The Voynich Ninja

(09-11-2023, 07:47 AM)merrimacga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Rather than being fantastical plants (though fancifully drawn), my theory is all of these plants existed but at least some were (a) experimental and/or (b) became extinct sometime later.

I think both the extinction hypothesis and the grafting hypothesis can be rejected as they are incompatible with both evolutionary biology and plant physiology.

While extinct medicinal plants are known, for example the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of classic antiquity, it remained identifiable as Apiaceae and most likely was the recently rediscovered You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It looks like fennel, nothing unusual. Keep in mind most 'recently' (in historical times) extinct plant species either survived in culture or at least have very close to virtually identical looking living relatives. Many were island varieties. No plant families or even orders became extinct in historical times. Even Cenozoic plant fossils back to 65 Ma are remarkably similar to today's flora and while the species themselves long became extinct, most can easily be classified at least to family level, sometimes even genus. This is not the case for VM plants. They are simply not realistic depictions of plants, neither from a taxonomic nor physiological perspective. And what are the chances of the author exclusively depicting plants which became extinct a few hundred years later without a single even remotely similar relative species surviving? In my opinion zero, even if we were talking about a remote island on which plants underwent some weird adaptive radiation. Even much less in Europe with its generally poor postglacial biodiversitythat has a wide distribution range.

Grafting can also be excluded for the reasons above, even if we divide above- and below-ground parts and include the extremely rare possibility of grafting chimeras, the plants still remain non-realistic, furthermore grafting of herbaceous non-woody plants was not a common procedure until the 20th century and is by no means trivial. It is not possible to graft unrelated species and compatibility is highly limited even with present-day technology. The first known successful interspecific herbaceous grafting was only done in the 1920s in Japan for watermelon shoots with bottle gourd rootstocks. Vegetable grafting combining several bottle gourd rootstocks to a single shoot to produce abnormally large fruit was known in China since the 5th century but remained a curiosity without wide-spread application. I am not aware of any herbaceous grafting experiments in medieval Europe, or in fact before the mid-20th century, see Lee, J.-M., & Oda, M. (2010). Grafting of Herbaceous Vegetable and Ornamental Crops.

So regarding the VM plants, I'm with Koen, similarly fantastic (or simply inaccurate due to lack of fresh reference material) illustrations are not unknown from herbals, plus we simply do not know what the author(s) of the VM drawings we classify as 'herbal' actually meant to depict. But I would rank realistic representations of extinct plants or exotic inter-generic grafts among the lowermost possibilities.

Can it be labeled as art? Let's call them illustrations, images, drawings etc. Thing is that there is a whole range of things going on in the VMs. They can be examined individually, but they do not necessarily predominate, or exist in a vacuum, as they say.
 
The large plants cover a range values regarding their recognizability. The viola and a few others seem reasonable to me, costmary has an interesting backstory. <If you know it.> But a lot of it doesn't make sense. However, various enthusiastic botanical investigations have rendered numerous results and found names for the vast majority. This is all well and good, but the hangup is the failure to establish any linguistic connections in order to interpret the written texts. Not to single out the botanical section, because no useful linguistic connections have been identified elsewhere either.
 
And so, we are left with the illustrations. Like the botanical section, much of the rest of the VMs is "difficult" to understand, but there are a few bright spots. Primarily, I suggest the VMs cosmos and the VMs mermaid. Since the publication of the parchment C-14 dates, this has promoted a more intense interest regarding the first half of the 1400s. From hats to sleeves, from quatrefoils to nebuly lines, from cosmic diagrams to religions tradition, history shows that the VMs drawings contain multiple elements of relevant history, if the investigator knows that history.
 
Take the nymphs of VMs Pisces and Aries (x 2) and their patterned 'tubs'. Do the patterns on the tubs mimic heraldry?  [Sort of depends on what the investigator knows about heraldry. Sort of like Newbold's identification of Andromeda would have benefitted from more relevant information on medieval cosmic diagrams. BNF Fr. 565 & Harley 334 might have helped him.]
 
Just for starters.
 
The real question is how to recognize what the illustrations reveal unless there is some familiarity with the significant social memes of the era in which the images were created. Or ostensibly created, as the case may be.
 
