthouse of Alexandria, you have to explain its anomalous inclusion on a folio replete with Bohemian/Lombardian architecture.
Until you provide credible reasons for the mismatch, it’s a theory.
JKP: Yes, I am inclined to agree with you. One person’s explanation is another person’s theory. An explanation is a theory that one believes to be true. Voynich research tends to have lots of theories, but few of them proportionally speaking can be said to have reached the status of definitive explanations, though frequently the proponents of such theories will proclaim them as being explanations. I think often this happens as anything self-described as a hypothesis or theory is easily ignored as merely a theory.
Mark: for me, an “explanation” is a temporary bullshit narrative that might possibly (but usually doesn’t) lead to an historical hypothesis.
A “theory” is a bullshit historical hypothesis that its proponent takes so seriously that anywhere it contradicts existing history, they are convinced the existing history must be wrong.
The default status of historical hypotheses is that they are bullshit until proved true. Some are more useful bullshit than others.
Nick: Yeah, I think plausible historical hypotheses have their place, the more plausible the better, as long as they are acknowledged to not having been proven. Hopefully over time we are able to whittle down the list of plausible hypotheses rejecting those that evidence leads one to believe are no longer plausible, though it is possible that new hypotheses will emerge which seem plausible in response to evidence. So I don’t think it is a problem there being a variety of plausible hypotheses floating around that are as yet unproven, as long as they are not presented as more than they are, just hypotheses. I don’t believe the Voynich is a hoax, but I accept it is in the realms of possibility, however the “Big Jim Finn” hypothesis would not meet the plausible hypothesis criteria I would think. It is conceivable that evidence might lead me to believe the Voynich is a hoax even if it doesn’t now.
Mark: Replication is the name of the game and each generation they can play it the same. So where do we go from here, anwhere our imagination and intuition takes us; all the way to Philadelphia if we so wish.
Mark: once Richard SantaColoma had demonstrated how to keep a thoroughly implausible Voynich hypothesis alive (i.e. by stressing that until such time as somebody utterly disproves a given hypothesis, then the hypothesis proposer has “won”), everyone else with a similarly implausible hypothesis took heart and has done the same.
For me, what distinguishes ‘theories’ from ‘hypotheses’ is the way that theories “push back” against other (unconnected) historical evidence. For example, one might look at all the claims Gerard Cheshire makes about other historical things that squarely rely (and indeed build) on his nutty reading of Voynichese. And the same for John Stojko with Ukrainian history, and for Newbold with Bacon, and so forth.
Nick: I don’t think the onus should be on other people to disprove a hypothesis, but on those who believe in the hypothesis to prove it in so far as is reasonably possible.
From my point of view I have to be open to various hypotheses even if they are not ones I believe, such as:
1) It is within the realms of possibility that the text of the Voynich is nonsense.
2) It is conceivable that the Voynich is German or French in origin and not Italian as I believe.
3) It is possible that Emperor Rudolph II once owned the Voynich, though I have no idea on the point.
4) It may be the case that large portions of the text were copied from other manuscripts, potentially with a significant amount of text copied verbatim, though obviously not in its original form. I very much doubt this, but it is not an unreasonable idea.
…
I try to avoid being too myopic and keep myself open to different ideas, whilst still retaining my own ideas, until such a time as I find the alternatives more plausible. Not being open to different ideas can easily lead one to being confined with bad ideas and stuck not making progress. We are all very likely to find ourselves quite wrong about at least one specific aspect of the Voynich, so I think it is unwise to cling to all our ideas too tightly.
Obviously certain ideas stretch credulity such as the Central American theory which seems to go against so much evidence to the contrary. And this is true of many theories, but there are Voynich ideas out there which are plausible, but unproven.
