The Voynich Ninja

[quote="-JKP-" pid='26018' dateline='1554068636']

Quote:3) Professional botanists generally do NOT have any background in medieval iconography.

Some of them hardly appear to have a background in botany if you see what they come up with 

(31-03-2019, 11:17 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[quote="-JKP-" pid='26018' dateline='1554068636']

Quote:3) Professional botanists generally do NOT have any background in medieval iconography.

Some of them hardly appear to have a background in botany if you see what they come up with 

Yes, I've noticed. I remember one time we were asked to create some technical drawings for a university-level biology class and very few of the students were able to do it.

(31-03-2019, 08:03 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The various millets etc in the Tacuina remain the best sunflowerbusters in my opinion. Confronted with these images, so influential and close in time to the VM's creation, I don't see how anyone, botanist or otherwise, could still hold on to New World claims based on the supposed sunflower.

At first glance, the VMS looks like an effort to catalog and describe plants found in the tropics. A closer inspection, however, reveals otherwise. Some of the plants depicted in the VMS are so absurd that they might not even be evolutionary possible, as would be the case, for example, with an ape having three eyes.

Many of the depicted plants combine parts drawn from different real plants, e.g., the roots of one plant are joined with the stalk and leaves of another and then its flower is drawn from still another plant. And, of course, some of the plant parts are purely imaginary.

Overall, plant parts match more frequently with plants found in the Americas than in Europe if for no other reason that there are more plants species in the Americas than in Europe. Efforts by Linda and JP to draw Africa and Asia into the picture do not impress me as there seems to be little evidence of widespread European settlements in Africa and Asia during medieval times.

I find that the turkie corne of 1597, which I compared with the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. plant, was revised for the 1633 edition where it no longer resembles the VMS plant so strongly:



I cannot rule out the possibility that the 1597 depiction was modified (giving it seven curved leaves) to match the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. plant: the fritillary flower in the poet laureate's right hand seems to provide a decoding clue via the marginalia on f17r, so it is logical to assume that the ear of sweetcorn in his left hand should also have some significance.

(31-03-2019, 11:17 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[quote="-JKP-" pid='26018' dateline='1554068636']

Quote:3) Professional botanists generally do NOT have any background in medieval iconography.

Some of them hardly appear to have a background in botany if you see what they come up with 

I've found that a rush to resolve historical mysteries (not just the VMS, other mysteries as well) has led many academics to rash conclusions and speculations not befitting serious scholarship.

Hi lads! Bad news for you.In the page 93r no such a thing as plants or curing. The teacher telling them about education which must be kept in secret....reasons -still unknown. I personally believe that plant is just an illustration of the way of his teachings....from the roots to the flower. Well, I will finish this page in some few days,maby today.
If somebody has some ideas about the reasons to keep this book into a secret, tell me about, please.
Actually in this page hi(teacher) told them "you must swear to keep my teachings or you will die"
...but i didn't"seen" any " secret things from over than 40 random pages. For me its seems that must be another book which "includes " something else.

Morten St. George Wrote:

(31-03-2019, 08:03 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The various millets etc in the Tacuina remain the best sunflowerbusters in my opinion. Confronted with these images, so influential and close in time to the VM's creation, I don't see how anyone, botanist or otherwise, could still hold on to New World claims based on the supposed sunflower.

At first glance, the VMS looks like an effort to catalog and describe plants found in the tropics. A closer inspection, however, reveals otherwise. Some of the plants depicted in the VMS are so absurd that they might not even be evolutionary possible, as would be the case, for example, with an ape having three eyes.

They have never looked like tropical plants to me. Even before I started identifying individual plants, that seemed fairly clear.

Plants from certain ecosystems have certain adaptations that are very recognizable. Australian plants, tropical plants, alpine plants, northern plants, Mediterranean plants, aquatic plants, heavy-rain forest plants, all have certain kinds of leaves, stems and flowers to suit their environment. If there are a couple of dozen images, then you can often exclude several regions and sometimes even pinpoint the general ecosystem.

The VMS plants are temperate plants. They are not tropical or Australian and don't appear to be east Asian either. They appear to be warm-temperate rather than alpine. They're the kind of plants that grow in northern Italy and central Europe, maybe some of the cooler coastal pockets in northern Africa, and in North America in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold regions on each coast. I'm not saying that because I think that's where the VMS originates. I'm saying it because the plant-forms in the VMS are those kinds of plants.


I will go so far as to say a number of them are forest-margin plants (not all of them) and semi-wetland plants. I will also go so far as to say quite a few of them are common plants.

I'm pretty confident about them not being tropical plants. The only exceptions might be a small number of spice plants that were easy to dry and import, but in most cases the plant itself was not imported, it was usually the bulbs, seeds, or bark or whichever part of the plant was desirable and easy to transport. Even if there are a few of these, they are definitely the minority. There are hundreds of plants in the VMS and by-and-large, they are temperate plants.