Given the range of information borrowed and used in the VMs, there is a potential for the artist having traveled from Paris to Rome, with any points in between. And going outside, to Jerusalem, is not out of the question. Subtle religious inclusions provide certain knowledge regarding and may imply some affiliation with the Catholic Church. I sometimes tend to see the person behind the VMs as a well-educated older person, who might have retired to an abbey and may no longer have been in full firmness of body or mind, shall we say, yet still had the motivation and opportunity to create the VMs.

(09-11-2023, 07:47 AM)merrimacga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Funny you should mention Da Vinci as one of my current theories is that the VM was originally the loose vellum sheets of notes of the original author written over many years, possibly decades, possibly including additional loose notes by others who inherited it from the original author. Much the same as Da Vinci's journals. The way the text flows and the rough nature of the botanical drawings suggest this. Further, I think it likely the original author had some higher education and exposure to other existing texts but that this education was probably incomplete. It is unlikely the author was anyone who would be remembered today, else someone would likely have identified the person by now. And I think it likely he or she practiced herbalism, alchemy, pharmacology and or medicine in a fairly remote area, possibly in some secrecy. Call it a working theory. Like you, I have a long, long way to go before I would classify it as anything more than that.


If we consider the VM to be simply a fantasy, especially if we believe it was created by an isolated individual, we have to consider the time, the effort and the money it took to create it. You might want to check out this thread I started: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It is estimated it took 14-15 entire calfskins to create the VM. Even if it was average quality, that much vellum would have been costly, probably too costly for creating merely a fantasy, a fraud/hoax, or a parody.

Yes, I wonder if the "Voynich A" and "Voynich B" might be the result of the author having produced these pages over a period of several or many years.

 I have a sort of vision of the author as the semi-cloistered, misfit scion of some aristocratic family, too eccentric to inheirit power, but indulged enough to be granted a stock of vellum and art supplies.

Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my essay in detail everyone. I almost forgot that this sort of reasoned and well informed discussion could occur on the internet!

(09-11-2023, 10:58 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't think "outsider art" is a valid option at all, because it is a term used to describe certain phenomena in the artistic world starting in the 1800's. Take a look at this Wikipedia page of outsider artists: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I recognize that using the modern term "Outsider Art" for a mediavel text is problematic. Perhaps ReneZ's term Outsider Philosphy would be have been a better choice. Although art historians might be reluctant to use a modern term here, that fact wouldn't prevent someone in the middle ages from being an early worker in the somewhat the same vein as Henry Darger if given the opportunity. The easy access to low-cost paper and art materials in industrial times allowed all sorts of people to create works that would have not been likely in the middle ages. Still, it is possible that someone in the middle ages found themselves in the "exceptional circumstances" that allowed them to create an abberant and highly personal narrative outside of contemporary traditions. After all, someone had to be first, and perhaps it was the VM author. 

(09-11-2023, 10:58 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.1. The problematic plants. It is clear that the VM artist knew how to draw plants and their parts, but the majority of the plants depicted in it are partially or entirely problematic. This in itself is not strange at all, since medieval herbals are not modern field books and only the most finely executed specimens produce reliable plant pictures. In many cases, stylized or fantastical elements are simply part of the tradition. The unusual thing is that we cannot link these plants, their selection and their order to any of the known herbal traditions. But even this is not unique. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. discussed on the forum some time ago starts out with established traditions, so it is certainly not "outsider art". But then it goes on to a section with hundreds of seemingly made-up plant drawings and descriptions.

This is a wonderful link to the Trinity College Herbal and thank you for sharing it! I can't read the text and agree that some of the later plant illustrations are fanciful, but even then, they perhaps lack the frankly unbotanical aspects seen in the VM herbal section like stems growing into one another and shoots emerging like plumbing pipes from a flat base.

(09-11-2023, 10:58 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.2. You point at the lack of corrections to suggest the existence of a creative flow. Now it is possible that the text was made this way, but the whole "no corrections" thing is a myth people just keep perpetuating because they hear others say it. People on the forum have pointed out plenty of places where the writing acts weird, and potential corrections. The problem is that we don't understand the text or even the writing system, so we cannot know what constitutes a correction or a mistake. If you were looking at an ancient Hebrew or Arabic text (assuming you can't read those scripts), would you be able to point out to me all the places where the scribe performed corrections? Of course not! Can you tell me all the techniques they would have used for correcting text, and how to recognize them? If you saw no clear signs of corrections, would you call the text fake? That's how silly the "no corrections" meme is.

Point taken, I think you are right about this.

