The Voynich Ninja

I have looked at the Common-Greek-Hebrew part of the manuscript and here are some names that seem to more or less make sense with the description of the plants (much less so with the illustrations):

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Yeramios
florem rubeam modum nigelle
red flower similar to Nigella
Could be some kind of Hieracium with reddish flowers, eg
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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Dabelion
(the description is partly unreadable)
foliis similibus cameleonte agresti. ... stipitem crocesas rotundis ... flore facit
leaves similar to Dipsacus, round yellow [flowers?]
The name suggests Dandelion "Dent de lion" Taraxacum, but the illustration shows a bulbous root, so it could be some other plant with the same name, 
e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.


You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Jacintus
unam stipem rectam habens rub[eam] cum florem unum celestem in summo
a single straight red stem with a blue flower on the top
It could be the obvious You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:MarcoP I have looked at the Common-Greek-Hebrew part of the manuscript and here are some names that seem to more or less make sense with the description of the plants (much less so with the illustrations):

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Yeramios

I think this might be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It has red flowers and a fancy pistil (similar to Nigella) with palmate leaves. Also, the name would fit (I realized the name was a good match after I found a possible identity for the plant). If you Latinize "Yeramios" to Yeramium, it sounds like Geranium.

Quote:MarcoP: 185v bottom Dabelion
(the description is partly unreadable)
foliis similibus cameleonte agresti. ... stipitem crocesas rotundis ... flore facit
leaves similar to Dipsacus, round yellow [flowers?]
The name suggests Dandelion "Dent de lion" Taraxacum, but the illustration shows a bulbous root, so it could be some other plant with the same name, 
e.g. Leontodon bulbosus

This might be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Marsh fleawort)
It has roundish yellow flowers with short rays, a cluster at the top, and some coming from the leaf nodes down the stem. The leaves are like Dipsacus, elliptical and somewhat toothed, and it has a round bulb. So the shape of the plant is a good match but I haven't been able to reconcile the name.

Quote:MarcoP:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Jacintus
unam stipem rectam habens rub[eam] cum florem unum celestem in summo
a single straight red stem with a blue flower on the top
It could be the obvious You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

You're right about the name being hyacinth (west-European hyacinth), but the plant doesn't match hyacinth at all. Hyacinth flowers are round or bell-shaped and often droop, and hyacinths always have a spike of flowers, and the leaves are always narrow and coming from the base. I'm scratching my head over the name.

From the drawing, one might guess periwinkle or  Veronica, except that the text makes a point of saying it's a single straight stem, which immediately eliminates both periwinkle and Veronica (which are viny plants with multiple curved stems) unless it's Veronica fruticans which is a little more upright than the other Veronicas and has red stems.

Some of the gentians have red stems, but the leaves don't look like this.

With the round bulb and a name like Jacintus, one might think it was one of the blue-flowered squills (a kind of onion), but the leaves are completely wrong.

The Tibetan blue poppy has a straight stalk, blue flowers with wide petals at the top, and some of the leaves are odd pinnate (near the bottom, the others are lanceolate). It has a clumpy root. But the stalk is not typically red. But...

...it could be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It matches reasonably well and some of them have red stalks. Polemonium has odd-pinnate leaves and blue flowers with broad petals, but Polemonium usually has three or four flowers at the top, so it depends on whether the illustrator simplified it to one flower to keep it uncluttered. It's mostly a North American plant, but there are species that grow in cooler areas in Europe, but... it usually has a tap root, so I'm not completely sure the Trinity plant is Polemonium, but it's the closest one I can find so far.

Conoriel, at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., looks like Dandelion.

The Greek name "stakis" suggests You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
The text says the plant has no stem and leaves similar to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Quite exceptionally, the text also provides Latin names for the plant: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (left).

How to make sense of all these different plants? Where does "conoriel" come from?

(05-05-2017, 03:19 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Conoriel, at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., looks like Dandelion.

The Greek name "stakis" suggests You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
The text says the plant has no stem and leaves similar to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Quite exceptionally, the text also provides Latin names for the plant: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (left).

