The Voynich Ninja

Heh, you're right. These are the two VM plants that have a "daisy" imposed on another flower. The thing in the Dioscorides, though far from a perfect match, is the closest I've seen to the "imposed daisy" phenomenon in another MS.

The Latin annotator wrote "narticus" (na2tic9) next to the plant on the left, so they connected the illustration with the paragraph at the top of the page, starting with Νάρθηκος (genitive of νάρθηξ).

In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the image looks very different (similar to the actual plant You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

Peucedanum is in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., also very different from the Paris ms (left and right: Paris; center: Morgan).

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EDIT: it would be great to be able to read Dioscorides' text, my guess is that the Paris Grec 2179 illustration was derived from a textual description of Narthex. E.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: 
"flowers small, yellow, in single or scarcely branched compound umbels arising from within the leaf sheaths". 

While the Paris illustration does not look like Narhtex, it does show a flower arising from within a sheath: the green cone below the daisy could represent the leaf sheaths, while the daisy stands for a generic "flower".

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has the Greek text side by side with a Latin translation. The text for Narthex in Paris Greek 2179 and Morgan M.652 appears to be identical. Both lack the last words (in parentheses) of the printed text. The passage is entirely about the medical use of the plant. The only part describing some of the plant is the one that is missing in the two manuscripts, and anyway it says nothing of the flower. So it seems more likely that the corruption of the image was independent from the text (though I find it hard to imagine what happened with Narthex). To make things even more complex, Collins believes that the text and illustrations of Paris Greek 2179 came from two distinct sources.


These are the two plants from the Latin Dioscorides You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (left: Ferula Narthex, right: Peucedanum). Also in this case, the illustrations do not seem to have much to do with the actual plants.

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(26-06-2024, 11:22 PM)Juan_Sali Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The name of the genus derives from the Greek
peukedanon, which was the Greek name given by Dioscorides and
Pliny to P. officinale and related species., there are 3 plants P. officinalis, the one that matches better is Parietaria officinalis

In the case of peukedanon, it is assumed that it is Peucedanum officinale (P. officinale). How did you get from peucedanum to parietaria ?

Perhaps a bit of a stretch (the VM plant is very weird), but I could imagine something like this (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) giving rise to the eldritch horrors of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . In this case, there are similar tendencies in "flower", leaf and root.

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In a similar vein, the little "skirts" on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are kind of weird. Chigi You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. does have stacked "skirts" in a way, as well as paired leaves connected straight to the stalk. It offers a potential explanation of where the VM bizarre comes from. Flowers and roots are completely different though.

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(27-06-2024, 01:36 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How did you get from peucedanum to parietaria ?

Look at the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Juan posted.
The huge problem with pre- Linnaean plant names was that several unrelated plants were often addressed by the same name and the same plant by different names - which caused considerable confusion. Another example would be Helleborus which in the Dioscorides is used to describe both the Christmas Roses we assign to the genus Helleborus today but also the Corn Lilies Veratrum, commonly still called 'falses Hellebores' today. So the mix- up is no wonder.

Also the currently favored hypothesis regarding the creation of Dioscorides copies indeed appears to be that text and images were compiled independently from distinct text and image sources each time and not copied from existing books. The original Dioscorides of antiquity is believed to have been un-illustrated, later, perhaps already during Imperial Roman times, the beautiful life-like illustrations were created and most likely preserved and copied as relatively large paintings on wooden boards, hence called 'pinakes'.  Such pinakes source must have existed at least until the creation of the Morgan Ms around mid 10th century in Constantinople.

The later manuscripts created in medieval Middle Europe show considerably poorer or generic drawings often completely unrelated to the actual plant. Still all Dioscorides copies have their unique plants which means that images were compiled from additional stock sources or novel creations of the artist. It is quite likely the same happened in the VM.

I am still not convinced the author of the VM had an actual high-quality Dioscorides copy as source, it may very well have been a later derived herbal. Still I believe it was Diane who described the VM imagery as distinctively 'Byzantine'.

These are good findings, Koen. I still wonder at what point pareidolia takes over so we have to be careful. But overall the VM plants do appear to have at least some Dioscorides DNA.

(04-07-2024, 06:44 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Flowers and roots are completely different though.

I am more and more leaning toward the hypothesis that many VM flowers were added independently. I would not call them 'fake' but probably the artist's own invention. Same with many roots but they rather appear to have been copied from another source.

Further observations:
If our hypothesis of a partial Dioscorides source for the VM is correct we can observe some odd things:
.) certain details were copied but not the overall plant
.) the stem part was copied independently from roots and flowers
.) roots have better matches in later medieval herbals
.) odd details like stem loops, weird flowers or the 'eldritch horror' pods of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. were added, either deliberately or out of a lack of understanding of plant anatomy. Many herbals have weird plants but the VM beats them by a mile.
This also matches glitches like Aries nibbling on the tree that was originally in the background or using a marriage couple as Gemini.

The 1 million dollar question is - why?

I'm thinking along the same lines, Bernd. There's a thin line between "potentially relevant" and "potentially fooling myself", and nobody knows where this line is. We can't run some python script to double check the results.

Still, with these similarities, I could not simply gloss over them. If we draw attention to them, they may or may not come in handy later, when we find another piece of the puzzle.

One of the things I'm struggling with is the diversity of apparent sources. The Zodiac images seem to have come from a line that originated in France and passed through Alsace and Germany. But Greek materials often entered through southern Italy. The Balneis is also south Italian. Swallowtail merlons were drawn in manuscripts produced in the Veneto and around Milan, but also in Naples.

Many of our best parallels for layout come from Greek manuscripts. Full page plants with added text. The Paris Nicander and similar Theriaca mss are probably the closest we have to the small plants. There's VViews post about the Marginal Psalters. And let's not forget about the Helios miniature which even gets a page on Rene's site. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

There are also stylistic elements in some of the plant drawings which might point to a Greek substratum.

I still don't understand any of this and I don't think there is enough evidence to absolutely insist on anything. But enough to remain aware of this context.

Judging by the name (stachy), it's cicely. The question is, which cicely?

Compared to the VM plant root, it should be the tuberous cicely

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