The Voynich Ninja

Sorry - I should have added links.

B. tomentosa centre of flower
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kidney-shaped leaf
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calyx in a botanical drawing (I'm not happy with the match here)
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another reason for my hesitation: the petals overlap, where those in f.2v don't appear to.
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B. malabarica
flower and leaf
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flower centre
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sorry - no picture of the calyx online.

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Uses:

medical uses for Bauhinia
Ayurvedic (list of names in various languages and dialects also here)
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Other Bauhinia which might be referenced:


Bauhinia racemosa or Mountain ebony - medicine

B. purpurea: Young shoots and leaves of B. purpurea are added to curry dishes; the taste is somewhat sour.

An online pdf also says
"for tribal people in general, and [in] Rajasthan in particular, Bauhinia sp. Kachnar are (sic) important ingredients.
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(01-03-2016, 01:59 AM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.With regard to this folio, I was less confident than with most of them, but settled with some hesitation for the leaf (which sets the type) as being from Bauhinia malabarica; with the flower from Bauhinia tomentosa .  The latter would have been of importance where it grew, in southern India, because it is also known as the 'flower of St. Thomas' and would thus have been revered, and I expect used for ...

That's an interesting idea, especially regarding the thickened calyx, but Bauhinia tomentosa grows as a shrub; it resembles a small apple tree in shape and size. Plants like that rarely have rhizomes with leaf scars because the leaves grow above the stalk/trunk rather than out of the rhizome.

The VMS rhizome is very carefully and specifically drawn. That kind of rhizome is most often seen in aquatic and wetland/marshy plants because they shed their leaves as they creep along their environment. That's why they have leaf scars. Shrubby plants have leaf scars on the branches, not on the rhizome.



B. tomentosa doesn't have a kidney-shaped leaf. It has a reverse-kidney-shaped leaf.

VViews

re:
...all the botanical folios show a composite.
...
some of the plants... are perfectly depicted in our manuscript.

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Perhaps I have expressed myself too briefly, but a lot of people here already know my views so I tried to be succinct.

I should have said "each of the botanical folios is a composite image of a perceived plant-group"

and

"some ... (e.g. the Musaceae group) ... are perfectly depicted in our manuscript although their [actual] appearance would remain unknown to illustrators of western botanical works until as much as a couple of centuries after 1438.



For details, and the historical matter, including western allusions to the Musaceae, the easiest thing I can do is suggest you search "Musaceae" on voynichimagery.wordpress.com

I believe that before I identified the 'banana' group on that folio, "a" banana had been earlier seen there by one or more researchers.  The posts probably mention the people, but my first write-up was several years ago, and I don't recall offhand. I think perhaps Sherwood was one.

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PS - I take the point that not everyone is a native speaker of English, and I shall make the effort to write in more formal, and less colloquial style in future.

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Yes, I agree with you about the creeping rhizome, and (as I said) the leaf looks to me like a succulent leaf.

However, it has taken a century it seems for anyone to notice that the flower can't possibly be that of a water-lily, at least not one from the old world.

I'm not sure that the makers of these drawings would have been particularly concerned with the sort of details we fuss over in our own botanical imagery.  The point is not to create images for some leisured person to consult in a nice library edition.  This is a working handbook, filled with a variety of information useful to the persons for whom it was made.  It might have been enough to see at a glance that the leaf was 'like' a kidney.  I don't know. As I said, I wasn't as satisfied with the results of analysing this folio as I was with the majority of others.

What I continually wonder is when we have such acutely critical minds as yours these days, the 'water lily' idea managed to survive and almost become canonical.  No-one 'saw" the key indicators which tell us that it can't be.

Speaking from experience, visually illiterate people really and truly cannot "see" details, and stylistics, a lot of the time.  With some you have to be quite diplomatic because otherwise they will excuse their own incapacity by suggesting what what they cannot register isn't actually there.  I guess the tone-deaf do much the same?

Saying that it certainly can't be a waterlily isn't any better than saying that it certainly is.

What is true is that we can't be certain either way.
What's also true is that the flower doesn't look like a waterlily flower.

Treating images in a medieval herbal MS as if they should be close representations of nature is most certainly invalid, though the period where this started to happen is roughly the 15th-16th Century, and the Carrara herbal (MS Egerton 2020) of 1440 is a fine example of an early case, produced by a very capable artist.
The flowers of the waterlily (Nenufar) in the early copies of Tractatus de Herbis really don't look like waterlily flowers either.

On the other hand, the drawing of the flower in the so-called waterlily in the Voynich MS seems to be quite detailed and deliberate.


The author of a recent scholarly edition of the Sloane 4016 MS pointed out (as I had also noted) that the flower looks much more like that of a common lily, as depicted in this MS but also in Egerton 747 (in both cases on f 52r, purely coincidentally).


This could lead to the speculation (not his) that the Voynich MS artist thought that the waterlily should have a lily flower. This only makes sense if his native language were English or German (or possibly some other that I am not familiar with).
I will strike that speculation, of course, if someone tells me that 'Wasserlilie' is not attested in the early 15th C.

Postscript:
Let me add a clip of an image of 'Lilius Albus' in the Oxford MS  Canon Misc. 500.
This was digtally online in the past but, apparently, no longer. I don't know a date for the MS.

Whoever drew this may not have been a great artist, but cared about details:




In fact, plants with this kind of rhizome can sometimes be identified as to the specific plant by how much the leaf scar protrudes, how porous it is (note the dots in the VMS plant) and the pattern by which it "spins" around rhizome's stalk (some are in bands, some in horizontal lines, some create a gradual spiral).