It seems probable that the 2009 carbon dating has been the catalyst for all medieval based theology and a confidence derived therefrom. I suggest that the tests were flawed to the extent that essential data relating to the potential for incorrect readings was omitted from the input regime. Well researched factors on coligen make up that science says may point to an age difference of up to four hundred years is not taken seriously by Rene Z in particular, and others who cannot countenence the suggestion of error. I’m not saying for a minute that the C14 SA results are necessarily wrong, though I am confident, based on other factors that this is a valid argument. If it were found that the velum itself had come from an ancient stockpile, which I’m not confident with, that would be the only dampener as far as I’m concerned….. I’d implore people, in the interests of balanced thought, to look into the science of deep water isotopic transfer effects on bovine food intake. Carbon depleted fodder such as kelp and fishmeal along with essential minerals derived from iodine loaded salt licks, which will have been i compromised by deep water marine effects.
You’d believe anything if it weren’t for the little hook.
The drawing style and the age of the parchment fit into the same time frame.
Therefore the VM was dated 15 centuries ago.
But this could not be known before the C14 method, and the method is now well established.
Actually, C14 only confirmed what had been assumed before.
Peter M: Tell all that to Rene Z and see if he agrees. Also change your High German to Kings English translator server, the one your using schucks.
The text on 116v is consistent with the radio-carbon dating. The month names could be 2 or 3 decades later. It’s hard to tell with so little text but it’s probably mid- or later 1400s.
The column text on f1r is later, probably early 1500s… give or take.
No way to tell with the main text, but the tails, occasional superscripted 9, and occasional macron, would be consistent with 15th-century script. Those conventions were gradually fading out by the middle of the 16th century.
@john sanders
I use the Deeple translator, I think it’s good enough.
I don’t need to tell Rene. I’m sure he’s reading, and if I’m too far off base like you think I am, he’ll get back to me.
Besides, I can’t just dismiss facts because they don’t support my theory.
JKP
Only just noticed your address to me – better to send such things as a comment to my own blog if you want to be sure I’ll see it.
However – with Nick’s indulgence…
In the upper right, there is a little drawing of a rectangular tower with a saddleback roof with two finials (a very common architectural style through much of Bohemia). Around it are several others in the same basic style.
– You don’t say which folio you are talking about, and your description is too vague for me to identify the structure you mean.
Just around the corner there is another saddleback in a compound with Ghibelline merlons (a common style of merlon in medieval Lombardy and parts of Bohemia but virtually nonexistent elsewhere).
Around what corner? Are you speaking about the map? It is inaccurate to speak of Ghibelline merlons in this context – both ‘Ghibelline’ and ‘merlon’. However, it has become common parlance in Voynich writings, so let that pass. It is a fair description to speak of that architectural style as Ghibelline if you’re speaking about Italy, because the ‘imperial’ party was called Ghibelline in Italy. But the same style .. as I documented in quite some detail when treating the map… was employed to signify ‘imperial’ and is, or was, found over a much wider range than the remaining examples. In crusader architecture and in Armenian architecture, for example, where people worked side by side who, in Italy, described themselves as of one party or the other. Same in Kaffa, and in Byzantium and Pera. It is something which has to be researched through the history of medieval and comparative architecture, because when territories were reclaimed or conquered, one of the first things to be demolished were the previous fortifications. So yes, I think the so-called ‘castle’ in the map (if that’s what you mean) alludes to the place as an imperial enclave, but not specifically Ghibelline.
The bottom pathway also has walls with Ghibelline merlons.
Once again – not intended as specifically ‘Ghibelline’ but in the more general sense as an imperial limit.
I illustrated other examples of this, from Roman times onwards – I mean the custom of delimiting the ‘imperial line’ with a (sometimes notional) wall having a rippled or jagged profile.
These architectural structures did not exist in Africa in the 15th century, so if you want to identify a tower as the lighthouse of Alexandria, you have to explain its anomalous inclusion on a folio replete with Bohemian/Lombardian architecture.
I think the issue is an old one in Voynich studies – the idea that what occurs within your preferred theoretical limit is unique to it. There are also a couple of historical issues – the lighthouse of Alexandria proper was badly affected by a series of earthquakes. By the third quarter of the fourteenth century the stairway was impassable and it was demolished to make way for a fort.
