Thanks to Thomas_S for bringing up this MS.
JKP's point that some illustrations are based on prints of plants is confirmed by the library description.
This made me look at Karen Reeds' article in Chapter 8 of "Givens, Reeds and Touwaide: Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200 - 1550", which has the title: "Leonardo da Vinci and Botanical Illustration: Nature Prints, Drawings and Woodcuts c. 1500."
Here the MS is only mentioned briefly as one of three pre-dating Leonardo's use of prints of plants. It gives a reference for this MS:
Elisabeth Antoine (ed): Sur la terre comme au ciel: Jardins d'occident à la fin du môyen age (Paris 2002), pp.228-9.
As far as I can tell, the MS has components from different sources, i.e. many of the herbs that come from the alchemical herbals, as Marco already pointed out, but also many that come from other traditions.
Thomas: when a tree is depicted in the VM, as far as we know it is drawn as a twig of that tree with roots added. For my reasoning, see this post You are not allowed to view links.
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If we see the VM plant as one "branch" of D. cinnabari, it's actually not too bad. This would even explain the bump on the stem since its branches are gnarly. It is a fact that the VM added roots to the oak twig where other manuscripts didn't, and it stubbornly draws roots on every plant or twig. So here, too, the roots look like they've been added to a twig of the tree.
Adding to that the dragon and, apparently, the sap, I still see D. cinnabari as the most likely candidate for this plant.
The most useful post on this topic, in my opinion, was made quite a while ago, and i have not been able to find it back quickly. I believe that it may have been from JKP.
It went along the following lines (now adjusted with some additional points):
A dragon near a plant could indicate several things:
a) the name has something to do with dragons
b) the plant is poisonous
c) the plant can be used against poisoning
d) (new): the plant is important for its sap
Point (d) is clearly still to be confirmed.
Just to pick one of the four options as the preferred one is necessarily an arbitrary decision.
Dragons are very common figures to appear near many different herbs in herbal manuscripts, and their appearance cannot be used to identify the herb.
Even if one were to decide arbitrarily that in the case of the Voynich MS the dragon refers to the name of the herb, the list of options is very large indeed. The list of languages of herb names to pick from is already quite extensive.
I would favor the poison-related explanations if more plants had been marked this way. In the VM large plants, however, we get a single plant with a dragon and another with two snakes entwined in the roots.
I admit there's some comfirmation bias on my part because the sap thing confirms Dracaena. It would also explain the dragon's sucking rather than biting appearance. It would indeed be interesting to find out more about the reason why a dragon was apparently associated with plant sap.
In her discussion of ms Clm. 337 (Latin Dioscorides, late X Century) You are not allowed to view links.
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Beside and behind the plants and in the margins are scattered decorative, coloured drawings of snakes, scorpions, dragons, dogs and insects, which, it will be seen below, are a feature of Latin Herbals to draw attention to cures for the bites and stings of those creatures. The effect is decorative, almost humorous.
This feature is extremely common indeed, hence not very informative. The association of reptiles (snakes or dragons) with snake byte is preponderant. This particular illustration of Erba Gengiana also fits the pattern, since the plant is said to “heal snake bites” (vale a le morsure di serpenti, second to last row of the text).
The same plant is very differently represented in the Alchemical Herbal, sometimes in the company of a dragon (e.g. You are not allowed to view links.
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The Gengiana illustration pointed out by Thomas is a good parallel for You are not allowed to view links.
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- the leaves are similar to those of the Voynich plant
- accompanying dragons are not frequent in the ms (“Gengiana” could be the only case in which they appear, even if of course there are the usual zoomorphic roots)
- the dragons appear to be nibbling at the plant (the roots, in this case)
I find it is sometimes informative because specific illustrators often use the serpents or dragons in consistent ways.
For example, in one of the very old English herbals, every time there is a snake next to the plant, the text includes a notation that it is for snake bite.
In Palatino 586 there are many animals and people surrounding the plants. At first I couldn't figure out what they represented, but after going through all the plants three times I realized that most of them represent how the plant is used, in somewhat metaphorical ways. I couldn't figure out all of them, but once you see how this particular person illustrated them, some of the meanings become clear.
