The Voynich Ninja

René:

Quote:I seem to remember that the ones Th.Petersen indicated were not all the most obvious ones. 

There also seem to be some mistakes - e.g. item 8 on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. does not look like the plant on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at all.
For those where I could see the resemblance, the labels do not occur on the respective herbal pages.

Rene,
(re post of Monday, February 8th, 2016, 08:06 am)


Yes, that's a very famous image, which I've described myself.  The date is important, as is the manuscript's provenance.

The person sitting in the chair is not a pharmacist; he's a high-ranking physician, as you can tell by his clothing.  This was the time when the Physicians of the Faculty were imposing rules on keepers of pharmacies and checking them twice a year - in addition to imposing an oath on them etc.

The picture is not of an average pharmacy, but of one which kept and maintained the highest standards and ingredients.  This is the 'message' of the unusual containers among those on the bottom shelf - they are meant to be seen as 'exotic' containers.

The physician is looking stern, as if to say "What's all this then?!"

and the pharmacist looks to me as if he's saying, "Wot, me, gov.  I never put nuffin' dodgy in the jar. It musta gone orf."

This is not a complete list, and also not in any particular order.  Feel free to add to it.

102r1, bottom left - 37v (root)
102r1, bottom right - 1v (root)

102r2, top left - 47v (root)
102r2, top right - 32v (flower, root, and leaf)
102r2, bottom - 18v-23r (roots)

102v1, bottom middle - 19r (root)

89v1, top right - 48v (root)

88r, middle row 2nd - 15r (leaf tip) (also 100r top right)

I came across this book, which seems interesting for the format in which containers, plants and other ingredients are presented.

"You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.", by al-Muḫtār Ibn-al-Ḥasan Ibn-Buṭlān, published in Strasbourg by Johann Schott, 1531

Since Koen elsewhere expressed his belief that pharma section labels represent plant names, I did some screening checks and then I found this thread in which I would like to state the following discouraging considerations as to the aforementioned proposal.

1) Many of the pharma section labels are unique words. E.g. in f88r, even if we exclude the labels that might be attributed to jars, 38% of labels are unique; in f88v, using the same principle, 50% of labels are unique.

2) Furthermore, not all non-unique labels are mentioned in the botanical folios. In f88r, 25% of non-unique labels, and in f88v, 40% of
non-unique labels, are those which are mentioned only outside of the botanical folios.

Considering 1) and 2), we can state that for the book, the opening part of which is an extensive herbal, it is strange to have so many herbs not mentioned in the descriptive subject section.

3) Some labels are re-used through the pharma section. Like, otoldy is used in f89r1, then in f89r2 (but here it can be attributed to the jar), but also in 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. where it labels two roots of entirely different appearance.

4) Here and there there are more labels than plants, even if we provide for the jars. Like in the third row of f99r: tha jar has its own label inside, so to the right of it we have 8 labels for only 7 objects. In the third row of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. we have 7 labels for 5 objects.

Point 4) is not decisive, because there could be plants which names are encoded with multiple vords arranged in an uncareful fashion.

Taken together, all these points, I am afraid, waive the possibility that the pharma section labels are plant names.

Anton. Another example of a support point 3. This word  “otol” is encountered in three different sections in the form of labels. .  F102v2, f77r, f68r1. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Thx Wladimir, I wrote about that more than once. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is another occurrence (otol shedy).

Anton,
Although I realise that most people are happy to see the plants as forming a medicinal herbal, my conclusions were that many of the plants (or groups) shown were not ones being used in manufacture - in which I include medicines, dyes, perfumes and all that sort of thing - but were materials intended to maintain the men and the modes of transport  used in the east-west trade.

Several, as I concluded after analysing the imagery, were plants chiefly used for food, ropes, timber and subsidiary needs (e.g. the lufffa, which I think I identified before Sherwood did, but I may be mistaken) was chiefly used as a sort of carpenter's sandpaper, and the hemp-plant chiefly for its fibre, even in Europe. The hallucinogenic sort was chiefly grown in north Africa, and even in Europe the chief reasons for cultivating hemp in the middle ages was for its use as ship's rope and caulking.

But this sort of distinction between plants which were intended for processing into dyes, medicines, perfumes, incense and whathaveyou, and those which were meant to be consumed en route (food, ship-maintenance etc.) might explain why so many of the labels in the botanical section do not occur in the 'roots and leaves' section.

Just a thought.

(18-04-2016, 11:10 AM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anton,
Although I realise that most people are happy to see the plants as forming a medicinal herbal, my conclusions were that many of the plants (or groups) shown were not ones being used in manufacture - in which I include medicines, dyes, perfumes and all that sort of thing - but were materials intended to maintain the men and the modes of transport  used in the east-west trade.

