The Voynich Ninja

The New York Review of Books

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The Voynich Manuscript
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edited by Raymond Clemens, with an introduction by Deborah Harkness
Beinecke Library/ Yale University Press, 304 pp., $50.00

Thank you, David. Interesting review!

It's nice to see that the author, the historian Eamon Duffy, has taken the time to carefully note a number of anomalies in Voynich plants.

Quote:Roots and branches bifurcate and then rejoin again to form a single stem (folios 5v, 22, 23, 40, 52), two separate stalks are joined by a single lateral branch or end in the same single leaf (23), slender stalks emerge from holes in the thick flat surfaces of roots that have been cut across like sawn tree trunks (14, 16, 16v, 19, 39v, 45v), and spiky leaves exactly mirror the forms of the same plant’s improbable roots (54).

I agree, this is the best of such reviews I've read so far. Well researched and balanced.
Edit: I hadn't read the last bit yet, where the author leaps from the observation that the plants aren't naturalistic to speculating that the whole MS is likely meaningless...