In others, the text doesn't offer any help (some don't have text), but if you can find three or four dragons next to identifiable plants, you can sometimes figure out their meaning.
[As an aside: Another convention that is very common is to create a root that looks like a snake for plants that have snaky roots and which often (because of the snaky root) have names like "snake root", "viperina", etc. The VMS has three plants with snakes in the root. I think they mean different things though. Two of them have snakes that are the root, but the third (the one that I suspect is Cuscuta) has snakes interlaced with the root (they are not part of the host plant, but intertwined with it in the same way the parasitic Cuscuta entwines itself with its host).]
Unfortunately, there is only one dragon (if it is a dragon) closely associated with a plant in the VMS, making it difficult to look for patterns. I sometimes wonder what was in the missing quire that might have made things more clear.
(29-08-2017, 11:23 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would favor the poison-related explanations if more plants had been marked this way. In the VM large plants, however, we get a single plant with a dragon and another with two snakes entwined in the roots.
I admit there's some comfirmation bias on my part because the sap thing confirms Dracaena. It would also explain the dragon's sucking rather than biting appearance. It would indeed be interesting to find out more about the reason why a dragon was apparently associated with plant sap.
Maybe, it was an influence of some ancient legends about dragons, which were mentioned in such work as the Natural History of Pliny, where he refered to Xanthus of Lydia and the king Juba II of Numidia and Mauritania. The matter is about an unknown herb named Balis (Balin, Balus, Balim), which returns to life dragon babies and, in the same time, a man killed by a dragon can be saved with the same plant. This fragment was quoted You are not allowed to view links.
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There is the constant confusion with this herb(s) and its name. You are not allowed to view links.
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P. S. You are not allowed to view links.
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Veratrum is one of the plants on my list:
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At the time I uploaded this ID (2013 and 2016), I didn't include
Dracaena because it's more of a tropical or desert plant and wasn't well-known in the 15th century within Europe or most of north-coastal Africa, and the leaves aren't quite parallel, but given the presence of the "dragon", other researchers have convinced me
Dracaena might qualify.
I still think
Plantago is the closest visual match to the leaves, but then the dragon would have to be nibbling rather than smelling or sucking, because
Plantago has no significant smell and no significant sap. It is edible (and also used medicinally).
Thew fact that
Veratrum is toxic doesn't discount it as a possible ID. A very high proportion of medieval medicinal plants were toxic. In fact, you almost get the feeling that they considered toxins as a way to root out body toxins because they used them so widely. This was true even in the 19th and 20th centuries, when mercury, which is highly toxic, was used to treat Syphilis.
Since both Thomas (when he first linked the newly scanned Paris, Museum national d'histoire naturelle Ms 326 "Recueil de dessins de plantes" 1487) and JKP (in another thread) commented on the text of Gengiana, I share here my rough transcription and translation.
Vale ale ulcere | cavernox al suco |
Vale a le ferite | de l erba e radice |
Questa. erba si domanda gengiana la qale nase in cima de monti ombrosi |
a la radice grosa amara di sua natura e calda e seca bevuta cum vina .a. |
peso de 3.ij cum pevaro e ruta vale a le morsure de serpenti e una drama del |
suco bevuto cuntra al male de costa e caduto d alto .amacia li vermi.
Translation:
The juice heals cavernous ulcers
The root of the plant heals wounds
This plant is called Gengiana. It grows on the top of shady mountains. |
It has a large root. Its [Galenic] nature is hot and dry. Drank with wine [? “vina” for “vino”] by |
the weight of 3 ij [? I don't know what this weight abbreviation means] with pepper [“pevaro” - could also mean "Asarum europaeum"] and rue it heals snake bytes. Drinking one drachma of its |
juice [helps] against chest pain and [wounds caused by?] falling from high. It kills parasites.
_______
Several words point to a Veneto origin for this manuscript:
- cavernox[e] - the Venetian dialect is basically the only Italian dialect using "x"
- grosa for grossa, seca for secca - dropping double consonants is also typical of the Venetian dialect
- pevaro for "pepper" orYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - I only found this term used in Veneto (Padua/Treviso in particular).