The Voynich Ninja

Quote:MarcoP:

In his You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Prof. Stephen Bax wrote: "With the notable exception of Zandbergen, it is surprising how few scholars have seriously researched herbal manuscripts contemporary with the VM".

There's no way to know how seriously something has been researched until it is written up. Many medical researchers will study a particular area of research for 20 or 30 years before writing anything up. Not everything can be understood in a few weeks or months.


I've devoted a decade to studying the VMS plants and I already had knowledge of plants before I started and my research goes far beyond individual identifications. I've studied the ecosystems of plants with these particular forms.


Also, Koen, just a suggestion as far as format goes, one large plant per page would not be a good place to start. Many of the herbals most similar to the VMS have two to four plants per page. I would suggest categorizing them by morphology and content rather than by page format.

I would agree that the Tractatus de Herbis tradition is one of the most important in relation to the VMS. It is not only the plants that bear some similarities, but some of the accompanying stories in the later versions (close in time to the VMS) show some cultural similarities.

Also, I think René would agree that in particular Masson 116/Casanatense 459/Sloane 4016 include important parallels.


As I've said in the past, I think whoever was in charge of the plants had knowledge of plants and did not rely on any one source. I think it is a synthesis of personal knowledge and a variety of references. I'm pretty sure this is someone who had access to a library or perhaps more than one library. Someone who filled a role similar to Jacobi Sinapius, but in an earlier time, would be a good candidate. In the 15th century it was very common for those who tended herb gardens to become doctors and for those who were doctors to sometimes become involved in managing herb gardens, especially those belonging to kings.

Kings surrounded themselves with doctors and herbalists. All of them had herb gardens and many of them had five or six doctors. The professionals under their patronage often had access to the king's library and were sometimes even sent off to other libraries to gather information.*

(06-01-2018, 04:12 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Ideally it's dynamic and adapting to our findings. Experience teaches that these things roll more smoothly when there are concrete guidelines beforehand, but these can always be adjusted when we notice that certain things don't work or are missing ....

Ah, now I understand what you mean. In my opinion, a forum is a difficult format to implement something like that. I thought of previously defined tags (properties) in each post so one can work comfortably with the collected information (via the search function). A kind of "header", I think you know what I mean. Of course, with dynamic criteria, this idea is obsolete.

Many of the earliest medieval herbals are from southern Italy in the areas where universities and medical schools were established (Salerno, Naples, Bari) and where multicultural translators were busy translating from Greek and Arabic manuscripts. Two of the most important include


Egerton 747 (c. 1300) Tractatus de Herbis    British Library
Manfredus de Monte Imperiali Ms Latin 6823   BNF

The transmission of these early herbals from southern Italy to southern Lombardy (northern Italy) was often through the colonists' Lombardic connections and sometimes through scholarly connections with universities in Padua, Pisa, Paris, and Heidelberg. Monte Cassino was also an important respository and center of learning at the time, and some who traveled by land rather than by sea passed through here.

This promoted a flush of copies in southern Lombardy (e.g., Masson 116).


However...

These are not the oldest examples. The whole process of transferring herbal knowledge to northern areas actually started much earlier, as can be seen from the English herbals. There was already a strong herbal tradition in the Saxon culture (and possibly in the adjacent Angle culture) that spread through the region in several directions and resulted in leechbooks in England and on the continent. Thus, when additional knowledge and illustrated herbals arrived from parts south, they already had a basis for understanding them and copying them.

For example, the parts of Cotton MS Vitellius C III (British Library) related to herbs date from the early 11th century. They are somewhat stylized, but there are some interesting choices in how they are drawn, such as rings around the base of some of the stalks, and bicolored leaves.

bi3: of course, the intention of essentials threads is (ideally) to render many searches unnecessary. It's like a snowball: as soon as something is written, everybody can comment on it and provide evidence for or against certain content, gradually growing the collected wisdom

But perhaps this subject is indeed too complex for us to treat in this way.

(06-01-2018, 05:59 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

But perhaps this subject is indeed too complex for us to treat in this way.

If you want to help researchers save time and avoid redundancy, I think a good starting point is to post a graph of the herbal traditions. There are about six of maps that give a visual timeline of the major herbals, their dates, and their lineage. It's a bit like a family tree for plant books.

Minta Collins has probably done one (I haven't read her book but it has been spoken of favorably by forum members), and there are several others.

They sometimes differ in details, but they mostly agree on overall lineage and content. I have one of my own, but I'm still fiddling with it, working out some details that I felt were missing from other maps, but those details don't matter to new researchers, any of the major maps on the Net would provide a helpful reference. Ideally an herbal timeline/map would include links to the holding repository.