Until you provide credible reasons for the mismatch, it’s a theory.
It’s always good to check before adopting other people’s assertions. Or if you haven’t time to do that, to at least refer your readers to the persons whose assertions you’ve taken up. In general, I find, it’s better to test them thoroughly against the historical (and architectural and even archaeological) studies before taking unattributed ideas on faith.
Of course, you can always ask the proponent more questions, such as the chronological and geographical range over which they sought explanations for those architectural forms.
About theories – I’m annoyed that I didn’t see Nick’s comment on theories before; if I had I might have quoted it in a recent post.
Nick genuine question. Not sarcastic and not provocative.
Your approach is as an historian; mine isn’t so naturally we define things a bit differently.
As I see it, the scientific approach begins with observation, proceeds to understanding what is observed, then tests that understanding to ensure the data that is retained is as reliable as possible and only then sets about (sometimes) to offer a single theory to explain the principle which underlies it all.
So it seems that your definition of an “explanation” is different from what I mean when I use the word.
So – Would you say the difference is essentially qualitative? That it depends on the quality of evidence you’re given if you ask the ‘explainer’ to explain how they came by that explanation of an artefact, or encrypted text or picture?
Diane: science isn’t history. Scientific explanations aren’t historical explanations.
If you ask someone for “an explanation of an artefact”, you’re essentially asking them for their best bullshit. Same for encrypted text or picture. This is why archaeologists end up using the word “ritual” all the time, it’s one of their favourite bullshit explanation words. But it’s not history.
Occasionally explanations prove useful, specifically when they lead researchers to ask good piercing questions of the evidence. But most of the time they’re just self-satisfied bullshit narratives that get nobody nowhere.
I’m sure I could rustle up a list of bullshit Voynich explanations that is longer than the Silk Road.
Nick – History may be bunk as Ford or Twain or someone said, but you’re quite wrong about explanations of art and artefacts.
What I do find irritating about your more extreme flights of caustic fantasy is that you obviously don’t believe a word of what you say if you do believe it you’re either a rank hypocrite or split-brained about it. If you really did mean it then you’d never again cite any date given for any medieval manuscript, or accept any explanation of any image which wasn’t provided with a written label that you could read.
If someone bought a nice little fifteenth century majolica albarello for you, for Christmas, you’d have to sneer and say it might as easily have been made in nineteenth century Mongolia.
Be real.
D.N., I don’t agree with your statements.
The V-style of merlon still had political connotations in the early 15th century. They weren’t as strong as previously, but they were there, and the geographic specificity of the merlons reflected this. So it is acceptable to refer to them as Ghibelline merlons (as opposed to the decorative swallowtail merlons that came later).
The Ghibelline merlons were emblematic of the schism between those who supported the pope and those who supported the Holy Roman Empire, a schism that stretched over several centuries and affected large groups of people (not just two specific families) well into the 15th century.
I did a great deal of research on this subject (several years) trying to determine when they transitioned from political emblems to decorative architectural features. I collected hundreds of medieval maps to determine where they were and when they were added. I also collected medieval chronicles, and manuscript illuminations that include the merlons, and it’s clear that writers didn’t just talk about them and illustrators didn’t just add them because they liked them, but because they represented a specific locality or a specific political perspective.
At the point where they came to be seen as more decorative than political, they began to spread (as decorative elements) to other parts of central Europe and also the southeast Mediterranean (brought there by colonists and crusaders). This appears to have occurred sometime in the latter 15th century. There are indications that Rhodes may have had them added by c. 1480s or 1490s but it is unlikely that they were there in the early 15th century.
By the 16th century it becomes more appropriate to call them swallowtails or one of the other words used for decorative architectural structures. Some people still saw them as political but that was within the smaller geographical region where there were ancestral ties to the original feud.
