I have written a rather long post about whether or not it is worthwhile trying to work out the plants in the Voynich.
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I would be interested in what people think. Obviously some people (such as Steve D on the Voynich mailing list) spend a lot of time and effort trying to identify the plants, but we never seem to get anywhere. Is it actually possible to label these plants? I would argue that it isn't.
I think that the work of identifying the Voynich plants is definitely the work that we need. I think that previous failures in this direction are greatly attributed to the fact that researchers have been excessively meticulous and formal. Like "hey, this plant does not have such and such element, so it cannot be "plant X"." I like the view shared by some researchers (e.g. the Finnish biologist from Prof. Bax's page) who advise that the plants may well have been:
a) depicted by memory
b) depicted in their dried shape
c) exaggerated in their essential portions
Please add to that that the person who depicted all the stuff was a person from the pre-Linnaeus era.
What I have proposed is to dedicate a separate subforum for this work, with one thread for each plant, and just implement a community brainstorm.
Moreover, supposing medical direction, most books of this kind would necessarily contain some common subset of plants. So, to begin with, one could take some book like
Conservatio sanitatis by Miechowsky and try to match the plants mentioned there to plants in the VMS. This is the work which I planned to undertake myself, but... well I did not find time yet
The issue however is that even if we decide that this plant is *InsertPlantName*, how does this help us? We cannot link it to any word in the text, we cannot use this identification as a crib into the text, and so whilst it removes a certain mystery and shows that the images probably aren't imaginary*, it doesn't actually advance our knowledge
*But we know that already!
This narrows the context of what is told on the respective page. First, for sure it will contain the name of that plant. Second, it will most probably contain recommendations on how to use that plant. Something like "mirabilis in reparatione visus", and so on. It is unlikely that the VMS would tell the stories about plants totally different from what is contained in many other books.
Well, you are now trying to force your assumptions on to these plants.
It is entirely possible that the text next to each plant is actually a little story that has nothing to do with medicine. Say a little uplifting moral story, or possibly a reminiscence of the author, illustrated with a nice picture of a plant that reminded him of the tale
But let us take your template. The name of the plant will either be its common Latin name which we know from herbals. Or it will be a local vernacular. If it were a Latin name then we could assume the text is describing the use of the plant in the same fashion as other herbals. But it doesn't look like it, So if it's a local vernacular... we're lost, because we don't even know in which language or area to start looking.
DavidJackson Wrote:It is entirely possible that the text next to each plant is actually a little story that has nothing to do with medicine.
Yes that's possible, but that's less probable. So it makes sense to investigate the more probable options first, and then, if no results, to move to less probable ones.
DavidJackson Wrote:The name of the plant will either be its common Latin name which we know from herbals. Or it will be a local vernacular. If it were a Latin name then we could assume the text is describing the use of the plant in the same fashion as other herbals. But it doesn't look like it, So if it's a local vernacular... we're lost, because we don't even know in which language or area to start looking.
Yes, for sure this is no way to direct decipherment, but this is at least some reasonable way to detect semantic patterns and correlations which might aid to decipherment.
David,
For what it's worth, I think the absolutely fundamental error has been to assume that we know enough to imagine the cultural origin and background of this text.
we...do...not..
The fact is that to say
"The name of the plant will either be its common Latin name which we know from herbals. Or it will be a local vernacular"...
is just to keep begging questions which have never been investigated at all. How do we know these plants are medicinal (Georg Barsch thought so... is that good enough?)
How do we know they are from the standard Latin herbal compendium - we don't. In fact the same Georg Barsch said categorically that they were foreign plants - exotics - peregrinae which the very learned botanists of Germany did not know!
But if a general inability to recognise the drawings is simply due to the drawings and their style ... well, why not begin by looking at as wide a range of comparative drawing styles as one can, in order to see where plant-images are drawn in the same way. Are they patterns for embroidery, or mosaic, or weaving, perhaps? How far from Germany would you call a place where 'exotic' plants grew? Italy? Holy Land? Further?
No-one has ever proven that the Voynich manuscript's content relates to the Latin herbal genre,let alone that it springs from that genre. People came to believe that mainly because they failed to consider how rash an assumption it was when first made by Wilfrid Voynich on (apparently) no evidence at all.
Since then, most people have started off assuming it a work in the western herbal tradition, and spent all their time thereafter trying to prove what they had already decided must be so. Not a very scientific attitude, really.
David, if the milieu natural to those drawings were identified.. same as any other painting or drawing.... then we might get somewhere collectively rather than (as at present) individually.
It will be a great moment when the Voynich collective realises that what they have on these folios aren't "plants" or efforts to "draw plants" in the European way. What they are coloured drawings which will tell the informed scholar where and when the imagery first took its present form.
Just as a Dutch painting of the fifteenth century can hardly be mistaken for a Italian painting of the tenth century... so these ought to tell us about their origins. Once that is known, hunting the plants (or not) should be a much simpler business, don't you think?
Exactly Diane. What I was trying to say was not that we stop looking at the illustrations - rather that we stop trying to ID plants to photos, as quite a few people seem to be trying to do at the moment, as if they were literal representations of plants anyone can find in a field. Anyone who subscribes to the VM mailing list will know what I mean!
David,
That methodology has been used ever since ... well, I think since Edith Sherwood began making her identifications.
The real problem is getting people to think for themselves in the very initial stages, to make them test each one of the supposed 'givens' which form the foundation for their own theory.
It depresses me to see people who are capable of carefully reasoned and logical arguments build those arguments from a dubious foundation, one that is baseless - or at least based on nothing more than "he says... she says..."
I think that's why so many promising arguments soon turn to rubbish, no matter how carefully and logically developed.
But hey, everyone on the mailing list is having fun aren't they?
David,
Since no-one else has added, may I say that I think it is worthwhile *after* you are confident that you know the sort of images you're dealing with. We can identify a carnation whether it is drawn as a photo-likeness botanical drawing, or an the work of an impressionist painter, or the highly ornate and stylised version used in Persian pottery, and again the artificial hybrid which might be used as an Indian textile design. But if you only knew the photo-likeness sort of drawing, most of the others would leave you bewildered.
That failure to re-think assumptions about presentation is the 'elephant in the room' for the botanical section. IMO