The Voynich Ninja

(13-02-2025, 04:39 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In medieval illustrated herbals, it's often difficult to identify the exact subspecies intended. Dioscorides includes You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the one on the left is is Alkanna Tinctoria.

It makes sense to me. If you imagine the ground level to be at the top of the root, this drawing does capture the low habit of the plant.

(13-02-2025, 04:23 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.An important piece of information might be that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has these same flowers but in white-green. The plant itself looks different.
ELV thinks the flowers look like one of the many clover species or a Scabious. Bernd thinks they look like Asteraceae... 

Either way, it appears unlikely to me this flower shape was invented as a fluke, twice.

As I was mentioned I would like to add a few things!
As Koen said, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has identically shaped flowers though the plant has pinnate leaves like many Fabaceae.
Therefore anyone claiming to identify You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as a whole plant should also provide a solution for f90v.
What plant family - if any - these flowers represent is difficult to say as with most VM flowers. They look like composite flowers of Asteracae but if, we only see the outer parts, the involucral bracts, not the central disc. They look very different from the B - 'daisies'.

Personally I think in many cases we are dealing with chimeras in the VM, fantastic composite plants that have been combined from roots, shoots and flowers from different sources or the artist's imagination. The VM flowers are odd in many regards and unusually large and detailed compared to most contemporary herbals. I would treat them separately when trying to identify potential source plants in other herbals. Same with roots.

I would also like to raise an uncomfortable question:
What is the point of illustrations in a herbal?
From an utilitarian point - there is none. Dioscorides himself complained that physicians do not care about botany. And frankly why would they? Physicians were not expected to go out and harvest herbs, this was considered an inferior task. Physicians bought dried herbs or herbal preparations. Knowing what the plant looked like in vivo was not necessary. Indeed the original Dioscorides is believed to have been lacking any illustrations. The marvelous paintings were only added much later in manuscripts that targeted a bibliophile and rich audience of nobles, not physicians that could never afford such books.

This has 2 implications:
1) If we consider the VM a practical book of medicine that was intended to be used, such complex illustrations are unnecessary. An exception would be an allegoric or mnemonic purpose of the drawings that helped in memorizing the text or contained hidden meaning.

2) This means there is no selection pressure to depict life-like plants. For medical purposes, it simply does not matter what the plant looks like, and grossly wrong representations have no negative effects on the physician's work.

We therefore must not look at such drawings with a 21st century perspective.
It looks like quite some work and care went into the VM plant drawings. But botanical accuracy certainly was not the artist's main priority.

One last thing to add - throughout the entire manuscript, the artist likes to utilize and recombine a few basic shapes and forms. The similarities between 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. which also include the overall shape of the plant, may also be a form of autocopy. Why invent something new when you can re-arrange the building blocks you already have? In a way, there's an odd analogy to the VM text which may or may not be a coincidence. No idea.

(13-02-2025, 10:50 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would also like to raise an uncomfortable question:
What is the point of illustrations in a herbal?
From an utilitarian point - there is none. Dioscorides himself complained that physicians do not care about botany. And frankly why would they? Physicians were not expected to go out and harvest herbs, this was considered an inferior task. Physicians bought dried herbs or herbal preparations. Knowing what the plant looked like in vivo was not necessary. Indeed the original Dioscorides is believed to have been lacking any illustrations. The marvelous paintings were only added much later in manuscripts that targeted a bibliophile and rich audience of nobles, not physicians that could never afford such books.

Perhaps an uncomfortable question, but crucially important.

In our modern mindsets, we are so used to the idea that illustrations are there to clarify things, that it is hard to think otherwise.

Nowadays, adding illustrations just to make a publication look better is considered bad practice.
(Similar to adding lots of equations to one's powerpoint presentation just to make it look more impressive - but I digress into a different set of disciplines).

We should not look at the illustrations in the MS as trying to help identify the plant. We cannot be sure why they are there, but NOT to explain what the plant looked like.
Quite possibly just to beautify or to impress.

I'd like to add to this discussion that an impressive amount of the VM plants are different and unique. If someone just improvised, they would quickly start duplicating stuff, and in the VM this only seems to happen with certain types of flowers. But look at any of the large plant drawings and they are quite unique as a whole. Many of the leaf shapes and arrangements are unparalleled.

