The Voynich Ninja

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Short detour to plants.
The "Tanacetum balsamita" is a very good candidate.
Flowers hit it, leaves have the shape and are serrated (unfortunately not so much), and the root would hit it too.
Medicinal plant Yes, and known and used in the Middle Ages.
Already mentioned by the Romans. Probably originated in southern Europe and came north with the Romans.

A very good candidate indeed. I will add it to my assortment.
I would not regard it as tansy "Tanacetum vulgare", which is already mentioned on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and is one of the safe ones.

Thank you from me for the tip.

(09-08-2022, 12:29 PM)Juan_Sali Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.f6v and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are the same plant: ricinus. Acording to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the leaves alternate and palmate with five to twelve deep lobes.
The leaves in the f6v have 7 lobes and the lonely leaf of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has 8 lobes.

Hmm. I agree completely with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as Ricinus.


but You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. looks like two layers of smaller leaves or possibly flowers coming out on top, partly coloured red, hairy, and a different root. Are you saying it is a younger plant? I havent grown it yet so i don't know how the seedling looks. Does anything else lead you to this conclusion that they are the same besides the number of lobes?

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Addendum:
As far as leaf edges are concerned, it also seems to depend on the place of origin.
From smooth to strongly serrated.

Perhaps there is another clue to the region here. Wouldn't be the first time.
I'll put it to work.

6v as ricinus is already in the first post of this thread, it is probably one of the most reliable VM plants available to us. This is because in addition to leaf shape, we also have the seed pods. And very similar images in other herbals.

The new proposal here is that f7 also depicts the same plant. This seems unlikely to me. There are several plants with this general leaf shape, so we would need additional information to point us towards a certain direction. if this is ricinus, why the single leaf? Why is there a secondary shape within the main one? What's with the white space and patterns?

The problem with these illustrative identifications is the text. Does the text correspond to the illustration in some meaningful way? Or is the illustration just a decoration? Is there meaningful text in the VMs? And if so. where was it hidden, before it was cut out?  Is it hidden by Stolfi's markers?


it is inconceivable to me that text and illustrations have no connection. it is obvious that someone made drawings of plants and added a text. the text should be similar to the texts in the known herbals with dependence on texts such as Plinius, Macer etc., but the authors own creation

I see a completely different problem: can one infer the rest of the ms. from the herbal text?

(10-08-2022, 07:20 AM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Does the text correspond to the illustration in some meaningful way?

In the case of page 6v, the text You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., in my opinion, a kind of thistle, even if the leaves look like those of the castor bean.

If image and text correspond, then a page is a botanical monograph. Can the VMs monograph be compared to the text of another herbal source with the same plant ID? It has been tried before, but it hasn't really worked. And the question is why it hasn't worked. Is the author's work so unique, in an era where science consisted of repeating the existing information?

Essentially, this is a search for a "Rosetta Stone" within the VMs. Whether that is a plant monograph or a block paradigm, it works the same way - *in theory*. In practice, however, there is a difficulty - a lot of difficulty. Are the potential plant monographs the best text options for interpretation, or do Stolfi's markers indicate a better opportunity?

If the images and their texts correspond in the botanical section, then such correspondence probably exists in other parts of the VMs. The recipes are instructions for pharmaceutical compounding. And the cosmic and 'bathing' sections also have corresponding texts, depending on what the author chose to write. But if everything is corresponding, and things are on the up and up, as they say, then what's with the trickery? Why is Oresme's cosmos in Shirakatsi's wheel? What's with Melusine? Why does White Aries contain a dualistic illustration? And all the other stuff. (New Jerusalem, Agnus Dei, Golden Fleece, Wreath of the Virgin, etc.)

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Meaning of Melusine.
She comes from the Greek "Ilithye" and Roman "Lucina" mythology.
She was called "Mother Lucina" in French "Mere Lucine", which later became "MeLusine".

In Celtic "guardian of the wells.

From the dictionary:
Lucina, an all-Roman deity, is therefore a Juno, but a Juno Ilithye or midwife, and like another goddess called Diana or Moon also possesses this quality of presiding over childbirth, it follows that Lucina is a Juno or a Diana Ilithye who presides over the deliverance of mothers and the birth of children. However, she was made the daughter of Jupiter and Juno, and she received Cupid as her son. Catule, poet of antiquity, called him Hera-Phosphoros or Luminous Juno; also derived - his name from the Latin word lux, meaning light, because it was indeed presiding at the moment when children were first born.

Later frowned upon by the Church as pagan. Probably through the teachings of Tertullia.
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If the VM is considered medical, there would be nothing unusual to say here. If it was even written mainly for female concerns, one could even take it for granted.

Her origins are important and in the Middle Ages there were several variations of her mythology. The two I see as relevant to the VMs are the dragon-like, Melusine of Lusignan, and the mermaid-like, Melusine of Luxembourg. The Luxembourg mythology was ancestral to the Valois descendants of Bonne of Luxembourg. The Valois duke of Berry had connections to both versions of Melusine. The Valois duke of Burgundy initiated the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1430.

The VMs illustration seems to show an illustrated depiction of a 'mermaid and her friends' format, whether her "friends" are sea monsters or fish (as seen in Lauber or Harley 334). In these examples, the mermaid is a generic figure, same as the other creatures. In the VMs, the characteristics of the Luxembourg version of Melusine have been substituted for the generic mermaid as an indicator of the Valois significance in the history of the VMs C-14 era.

And that brings us back to the discussion on the pages:

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