The swallowtail shape became so popular by the 17th century that many decaying or destroyed towers were rebuilt with swallowtail merlons, or the existing merlons modified. Obviously it would not be appropriate to call these later merlons Ghibelline because their intention was fashionable rather than political.
I’ve seen many people post examples of swallowtail merlons that were not on the original towers, but were added later. I’ve also seen some posted that don’t really qualify as swallowtail merlons—they are similar, but they are considered to be a different style. I think it’s important to focus on the ones that existed in the historical time period relevant to the VMS and not on the decorative versions that spread throughout the region after the 15th century.
So D.N. is presenting herself as a scientist and Nick Pelling as a historian.
[pause while the reader absorbs this…]
The next thing I’ll expect to see is a caterpillar smoking a hookah.
….Or why not, “The road to Gondolfo” which has it’s very impressive ghibelline fortifications albeit, sadly no signs of the circa. 1465 swallow tailed merlons with which we at VM have become so accustomed.
Diane: to be clear, for me history = evidence + argument + reasoning (+ occasionally proof). Explanations are narrative psychological bullshit, not history.
If I talk about the techniques used to make albarelli or their sales/export patterns, that’s history. If I talk about the stuff going on in albarello makers’ heads as to why they did things the way they did, that’s explanation = narrative psychological bullshit.
So I have not the faintest idea what you’re talking about here.
@Nick
Albarelli with handle are still used by me today. 🙂
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQMU9EIUY7K7YNQSEH9It_RGHhLv_9N_jW1XOvJyjidWX_i58OkpQ&s
Nick – this just isn’t true.
If, while leafing through a medieval manuscript, you notice the image of a monk and a flying bird whose head is pointed directly towards his ear-hole, you might theorise all you like about the historical connection between birds and monks, but it what was ‘going on in the maker’s mind’ and in the intended readers’ and the conventions in art current in that time and region which allow us to know the bird’s there as token of divine inspiration.
If the same sort of combination (man with bird near his ear) occurred in an image whose stylistics indicated a very different time and place of origin, then the explanation – “what was going on in the maker’s and readers’ mind” could not be explained by analogy with the medieval Latin Christian example, could it?
Then you have the third and important distinction between enunciation of an image and the present material object.
Another constant error in Voynich writings is merely to presume the images originated in whatever time and culture they believe the present manuscript was physically produced.
I’m absolutely in agreement with anyone who says that airy-fairy guesswork is useless, and I doubt any theory which ignores the technical issues of manufacture and production: it is an issue constantly avoided by those holding the ‘central European’ theory, for example.
So too with the important questions of palaeography and the text’s statistical analysis, which haven’t provided much support for the ‘c-e theory’ either.
It annoys me, I admit, when such important criteria are ‘decided’ by the simple means of nothing better than anonymous assertions delivered as if by authority from on high.
So far the ‘Germanic’ theory relies on a few bits of marginalia – a problem addressed, it seems, by unattributed assertions such as JKP’s saying that the marginalia is contemporary with the rest of the text’s inscription.
Is it his bright bit of hypothesising, or does he owe it to someone else? Who first proposed that idea, and where can I read that person’s evidence and argument.
It seems characteristic of the ‘I believe it cos it suit me’ attitude, that without so much as asking whether his ideas are valid, Mr. Petersen should assert/imply/insinuate that you have no qualifications in historical studies…
But since Mr. Petersen’s comments are plainly aimed at the gallery he makes of your readers, I’ll leave it to others to respond to his ‘third-party’ addresses in future. I’ll gladly respond to any questions posted to my own blog about my research , evidence, reasoning, sources, and other useful bibliographic references I can help with.
Diane: for me, this is a discussion about what the nature and limits of Intellectual History are.
Even though Intellectual History is centrally defined as the study of the historical flow of ideas, it achieves its end by the careful study of material objects that express, embody and communicate those ideas. And typically, as with Art History, those ideas are about how to represent other ideas, such as emotions or recipes.
For me, I don’t think the kind of symbology / iconology you describe falls into that category, particularly where it relies upon discussing what was going on in some long dead person’s head.