How to make sense of all these different plants? Where does "conoriel" come from?

It certainly looks like a form of dandelion.

It might say "stakis" but it might also be "stal'is" (staleris or staliris, which sounds like "stellaris" and which would fit the rays on a daisy-like flower).

If they mean Pliny/Plinius where it says pl'es (I'm not sure it is Pliny, but it does look like a reference to a person or group of people), then it says, "Pliny calls it ox-eye and ass lettuce", so maybe these are not meant as Latin names for this specific plant so much as a reference to how the plant looks (like saying "it resembles ox-eye by the daisy-like flower and basal whorl, and ass lettuce by its edibility in the group of dandelion, chicory and other lettuce-like plants").


Most lactuca species, sow thistles, and hawkweeds have long flower stalks, dandelion is one of the few that sometimes has short flower stalks, so a reference to a short stem would fit well with Taraxacum (common dandelion). Dandelion has more local names than almost any other plant and it's hard to know if the root of conoriel is conori, conor, conos, or something else.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has red veins in the leaves and the flower is pale yellow and sometimes white rather than yellow, so it looks almost like a daisy flower (which would explain the oculis bovis reference). It matches very closely to the drawing: red veins, short stem, light-colored flowers. I've noticed other alpine and cold-weather plants mentioned in the Trinity MS, so an arctic plant wouldn't be out of place.

It might also explain the unfamiliar name. Common names of northern plants are often based on Gaelic, Norse, and Finnish rather than Greek or Latin. I can't account for the Hebrew name, an arctic plant probably wouldn't have a Hebrew name, but some of the arctic plants also grow in mountains in more southern areas, so there might be dandelions similar to Taraxacum arcticum that are more widely distributed in mountain regions.

That drawing is a dandelion if I've ever seen one. They grow everywhere around here these days. Like, you look away from your garden for five minutes and before you know it it's full of dandelions. Everything matches, apart from the fact that you don't get a full view of the flower.

The text says that it grows in the mountains - might this be the case in southern Italy? There are apparently some species that only grow in the mountains. 
The common name is weird indeed. It probably doesn't help that these types of plants get a dozen different names in areas where they are common. Just from the English wiki:

Quote:Taraxacum officinale has many English common names (of which some are no longer in use), including blowball, lion's-tooth, cankerwort, milk-witch, yellow-gowan, Irish daisy, monks-head, priest's-crown and puff-ball;[25] other common names include, faceclock, pee-a-bed, wet-a-bed,[26] swine's snout,[27] white endive, and wild endive.[28]

Now if you turn conoriel into coroniel there might be a hint of a relation with "corona", though that's probably a bit far-fetched.

The part of the MS that intrigues me the most is the part from fol. 65v to fol 106. This has the two illustrations of Galen and Hippocrates at the start.

The problem is that the information about the origin of this MS is quite unclear. It would be extremely helpful if there was anything more concrete. The sticker on the inside of the front cover of the MS says:
"XIII-XIV Century, German? ".
The MS description on the web site says: "14th Century" and: "I think the work is German".

The descriptive introduction on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  is more concrete and says:
"Written and illustrated in Germany in the second part of the 14th Century".
Is that more reliable?

The interesting part of the section f63-f106 for me is that many of the herb names and illustrations are familiar.
But what could have been the source?

They are not repetitions of herbs from the earlier part.
Several do appear in the "Tractatus de Herbis" tradition that traces back to the Salernitan school and the text of Circa Instans, but the place and time are a bit challenging. The earliest illustrated herbals from this tradition are from the first hald of the 14th century and from way south of the alps. Were any examples in Germany?

Paris BN Lat 6823 (the "Manfredus" herbal) is interesting in this respect. For one thing it has an illustration of Galen facing Hippocrates in its introduction, but  also several other ancient physicians.

More than this tradition, Dioscurides could have been a source, but most of these manuscripts were not illustrated, and in particular Latin illustrated copies are rare.

One of the most recognisable herbs in this part of the Cambridge herbal appears under two names, on two pages, and with two illustrations. This is 'Palma Christi' or 'Pentadactilus',  presently known as Ricinus.