(01-04-2019, 02:52 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.They have never looked like tropical plants to me. Even before I started identifying individual plants, that seemed fairly clear.

Plants from certain ecosystems have certain adaptations that are very recognizable. Australian plants, tropical plants, alpine plants, northern plants, Mediterranean plants, aquatic plants, heavy-rain forest plants, all have certain kinds of leaves, stems and flowers to suit their environment. If there are a couple of dozen images, then you can often exclude several regions and sometimes even pinpoint the general ecosystem.

The VMS plants are temperate plants. They are not tropical or Australian and don't appear to be east Asian either. They appear to be warm-temperate rather than alpine. They're the kind of plants that grow in northern Italy and central Europe, maybe some of the cooler coastal pockets in northern Africa, and in North America in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold regions on each coast. I'm not saying that because I think that's where the VMS originates. I'm saying it because the plant-forms in the VMS are those kinds of plants.

I will go so far as to say a number of them are forest-margin plants (not all of them) and semi-wetland plants. I will also go so far as to say quite a few of them are common plants.

I'm pretty confident about them not being tropical plants. The only exceptions might be a small number of spice plants that were easy to dry and import, but in most cases the plant itself was not imported, it was usually the bulbs, seeds, or bark or whichever part of the plant was desirable and easy to transport. Even if there are a few of these, they are definitely the minority. There are hundreds of plants in the VMS and by-and-large, they are temperate plants.

JP, I said "at first glance" by which I meant my first glance, not your first glance. I lived most of my life in temperate zones, and seeing pretty much nothing in the VMS that I could recognize, I assumed that the plants had to be tropical or at least subtropical. That was a while back. Today I view the plants as mostly imaginary, giving them no geographic or climatic placement.

We shouldn't have to be debating this. Why can't we get a group of botanists together, or even the botany department at Yale, to look at it and tell us what is going on with those plants?

Morten, if you gave a 13th-century herbal manuscript without labels to a group of botanists, they would have a hard time identifying any of them.

After 12 years of really working at it, I can identify most of them without labels BUT it is ONLY because I now know how they drew Acacia in the 9th to 15th centuries, how they drew Oreganum, how they drew Salvia, etc. They had certain ways of doing it that they copied from other manuscripts enough times that it became traditional to do it a certain way.

There's more than one tradition... There seem to be three main ones, one less primary and a couple of outlyers, but all in all, if you learn the traditions, you have one of the important fundamentals.

But there's more...

Figuring them out has to do with more than knowing the traditions and the way they were drawn. It also depends on how they ordered them. There are traditions for that too. Not all were alphabetic, some were according to use, some according to plant characteristics, some according to local names.

So... MANY of the old plant drawings don't look very much like the plant, but if you can identify the drawing tradition AND the ordering tradition, you can get a pretty good percentage.


So it isn't really botany. It can't be, because they aren't very good drawings. One has to learn how they did things in those days. It's more history and iconography than botany for about 80% of those old herbals.

Here, I'll give you an example.

Those who are familiar with old herbals probably know what this is. But if you gave this to 100 modern botanists who have not studied medieval herbals and asked them to identify the plant, without a label (as in the VMS), it's possible that not a single one would get it right.

I know immediately what this plant is but ONLY because I know which tradition it's from and how they typically drew this specific plant:

[attachment=2755]

(01-04-2019, 05:48 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Morten, if you gave a 13th-century herbal manuscript without labels to a group of botanists, they would have a hard time identifying any of them.

After 12 years of really working at it, I can identify most of them without labels BUT it is ONLY because I now know how they drew Acacia in the 9th to 15th centuries, how they drew Oreganum, how they drew Salvia, etc. They had certain ways of doing it that they copied from other manuscripts enough times that it became traditional to do it a certain way.

There's more than one tradition... There seem to be three main ones, one less primary and a couple of outlyers, but all in all, if you learn the traditions, you have one of the important fundamentals.

But there's more...

Figuring them out has to do with more than knowing the traditions and the way they were drawn. It also depends on how they ordered them. There are traditions for that too. Not all were alphabetic, some were according to use, some according to plant characteristics, some according to local names.

So... MANY of the old plant drawings don't look very much like the plant, but if you can identify the drawing tradition AND the ordering tradition, you can get a pretty good percentage.

So it isn't really botany. It can't be, because they aren't very good drawings. One has to learn how they did things in those days. It's more history and iconography than botany for about 80% of those old herbals.

JP, I understand what you are saying. It makes a lot of sense. But it would be more convincing if you could kindly provide a few side-by-side illustrations, that is, show us a few VMS plants side-by-side with a tradition drawing of the same plant. This could potentially confirm that the VMS plants are of European origin, which is surely what you want to accomplish.