For me, then, history is fundamentally about artefactual evidence. Stray into psychological explanations all you like, but please don’t pass that off as history.
D.N. O’Donovan wrote: “So far the ‘Germanic’ theory relies on a few bits of marginalia – a problem addressed, it seems, by unattributed assertions such as JKP’s saying that the marginalia is contemporary with the rest of the text’s inscription.
Is it his bright bit of hypothesising, or does he owe it to someone else? Who first proposed that idea, and where can I read that person’s evidence and argument.”
Attribution of the script style to the earlier 15th century is based on my own research. Extremely thorough and careful research.
I have searched more than 12,000 manuscripts in the last 12+ years. I have collected more than 3,000 SETS of script samples chosen SPECIFICALLY because they are consistent with the style on 116v. I have created a mathematical system to compare individual characters in order to reduce subjective interpretation as much as possible.
I have very extensive charts and data to support the temporal attribution of the script style (and other characteristics of the text).
This is not related in any way to any “Germanic theory” which you love to conflate with discussions of the script itself.
I would suggest that you consider the script style and the languages on 116v as separate issues, because this script style was used broadly from England to southern Italy and from Spain to eastern Europe. It was not confined to Germany (or had anything specific to do with Germany) and has nothing to do with the languages on the folio. Thousands of scholars learned to write in the same style but it is a style that did not exist in the earlier 14th century and had mostly disappeared by the 16th century.
In time I might be able to triangulate down to a more specific region of where the person learned to write, but that will be based on the data, not on “theories” of where the VMS came from and it is always possible that the scribe learned to write in one region but lived and worked in another (in other words, it might geolocate the writer’s childhood, but does not necessarily geolocate the VMS).
Nick – I don’t know the degree to which others rely on primary evidence and secondary scholarly studies in forming their Voynich ideas, theories, opinions or conclusions, and I’m not sure I quite understand how you, yourself, define any “ways of seeing”, “intellectual history”, “cultural attitudes” or distinguish these from your definition of “psychology”.
My *impression* (underlined) is that you have an unspoken ‘individual…’ before psychology, and if so we are already at cross-purposes.
I am not of the opinion that the work had a single author, and we know that more than one scribe and draughtsman worked on the thing – so for me the whole ‘individual personality’ aspect is irrelevant and I attribute its persistence in Voynich studies to that constant inclination to heroising individual personality and ‘genius’ which so typical of the older kings-and-things sort of history, and is so well illustrated by Wilfrid’s talk in 1921 and the unthinking presumptions o that time, transmitted through to the matter in d’Imperio’s book (though I understand that if the text is believed enciphered, an ‘author’ theory for the written text, at least, is unavoidable).
My sort of work is about identifying the historical and cultural context proper to an artefact (or, all too often some fragment) and its materials.
Normally, one has, or immediately commissions, specialist assessment of the materials and I was really quite astonished to realise, when first asked to look at the Vms, that there was no formal assessment yet of the palaeography and only your efforts to treat the codicological problems. As I recall yours remained the only writings addressing codicology from (2007-c.2014) while Voynicheros found theory-spinning of greater interest and the usual meme was : “unnecessary” and “too complicated”. Things have now changed, a little, but we still haven’t a full technical description of the pigments – absolutely key information but we don’t have it.
So all one can do is rely on the usual means for putting an image in context – and that does depend on understanding the different ways in which different communities ‘saw things’ – because people draw what they talk about, and in terms of how they think about it.
..
The basic rule is “Form and Informing thought”.. It’s like a fingerprint, sort of. It’s why someone is able to say whether the image of an angel is Christian or Muslim or why it’s not an ‘angel’ in that sense at all, but a winged figure produced by another sort of culture and environment. It’s also why we can say whether the image of an angel was produced by Coptic Christians, Syrian Christians, Byzantine Christians or western European (‘Latin’) Christians.