[attachment=1354]

The version on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was already mentioned here before, and it provides a reasonably 'true to nature' version of Ricinus.
Someone wrote the name 'palma christi' (abbreviated) in black under the red name 'Pentadactilus'.

The version on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is also found in copies of Tractatus de Herbis:

[attachment=1355]

The similarity is there, but one cannot say that the Cambridge illustration is a copy of one of the other two. It is the same herb, but in an original rendition.
This is where the question of time and place of creation of the Cambridge MS comes in.

Right now I am still puzzled, and I can only suspect that this has already been analysed by some scholar.

Hello Rene, I agree with the great interest of the central part of the herbal. I haven't looked much into it yet, but it seems clear that the illustrations are much more realistic than those in the last section of the herbal. 

I think that in the illustrations you presented, the second Palma Christi plant is not Ricinus, but some kind of orchid (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Ricinus has palmate leaves, Epipactis hand-shaped roots: to the medieval mind, both of these were apparently related with the hands of Christ.

I agree with your observation that, while Cambridge 65v clearly is the same plant as that in Tractatus De Herbis, it is not clear if the illustrations are related or not. I do hope that some scholar has looked into this ms, because there is a huge amount of interesting stuff in text and images. Thank you again for pointing it out!

About lactuca asinina, dandelion is called horse flower in Dutch. According to my etymological dictionary, this is because horses like to eat the plant. Perhaps donkeys have the same culinary preferences..

(05-05-2017, 08:28 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

One of the most recognisable herbs in this part of the Cambridge herbal appears under two names, on two pages, and with two illustrations. This is 'Palma Christi' or 'Pentadactilus',  presently known as Ricinus.



The version on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was already mentioned here before, and it provides a reasonably 'true to nature' version of Ricinus.
Someone wrote the name 'palma christi' (abbreviated) in black under the red name 'Pentadactilus'.

The version on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is also found in copies of Tractatus de Herbis:



The similarity is there, but one cannot say that the Cambridge illustration is a copy of one of the other two. It is the same herb, but in an original rendition.
This is where the question of time and place of creation of the Cambridge MS comes in.

Right now I am still puzzled, and I can only suspect that this has already been analysed by some scholar.

There are two different plants widely known as Palma Christi...

Dactylorhiza maculata (orchid) is Trinity folio 65v, and is reasonably accurate except for the extra leaves, Ricinus (f66v) is quite recognizable, so I've been assuming they were put close together in the Trinity volume due to the similarity in names (maybe to help disambiguate the names?).

As a point of interest, Palatino 586 also includes the orchid version of Palma Christi (with a hand for the root), as does LJS 419.

Indeed, of course, these are two different herbs. The 'orchid' variety can be seen in a lot of manuscripts, in quite similar forms. Most of these are after the proposed date of the Cambridge MS.

I did not include Florence  Palatino 586 since this herb is in the unfinished, unpainted part.

It is also included in many alchemical herbals, but it is missing from Oxford Canon Misc.408 (dated late 14th C). The latter only has the very similar 'Satirion'.

The version of Palma Christi in Morgan MS 873, which would seem to be roughly contemporary with the Cambridge MS, looks more like Ricinus ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ), though the top of the plant is quite unclear.

There are lots more intriguing herbs in the same part of the MS and I have not yet had time to look at all of them.

On  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (top), for example, is a herb with the very distinctive name 'Tetrahit Yudaica'. This herb is also found in the Tractatus tradition, sometimes without and sometimes with the 'Yudaica'. However, the illustration does not look like these.
The description of the herb also refers to Centaurea Minor, and the illustration looks quite similar to that. Now that does not help us a lot, since this herb is common in essentially all herbal traditions that I know of.

At the bottom of the same page we find the herb 'Alleluya', which again is common from all Tractatus herbals. The fact that it looks completely similar is probably due to the fact that the simple shape does not allow for a lot of variation.

What is clear is that it is much easier to come up with lots of questions rather than with answers.

I just have the feeling that I'm stumbling along a road that someone must already have stridden along.

But it's fun.