There was a software developer who was working with plant rhizomes to try to develop algorithms to mimic each individual pattern of growth who had some excellent close-ups of the rhizome structure of a few aquatic plants. Unfortunately, it was only a limited sample (a couple of species) and I don't know if the pictures are still online.

(01-03-2016, 06:19 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

This was digtally online in the past but, apparently, no longer. I don't know a date for the MS.

Bodley says around 1500

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I've mentioned Nymphoides a couple of times (it's not the same as the lotus or water lily Nenuphar, Nuphar or Nymphaea and is small compared to what most people call water lilies) and I found an example of the Nymphoides aquatica rhizome. It doesn't show the new growth, but it does show the leaf scars:

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The VMS flower:



Now look at the flowers of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can give you an idea of the diminutive size of this plant.

Good match in many respects, moreso than the traditional lotus or water lily which is larger and has spikier petals or much rounder petals, depending on the species.

Nymphoides has the correct rhizome structure, leaf, and lightly fringed white or yellow petals (the petals are variable textures but most are lightly fringed). But... Nymphoides (and its relative in the Gulf area Villarsia humboldtiana that has a protruding style) does not have this calyx structure. The calyx is longer and spikier and not thickened and the style is not hirsute, even in Villarsia.

It's one of those, so-close-and-yet-so-far situations which is why I like to retain plants like Asarum and  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as possible options, as well. Parnassia species have a thickened calyx (but not a knob) and a protruding style (but not hirsute). The annual Parnassia do not have rhizomes, but the perennial species do and a couple of them have reniform leaves.


Many plants (like terrestrial lilies) have protruding stamens (like the example René posted), but protruding styles (especially hirsute ones) are not common on reniform plants and the previously mentioned hibiscus and malva, which do have hirsute styles, don't typically have kidney-shaped leaves and this kind of rhizome.

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Okay, so how's this for one possible explanation for the seeming disjunct between the flower and the rest of the plant...

Some of you have noticed that the same flower occurs a few folios later on a different plant.


This thought crossed my mind when I began to realize at least some of the VMS plants appear to be drawn from herbarium (flattened) specimens...

Plant 2v does resemble You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in most ways except for the petals and style.

1) If you look at A. europeum flowers they are distinctive, quite thick, and they have a narrow waist and a bump below the area usually associated with the calyx (similar to the VMS calyx).

2) In herbarium specimens, petals sometimes disintegrate when they dry—they are fragile.


Is it possible the illustrator worked from a dry specimen and thought the little jug-shaped Asarum flower was the calyx and "invented" the missing petals? I'm not proposing this as a theory. I'm just putting the idea out there as food for thought.

rene i agree with you: saying it isn't this or that because it resembles more this and that doesn't help.

Also, it is my opinion after much study, that discussion what herbal looks like which herbal is somewhat useless.

Because, for example:
*herbals in general in the period of the VMS are drawn not nature-like
*herbals in de VMS are not nature-like
*herbals in similar MS have often names that are not latin, but slang or invented names
*herbals are always copied and then altered and then copied again
*coloring of the herbals is often done with colors "at hand"


What is more interesting to me: 
from which MS did the writer copy the drawings ?


From there we can try to distillate the appropriate names applied.

Yes, you can say, prove that he copied them. 
But the chances that most herbals have been copied are bigger, then that the writer made ALL herbal pictures himself !

(01-03-2016, 12:45 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.rene i agree with you: saying it isn't this or that because it resembles more this and that doesn't help.

Also, it is my opinion after much study, that discussion what herbal looks like which herbal is somewhat useless.

Hello David, I don't think that Rene wrote anything like that.
In my opinion, comparing the Voynich illustrations with other herbals is very useful. Until we manage to read the text, we can never be certain of any identification, but we can often define a limited number of reasonable candidates. And the only possible way to decide which candidates are reasonable is by comparing them, evalutating which one is more resemblant. 
For instance, let us consider the cicaro herb you mentioned (ms University of Pennsylvania You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and one of the Water Lily images posted by Rene Zandbergen and Ellie Velinska (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.):

* Flower: both manuscripts bear some similarity, but none of the two is perfect. In particular, the prominent pistil is missing and the petals are not frilled (I refer to JKP's detailed comment above). Egerton seems better because the flowers have fewer petals, as in the Voynich ms. Let's say, roughly:
60% Upenn, 40% Egerton

* Leaves: Upenn is completely different, Egerton very similar:
20% Upenn, 80% Egerton

* Roots: Same as the leaves
20% Upenn, 80% Egerton

Upenn average: 33.3%
Egerton average: 66.6%

Of course, you can disagree with my analysis and its results (and the numbers are here only to make clear that these things are indeed comparable). You could tell us in detail which features of the Cicaro illustration are better than the Egerton's manuscript.

In my opinion, this is a simple and meaningful way to proceed.
Incidentally, it also gives us a possibility to find an answer to your question:
from which MS did the write[r] copy the drawings ?
For instance, see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Again, it is unlikely that we will ever be able to identify a single source, but likely there is a herbal tradition that can provide closer parallels than the others.

JKP Yes, I like the nymphoides.  It seems to meet all the criteria, doesn't it?
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And Rene, that illustration is of a plant popularly known as the 'Joseph lily' - it isn't aquatic and its leaves are narrow and pointed.  It was so well known in mainland Europe that I expect anyone could have drawn it in their sleep. It is seen in every statue of St.Joseph, every carving of the holy family and so on.

I don't agree with your thought that when a drawing is manifestly unlike something else, that's the same as saying it is like that other thing.