But there’s a good deal more to it. You have to understand the significance of what is *not* there, and this is where most approaches to the Vms have their weakest point. To know that you need to know rather more than what a person can learn just by looking at something.
I guess that even now though I’ve been doing this sort of work for some time – and from long before being asked to look at the Vms – I’d still spend perhaps 40%-50% of my time studying primary and secondary studies on subjects ranging from economic history to cultural practices in one region or another at some particular time.. about 10% reading other input (such as what the client’s brother in law told him a chap in some other town thought about it after looking at a phone-image online), and then about 20% just focused on the object itself and perhaps 20% writing up a report. Not much time for theorising. The Vms is a mount Everest in this sort of work. I’m only glad I don’t have to bother too much about the written part of the text and I stand in awe of the historical-comparative linguistic efforts and the stoicism of the cryptographers.
But the sort of work I do isn’t “art history” in the sense you seem to mean the word. Nor does ‘individual personality’ have much to do with it. Of course, specialists in, say, English fourteenth century manuscript art can put details into context so precisely that they can identify a particular painter as ‘e.g. the such-and-such master’ but the price of such intense specialisation is that one hasn’t time for the sort of cross-disciplinary studies needed for other sorts of work.
In fact, modern western art’s emphasis on personality, the individual and the idea of psychology as individual and unique makes pieces easier to assign to a person, native region and time-frame. 🙂
Diane: this is just ridiculous. You start your comment here clearly flagging (both to everyone else and yourself) that this is going to be a straw man argument about some presumed single author based on an “*impression*”, and then you go ahead and do it anyway.
Look, you have your own (multiple) blogs to post up this kind of straw man bullshit, please think twice before posting it here. You clearly knew it was bullshit, but posted it anyway.
Finally: it seems to me that what you do isn’t so much Art History as old-fashioned Iconology/Iconography, but from which work you somehow hope to draw Art History conclusions. This may (in my opinion) be the root cause of some of the evidential issues you tend to face when constructing arguments.
Nick – Yes, I run two blogs, ‘Annotated Voynich News’ is about Voynich news and ‘Voynich Revisionist’ was designed as a critical survey of the study’s history, and errors with long-lasting effects.
Have I breached some Voynich edict? Or is that some meme you’re parroting. I must say I’ve heard it before – though what it has to do with the quality of evidence or research has never been clear. Is a person only supposed to publish books, but not papers? To write a blog but not express opinions in a forum? What exactly is he principle which defines a person as ‘inferior’ by inference and meme?
The Grand Meme-r has also generated memes just as brainless and just as catchy about you, as it happens, but I tend to look for quality of evidence in everything, so am pretty well meme-immune.
When the low standards current in ‘Voynich studies’ depress me, I spend time reading early posts to Jim Reeds’ list and the air of assumed equality heartens me. No ‘meme-r’ propaganda there.
Personal efforts to claim a person ‘inferior’ while being unable to address anything they’ve said about the manuscript, are hardly helpful and actually counterproductive, as the study’s history proves.
Had Friedman realised that impressions of social ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ have no place in academic study, he might have deigned to ask from Panofsky a full description and opinion about the manuscript instead of his ill-informed and positively rude questions. We might also have still had the benefit of Fr. Petersen’s years’ of work – unruined.
But then Friedman no scholar and seems to have considered all scholars inferior types, doesn’t he?
Diane: I can honestly say I have no idea what you’re talking about here. I made a fairly basic point in what I thought was clear enough language, but off you went into meme conspiracies and bullshit about Friedman. Good luck with that, whatever it is.
Mark Knowles, ¿hay posibilidad de que me des acceso a ver las fotos del MS Bodleian Add. 23? Muchas gracias por tu labor.
Hi Nick,
online scans of Pavia ms Aldini 211 are now available:
http://www.internetculturale.it/jmms/iccuviewer/iccu.jsp?id=oai:www.internetculturale.sbn.it/Teca:20:NT0000:N:CNMD0000292373
In case the url above does not work, you can type “aldini 211” in the search box at http://www.internetculturale.it