Several, as I concluded after analysing the imagery, were plants chiefly used for food, ropes, timber and subsidiary needs (e.g. the lufffa, which I think I identified before Sherwood did, but I may be mistaken) was chiefly used as a sort of carpenter's sandpaper, and the hemp-plant chiefly for its fibre, even in Europe. The hallucinogenic sort was chiefly grown in north Africa, and even in Europe the chief reasons for cultivating hemp in the middle ages was for its use as ship's rope and caulking.

But this sort of distinction between plants which were intended for processing into dyes, medicines, perfumes, incense and whathaveyou, and those which were meant to be consumed en route (food, ship-maintenance etc.) might explain why so many of the labels in the botanical section do not occur in the 'roots and leaves' section.

Just a thought.

Actually when we first began this discussion with Koen, I was (and still am) interested in the names of the plants depicted in the botanical section. So the question was - if those plants are repeated in the pharma section, then does the pharma section label represent that plant's name?

There may be plants in the pharma section which are not present in the botanical section. Are there? This would have been a good analysis to show which way it is.

Offhand, I'd say that I would expect the pharma section only to re-use plants mentioned in the botanical section, but not to introduce any new plants.

Why? Let's see what we have. We have a document (a book, for brevity) containing several thematical sections - "botanical", "astrological", "pharmaceutical" etc. (the terms are just for formal designation, they may or may not guess the subject matter of the sections correctly).

Being a book in the aforementioned sense, the VMS may or may not be a compendium of older works - that does not matter here.

Now, the book opens with the botanical section. Not only is this section the leading one, but it is also the largest one, greatly overweighting all other sections in size. (I omit the assumption that botanical folios were kept being added later (as if to make the set of plants even more comprehensive) - because, if I am not mistaken, a way to rebind the MS can be shown in which all botanical folios will appear consecutive.)

So the very notion of plant is introduced into the MS by the botanical section and the botanical section looks like a vast reference of plants. It is only natural to expect that this reference is on purpose - to be used in a certain way by the later sections. You first decribe objects, and then their use, and not vice versa.

Now, given that scope of the plants' reference presented in the botanical section, why would the pharma section take over the function of the former and introduce new plants, not described before? This would just mean that the botanical section failed to fulfil its task, that it was a poor and incomplete reference of plants.

(18-04-2016, 04:01 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why? Let's see what we have. We have a document (a book, for brevity) containing several thematical sections - "botanical", "astrological", "pharmaceutical" etc. (the terms are just for formal designation, they may or may not guess the subject matter of the sections correctly).

Being a book in the aforementioned sense, the VMS may or may not be a compendium of older works - that does not matter here.

Now, the book opens with the botanical section. Not only is this section the leading one, but it is also the largest one, greatly overweighting all other sections in size. (I omit the assumption that botanical folios were kept being added later (as if to make the set of plants even more comprehensive) - because, if I am not mistaken, a way to rebind the MS can be shown in which all botanical folios will appear consecutive.)

So the very notion of plant is introduced into the MS by the botanical section and the botanical section looks like a vast reference of plants. It is only natural to expect that this reference is on purpose - to be used in a certain way by the later sections. You first decribe objects, and then their use, and not vice versa.

Now, given that scope of the plants' reference presented in the botanical section, why would the pharma section take over the function of the former and introduce new plants, not described before? This would just mean that the botanical section failed to fulfil its task, that it was a poor and incomplete reference of plants.

The 1460 ca Vienna manuscript containing works by Giovanni Cadamosto da Lodi (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) provides a parallel that could be of some interest.

The manuscript consists of two main sections:

1. A herbal describing about 300 plants (p.13-173). Each page illustrates two plants with a textual description. This section looks quite similar to the Voynich "herbal" (but for the fact that are two plants per page).

2. A treaty on food including different chapters:
174-182 about 20 vegetables
183-202 about 20 fruits
203-236 drinks, cheese, cooked food, meat etc.
In the second section, each page contains two scenes each with people cooking, eating or trading a specific kind of food. This section is not so similar to the Voynich pharma section, but still it includes plants, so it could be a relevant parallel.

The last twenty pages (237-257) contain other short treaties in different formats on various subjects (the seasons and the weather, a list of recipes, properties of stones).

The herbal describes the medical use of plants. There could be a small overlap between the entries in the herbal and those in the food section:
* onion “cigola” (p.50 -cigola squilla- “sea onion”, 175 “onion”)
* garlic “aleo” (p.21 -wild garlic-, 175 “garlic”)
* cucumber "cucumero" (p.62 -”donkey” cucumber, 167 “cucumber”)
Also in these few cases, the names of the plants present a qualifier that suggests that the herbal mentions a “wild” variety of the plant, different from the variety used as food.


Another parallel could be the XII Century English ms You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which includes two different herbals (Pseudo-Apuleius and Pseudo-Dioscorides). In this case, the two works are by different authors and have a similar scope (both are about the medical use of plants). The two works have a significant overlap: e.g.  Aristolochia, Arnaglosa, Buglossa, Camellea, Dragontea, Heliotropium, Lapatium, Scilla, Titimallos.