(09-11-2023, 10:58 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Also, if someone were creating "flow of consciousness" art, would they opt to add a bunch of celestial diagrams to their dozens of plant images? Is a scientific diagram really what the outsider artist likes to make? It feels to me like the polar opposite, since diagrams are by definition structured and planned out.

Yes, the celestial diagram section certainly has the least "creative flow" feeling of any part of the manuscript. Perhaps that's why, as you note, there is a sense of hurry and simplification at the end of it. This section feels the least mad and wacky, with the carefully plotted diagrams and the zodiacal symbols being a rare concrete link to the normal world of contemporary ideas. Perhaps the author, in the transiant vaguaries of their mental condition, was making an effort here to get a bit closer to normality.

(09-11-2023, 10:58 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Now as I see it, the presence of these rushed pages is an argument for meaning of the images, not against. If you are just making up nonsense to fool someone but you're running out of time, you just take the dozens of pages you have already. You don't go on rushing in even more nymphs and pools and plants and then add a whole text-only section. Similarly, if you are creating l'art pour l'art (since we're doing anachronisms today) and just kind of flowing along, there is no reason to rush things, to get those last pages done.

If, however, you have a certain plan, schedule, assignment or an exemplar to copy... and you've already drawn a hundred nymphs but there are more and more to go. Then you might start slacking, cutting corners and rushing things.

Yes, this is a good point, and I think this is a productive way to try and interprest the MS without being able to read the text. I do think the creation of the text was associated with meaning in the author's mind as they created it, but that the text may not be readable in a tradtional sense. The scenario I'm imagining is that the VM author was merrily scribbling along with words going through their head as they wrote, but the lettering had only the most peripheral realtion to words they were saying. Imagine someone thinking or speaking aloud "and by taking the celestial elixar from the fourth house of the stars" (or some other alchecmical mumbo jumbo) but writing something like "sofrtha frothro sofro soth othrosa." I know this seems outlandish, but the process I propose is not too different from the semi-illiterate graphic novels my 8 year old kid creates. She includes pictures and a sort of text that correlates with the words she says in her head as she writes, but which is not deciperable by anyone else. 

With the astrological diagram section, I feel the author set out to create a longer planned exposition of some kind, but got a bit bored at the end and hurried up while dutifully completing what they had planned. 

(09-11-2023, 10:58 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.4. "The author seems to be familiar with the general appearance of contemporary texts but does not appear to fully understand their meaning." This is a problematic argument. Maybe the makers understands the meaning of contemporary texts so well that they can play around with them, making new versions, applying them to different contexts. We simply don't know. I don't understand what the scenario is here. So this person had access to a whole library of learned texts but didn't understand what they were seeing and then proceeded to spend considerable resources in making a dumb imitation of it?

One scenario I can imagine is that a clever and creative but highly neurodivergent individual was born into a privledged aristocratic family, had access to a number of contemporary texts but was never granted the education to learn to read them in their Latin, perhaps because she was female and a bit daft. (The extensive non-sexual depiction of naked women in the VM suggests to me that the author might possibly have been a woman, or at least not a cishet male, but that's another story) Her family ingulged her by providing the writing materials she asked for, and left her alone to wander in her mystical fantasy world, which she documented compulsively. After her death, her loving brother compiled an assortment of her writings, produced over many years, into the small codex that has come down to us. 

No evidence for any of this of course, but to me it is not an entirely unplausible scenario that explains the mystery we confront.

A single-author hypothesis usually has a problematic relationship with the evidence, in my opinion. Preston Currier already suspected more than his two "certain" hands, and Lisa Fagin Davis (the first professional paleographer to study the VM handwriting concludes that there were five different people writing the text.

This does not take into account the question of how many people drew the imagery, if they were the same people who wrote the text, if there was really a good painter and a later clumsy painter etc. 

The degree of coordination required to pull this off suggests that at least the majority of these people were working together. This in turn presupposes a certain didactic component to the exercise, one explaining the others how it's done, or a coordination of strategies if they were working simultaneously.

This makes it hard to conclude that this was one person's fantasy world. And again, anachronism looms over this concept - what would constitute a fantasy world for medieval writers?

(11-11-2023, 12:06 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This makes it hard to conclude that this was one person's fantasy world. And again, anachronism looms over this concept - what would constitute a fantasy world for medieval writers?

I know next to nothing about medieval anything, but I always thought Don Quixote of 1605 was ironically referring to some past tradition of fantasy chivalry novels, so I would assume these had been extremely popular and seen as what they were: a fantasy. 