The collection of plant drawings is very high entropy.

I agree with the sentiments expressed by Bernd and Rene, but would add that some guiding source or principle must have been employed to give rise to this diversity.

Pictures make perfect sense as a textbook.
In schools, what the plant looks like. Or get me a bunch of Chrotepösche. What does it look like? Yes, something like this.
A picture is an advantage here if I don't want the whole meadow.
Chrotenpösche/toad bush = dandelion.

Well, it's not just the flowers that have to be right.

Tragant
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Wundklee
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Normaler Klee
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(14-02-2025, 12:48 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(13-02-2025, 10:50 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would also like to raise an uncomfortable question:
What is the point of illustrations in a herbal?
From an utilitarian point - there is none. Dioscorides himself complained that physicians do not care about botany. And frankly why would they? Physicians were not expected to go out and harvest herbs, this was considered an inferior task. Physicians bought dried herbs or herbal preparations. Knowing what the plant looked like in vivo was not necessary. Indeed the original Dioscorides is believed to have been lacking any illustrations. The marvelous paintings were only added much later in manuscripts that targeted a bibliophile and rich audience of nobles, not physicians that could never afford such books.

Perhaps an uncomfortable question, but crucially important.

In our modern mindsets, we are so used to the idea that illustrations are there to clarify things, that it is hard to think otherwise.

....

We should not look at the illustrations in the MS as trying to help identify the plant. We cannot be sure why they are there, but NOT to explain what the plant looked like.
Quite possibly just to beautify or to impress.

I agree that "What is the point of illustrations in a herbal?" is a good question, but I am not sure we know the answer. If Dioscorides complained that physicians do not care about botany, I guess he thought that knowledge of botany was important for the physicians, and "De Materia Medica" certainly points in that direction. His descriptions, however short, seem to me to be intended to make the plants recognizable.
For instance, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

Dioscorides Wrote:Anchusa has many prickly leaves (similar to the sharpleaved lettuce) — rough, sharp and black — on every side of the root joining to the earth. The root is the thickness of a finger, and the colour almost of blood. In the summer it becomes astringent, dyeing the hands. It grows in good grounds.

About the second kind:

Dioscorides Wrote:Anchusa altera differs from the above in having smaller leaves yet equally sharp. There are thin little branches, with flowers of a purple colour drawing towards a Phoenician [red]. The roots are red and very long. Around harvest time they have something similar to blood in them. It grows in sandy places.

These descriptions take about half of each paragraph (the second half being about the medical use of the plant). From the text, I get the impression that he wanted his readers to be able to recognize the plant in nature. Maybe his readers were physicians who gathered their own plants, or maybe the book was addressed to both apothecaries and physicians. In any case, the paragraphs above would benefit from illustrations: if they were a later addition, they were still consistent with Dioscorides' efforts to make the plants recognizable.

There are late medieval herbals that are somehow comparable with the Voynich manuscript, e.g. the so-called Alchemical Herbal, or the non-Apuleius plants in Trinity O.2.48. In the case of the Trinity ms, my impression is that the illustrations were based on the description in the text. Again, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The illustrator (like ourselves) apparently had no idea of the actual plants described and his illustrations are certainly not reliable. I wouldn't exclude that also in this case the intention behind the images was "to explain what the plant looked like", though in practice the illustrations are not helpful.

The case of the Alchemical Herbal is probably more complex: the anthropomorphic / zoomorphic details appear to be more about the folk names of the plants than about the plants themselves. The text lacks the description of plants found in Dioscorides and Trinity O.2.48, but it does give instructions for the time and places appropriate for gathering: in this case, it seems that the textual descriptions were replaced by the illustrations. Even if the illustrations are very schematic and ambiguous, I suspect that the intention was still making the plant recognizable.

Certainly there were illustrated herbals made for royalty like Anicia Juliana or Matthias Corvinus, but they could derive from illustrated works of a simpler nature and made for physicians and apothecaries.

In conclusion, on the basis of other manuscripts, I am not so sure that the Voynich illustrations were not intended to help identify actual plants. Anyway, since the function of images is sometimes unclear even for works that can be read, we will probably never know with any certainty what the intended function of the Voynich illustrations was.