[quote pid='18733' dateline='1515253311']

Also, I think René would agree that in particular Masson 116/Casanatense 459/Sloane 4016 include important parallels.

[/quote]

I certainly agree.

Casanatense 459 also illustrates the compliication of defining 'relevant'.
It is very different from the Voynich MS, in that it was made for a king, by professional and expert scribes and artists, in a professional MS workshop. At the same time, it is very close in time, and (FWIW) it has one herb per page (mostly).

It was sent to King Wenceslaus, and in Germany a copy of it was made. This is now Munich cim 79, formerly UB 604.
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German herbals are relatively rare, and a relationship between the Voynich MS and Germany is given by the style of the zodiac illustrations, so I would consider all German herbals of interest (in principle).

I also consider the alchemical herbals very relevant. In fact the most interesting individual herbal MS for me is Florence MS 106, for several reasons which cannot really be used as 'categories'. For example, it has a cipher table on the first folio - highly unusual for herbals.
Marco already mentioned the Vicenza alchemical herbal - Italian and German, with the colour annotations.

Another point of JKP in another post is a very good one - the diagrams of relationships between herbals.
I don't think there are any in Collins, but there are two in Blunt & Raphael, which were taken from the work of Singer.
One can see some here:
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The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.and derivatives are a rabbit hole.
There is a whole family tree of related herbals on the Wikipedia page.

[attachment=8840]

I found it interesting that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1350) was written in Occitane. Has anyone checked if the dialect matches the VM month names? The illustrations do not seem to be a particularly good match to the VM.

The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Mid-15th century) Kräuterbuch however has some interesting characteristics regarding imagery including many plants with leaves only on one side while the opposite one is omitted, 'cancelled' stems that have also been omitted, different leaf shapes on the same plant and some interesting 'whirlwind' Asteraceae.

[attachment=8842]

Page 64 also depicts a plant (Ruscus?) that somewhat matches VM You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

[attachment=8841]

It's a shame the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Mid-15th century) was sold to  a private collector withoutr being digitized. The manuscript also contained the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which sounds interesting.

Regarding the original You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1280 - 1350) it is again stated that the plant illustrations came from different sources and were of widely differing uality depending on the availability of the live plant.

Quote:At least three stylistic groups of plants can be distinguished. 
1) Trees and shrubs from overseas or "the Indies", such as the incense tree, whose products reached Europe in dried form, are illustrated with images that bear no resemblance to their natural appearance. They are characterized by clean, fine lines and careful application of paint, and are well framed in the space of the column reserved for them. 
2) Familiar trees such as the fig tree, with their more recognizable leaf shapes, are marked by a freer, bolder use of paint, and a more sketchy, less delicate style. 
3) Finally, common aromatic herbs such as coriander or chervilare depicted in a more precise, smaller and more schematic way. These groups suggest that the artists worked from sets of drawings, some invented for unknown plants, others composed of characteristic features but without proportion, and still others drawn from nature.

With regard to this third group, Felix Baumann suspects that the often two-dimensional representations of plants are based on pressed originals. The leaves of wild chicory, which are naturally arranged in a rosette around the stem, are thus represented in a star shape as if they were a flattened specimen. However, the first evidence of the herbarium technique, collections of dried plants, is only known from the 16th century onwards, and if true, this hypothesis would bring the discovery forward by almost two centuries.

From that "family tree", I get that 28 manuscripts of the Livre Des Simple Medecines were derived from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. That sounds wrong. Collins says that the Livre (e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Collins' Plate XXX) is the French translation of Tractatus De Herbis (Egerton 747), and indeed the text for each plant is as long as that in Egerton 747, with only one or two plants per page on two columns (while the Florence ms has a single paragraph for each plant and a fixed layout of exactly 4 plants per page); the illustrations in the Livre are like those in Egerton 747, without the fantastic elements added to Florence Pal. 586.

There are still a few important herbals in this family that are not included in the family tree illustration.
Some are mentioned in the text though, and it would be interesting to see how they should fit in.

Beside Morgan M.873 there is a second MS in Modena (MS. Lat.993 - my old link does not seem to work anymore), and there is the stunning Carrara herbal (Egerton 2020), also known as the "Rinio" herbal, that is the topic of Baumann's book, and which is almost exactly contemporaneous with the Voynich MS. I don't know what is the status of the British Library's digital images, but that MS was only partly online in any case.