Also, I tried looking up examples of medieval fantasy online, found references like this one: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The second story mentioned there has an interesting detail: the Moon as a cosmic trash dump, not unlike MCU Sakaar. To me this looks pretty much as a simple version of the modern fantasy world building. 

What exactly is anachronistic in the concept of a fantasy world wrt the Voynich manuscript?

Well it depends. Fantasy as a genre is a phenomenon that started in the 19th century. 

Fantasy as a concept - imagination - is as old as humanity. Every work of fiction is a fantasy. Myth, allegory, mysticism... all contain fantastical elements. Medieval encyclopedias are bursting with fantastical elements. Using imagination is part of human nature and that any work of fiction contains fantastical elements goes without saying.

So when someone uses terms like "fantasy" and "worldbuilding" in relation to the VM, they could be doing one of two things:

1) Simply saying that it contains fictional elements. This would be true for most human writings in history, and hence would not add something new. Hence, I assume they are instead....
2) ...invoking the more modern concept of fantasy literature and associated concept of worldbuilding. This is by definition anachronistic. 


Would the medieval bestiaries be called a work of fantasy? An exercise in worldbuilding? Doesn't this terminology feel a bit off?

(11-11-2023, 07:07 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So when someone uses terms like "fantasy" and "worldbuilding" in relation to the VM, they could be doing one of two things:

1) Simply saying that it contains fictional elements. This would be true for most human writings in history, and hence would not add something new. Hence, I assume they are instead....

A lot of human writing contains deliberate fictional elements, but a lot of human writing doesn't. The Voynich manuscript could be a medieval science book, or it could be a medieval fiction (or even some strange form of art). So, when people say "fantasy" they could just refer to the hypothesis that VMS is not a treatise or a study book, but an illustrated fiction. And if a fiction describes a self-consistent world significantly different from the reality, I see no problem talking about world building, etc. Maybe this would be a problem for professionals, I don't know.

(11-11-2023, 07:07 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would the medieval bestiaries be called a work of fantasy? An exercise in worldbuilding? Doesn't this terminology feel a bit off?

I had to actually look up bestiaries to know what they are, I guessed from the word it would have to do with animals, but that's all I knew. If a story describes certain fantastic elements without trying to tie them up in a large consistent fantastic world, this probably could be called a (fairy) tale, a collection of anecdotes, etc.

On the other hand, what would you call the trip to the Moon from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (about the existence of which I also learned just 15 minutes ago)? It is a piece of a fictional story about a fictional world, if I understand the synopsis correctly.

I had a professor at university who insisted that we are all people of the renaissance. So much of how we see the world, art, science, ourselves... was shaped in that critical timeframe. Obviously this cannot be seen as a single moment when everything changed all of a sudden, but things were shifting quicker than before for a number of reasons.

Now the whole concept of the renaissance, when it started, what it entailed and so on is being revised by historians, and a subject of debate. But nobody, not even proponents of a very long Middle Ages, would use a 16th century work like Orlando Furioso to say anything about medieval literature. It's just a product of a different age and would not have been made in the early 15th century, just like Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) could not have been made in the 1600's. Works of fiction are products of their time. That fact that Orlando Furioso was written in the 16th century is extremely relevant, since it was clearly a new kind of work that had success and great influence on later authors.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the context of the early 15th century.

Bestiaries had as their prime purpose to show how the entire natural world reveals biblical truths. They are didactic, moralistic an religious. If you don't believe me, just read the introductory paragraph of the wiki: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Now take any medieval work you want, and ask: what is its purpose? Why was it put on parchment? 

Then compare that purpose to the purpose of modern fantastic novels. And you will start to see why the terminology is anachronistic.

Of course you can always say that the VM is different, but then we opt to abandon the known cultural context of the early 15th century and replace it with modern concepts, which is something I think is probably not the most productive.

The VMs was a "botanical bestiary". The one proven example is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 'costmary'. As per prior ninja discussions, costmary is the 'herb of the virgin'. So, this is a reference to the Virgin Mary and to Mariology of the era. The wing-like roots represent St. Michael and together these two elements present the Assumption of Mary into heaven. So perhaps the written text on this page has to do with religion and not botany.

Look at the biography of Colette of Corbie. Religious ideas were a source of strong motivation. Her biography specifically mentions a special ring received in a dream and a cross. Keep that in mind while investigating the VMs nymphs. It's another example of the "known cultural context of the early 15th century".