The Voynich Ninja

(29-07-2022, 07:01 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Interestingly, the plant has the same name in Greek, Latin and German.

I did not understand the name of the plant

(30-07-2022, 12:35 PM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the seven crown-shaped blossoms - seven crowns.
As for the eighth blossom, I saw it like this one above the rest seven

In my opinion this is a good find, I personally only saw one tiara, forgetting the details.

Take a look at the first part of the Rylands' ms. to see a variety of depictions of different wings.
See post #28

Take a look at the second half, if you want to know where old, blank vellum might come from.

It is clear that the so-called eagle-root can be interpreted in several different ways:
- a reference to San Michael
- a reference to the arms of the city of Novara
- a reference to the arms of the Habsburgs and/or Tyrol

Not all of them may be sound (we are all amateurs) and there may undoubtedly more.

There are two ways of using this 'information'.

1) All of the options are added to the general list of tentative identifications, and as soon as this list is long enough, some pattern may emerge.

2) One already has a hypothesis about the origin and meaning of the Voynich MS, and one picks the option that best fits this hypothesis.

Clearly, the second is methodically not sound. It is 'backward' logic, or projecting one's hypothesis on the illustrations in the Voynich MS.
(A typical example is the meso-american theory of A.Tucker et al, where essentially all herbal illustrations have been projected onto meso-american species).

The first is the way to go, but I daresay it is all too weak, and incomplete at that, to allow for much progress.

I think it's a good idea to establish beforehand which parts of the image are most important to aid us. For example:

* Some people get hung up on the lack of a head, but this makes no sense: lacking a head is a common feature of VM zoomorphic roots. So looking for something that lacks a head is counterproductive.
* Usually, VM roots stay under the (imagined) ground line. Roots don't tend to rise far above the spot where the green stem transitions into the roots. But these "feathers" do, and significantly so. Therefore, the fact that the top feathers point straight up and rise above where the "head" would have been, seems significant.
* VM plants are rarely (if ever) perfectly symmetric, and these roots aren't either. Yet the overall design still appears to be a symmetric one.
* The hole for the head is suspicious. Was it made on purpose, or was an existing hole incorporated into the drawing? If it was made on purpose, this should be an extremely important part of our assessment. If it existed already, it may not be important at all.

This is probably off-topic, since it is not about heraldry. Zoomorphic elements are rather frequent in late medieval herbals. They are typically caused by one of two reasons:

1. the name of the plant is similar to the name of an animal;
   
2. a part of the plant is similar to an animal.
   

An example of the first case is provided by Herba Corporelis  / Corborellis (crow-plant) from the Alchemical Herbal. Segre-Rutz identifies the plant as Hepatica Nobilis, but I am not aware of dialects naming the plant after crows.
[attachment=6715]


Several examples of the second case can be seen in Trinity O.2.48, where the text describes parts of the plant as similar to "a swallow", "stork's beaks", "bird's heads" and the illustrator took these analogies very literally.
[attachment=6713]


Adding to the ongoing speculation, one can observe that 'eagle' is 'aquila' in both Italian and Latin, so maybe (at the light of case 1 above) 'aquilegia' could not be totally impossible for f46v.
From You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

Quote:According to Albertus Magnus the name aquilegia was taken from aquila, the Latin for “eagle.”

[attachment=6712]

For me, these are two separate questions:

- What was the image based on?
- What does it mean?

For me, it makes little sense to make a plant "mean" a heraldic device, but it may be based on one. Most likely, the VM's "eagle" was not improvised by the artist. If we look at the other animals in the VM, the idea that they would have needed a model for drawing an eagle seems reasonable. Remember that this is the same MS that finds crayfish with legs on the tail okay, and makes bovine legs bend the wrong way. Especially the fact that those red parts at the wings were included is a strong indication that they were drawing off an example - it feels like a detailed part of (traditional) wing anatomy the VM would normally omit.

So my idea is that if we can first determine the most likely model, we can then maybe say something more about the meaning, whether it is most likely an eagle or an angelic being and so on. So far, our only decent model is a modern version of Novara's arms.

As an update to this discussion of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. costmary, there is an alternate interpretation to the eagle hypothesis. If the roots / wings represented are to be interpreted as wings, then the representation is that of a heraldic vol. A vol is defined as a pair of outstretched wings with *no* bird parts in between. No head, no two heads, no feet, no tail. It is uncommon as an old heraldic charge, but it exists.

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Whose wings are they - an eagle or an angel? If wings are just wings, it's hard to say - based on the wings alone. However, if the plant on this page is identified as costmary, aka 'the herb of the virgin,' and if the wings belong to Saint Michael, as psychopomp, that shifts the interpretation of this image to a whole other level. The idea of a botanical bestiary was suggested earlier.

Is Novara still to be considered as the only model?