The Voynich Ninja

I'd like some help from other members to clarify a point for the introduction to a book of essays.

I was unaware until fairly recently that the Friedman group had formed a general opinion that plants in the manuscript's botanical section were formed as composites.

Having discovered the fact independently - and presented an explanation of the way in which the pictures are structured, the system informing the 'pictorial annotations' at the roots and identified about forty folios' worth, I was later informed that the general idea had been stated in d'Imperio's book.

So my question is this. 

Between 1912 and the publication of Mary's book in 1978
and
(separately)
between 1978 and when I began publishing my own work (from 2010)

had anyone ever looked into that issue, or defined any of the plants as composites, or explained any folio in that way?

Otherwise it looks as if d'Imperio's general statement was ignored for the first thirty years, and now that an independent investigation has provided explanation and demonstration - now that is being ignored, while the general statement is increasingly repeated...

Is that the case, or is there a precedent body of research that I've overlooked?  Please rack your memories..

Thank you.

(05-10-2016, 12:25 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'd like some help from other members to clarify a point for the introduction to a book of essays.

I was unaware until fairly recently that the Friedman group had formed a general opinion that plants in the manuscript's botanical section were formed as composites.

Having discovered the fact independently - and presented an explanation of the way in which the pictures are structured, the system informing the 'pictorial annotations' at the roots and identified about forty folios' worth, I was later informed that the general idea had been stated in d'Imperio's book.

So my question is this. 

Between 1912 and the publication of Mary's book in 1978
and
(separately)
between 1978 and when I began publishing my own work (from 2010)

had anyone ever looked into that issue, or defined any of the plants as composites, or explained any folio in that way?

Otherwise it looks as if d'Imperio's general statement was ignored for the first thirty years, and now that an independent investigation has provided explanation and demonstration - now that is being ignored, while the general statement is increasingly repeated...

Is that the case, or is there a precedent body of research that I've overlooked?  Please rack your memories..

Thank you.

Except for Tucker and Strong, I haven't read any of the previous research (I prefer not to) but I have looked at some of the previous plant identifications (there are a lot of charts out there).


In my opinion, a very large proportion of the plant IDs are wrong and some are glaringly wrong.

So, you have to ask yourself (while you're looking into this previous research)... If they were unable to identify the plants (whether as singles or as composites), then how can they make the determination that they are composites?


The idea of composite plants is a slippery slope, just as anagrams are a slippery slope when interpreting the text. As soon as one broaches the idea of the plants being composites, then any part of any plant can be selected separately from any other part and matched to almost any plant. There's no way to prove the idea is correct.


I'm not saying the previous research shouldn't be considered or mentioned if the project is to review the research, but as a working theory for actually understanding the manuscript, it's one of those things that should be kept in the back of one's mind as a possibility rather than actively pursued as a theory, because it's not one that can be verified without some external confirmation (like the decipherment of some related text).



My personal feeling about the plants is that they are like other medieval drawings of plants in the sense that some are naturalistic and some are a combination of naturalistic and mnemonic, but I think it's a lesser possibility (not impossible, but of lower probability) that they are composites.

Having said that, I'm one of the people who wondered out loud if they were composites due to the anomalous flower on the one that looks like a water-lily-like plant but there are other explanations for that as well. When flowers are dried, they change more than leaves/roots/stems, sometimes quite dramatically (in both shape and color) and an illustrator might miss the mark in trying to reconstruct a flower from dessicated remains. Another possibility is that the species became extinct before botanists fully described it.

JKP
You wouldn't be in a position to know this but my first period of in-depth research into the manuscript - by which I mean formal study relying only on academic texts (plus thirty-five years experience) was conducted between 2008-10.

Like you, I avoided having my vision affected by reading any "Voynich-specific" writings, except to check via Nick Pelling's blog whether an intended line of investigation was already covered.

I published the first analysis of a botanical folio in 2010, choosing f.25v because it allowed me to introduce at once the idea of mnemonic devices present in the manuscript, and a clear instance of why the botanical section cannot be a product of the Latin European environment: the plant I identified as Dracaena cinnibaris.  The style in which that 'little dragon' is drawn is, however, European (unlike most of the others), so I thought that would not be too threatening.

Between 2010 and 2013, I published detailed analyses of about thirty or forty of the botanical folios, explaining that they are composite images, that (again) they cannot be images first devised in Latin Europe (the folio showing a range of banana-type plants is obvious proof of that), and also explaining the systematic and regular way in which the 'pictorial annotations' (or mnemonic devices) are devised, and their consistent relevance to the content of the picture.

These posts had to be made private because "Steve D" developed a habit of taking any hitherto unmentioned plant id, and applying it apparently at random, and without explanation, to some other folio altogether.

But in short, I had concluded from my analysis and research that the images are devised differently from Latin works'; that they are designed as composite figures - even the 'ring-in' on folio 9v - and there is intelligent system and order to their structure.  But the plants are not those of a Latin herbal, and cannot have been first devised by a Latin European.

So please don't mistake the conclusions of research for another balloon being floated as 'hypothesis' or 'idea' or (to use Rene's preferred term "proposition").  I do not see in such terms the mutual respect which is owed by those working on the imagery to fellow researchers working on the text, or - most importantly - to the artefact itself.

Diane,
I don't really know if you'll consider this relevant, but one of the most common ideas about the Voynich plant illustrations has long been that they represent grafted plants. 
To me it seems that there isn't much difference between saying that folio x shows a graft between two or more plants and saying that it is a composite.
The nuance might be that in the first case the "composite" occurs in real life and is reflected in the drawing and in the other the composite exists only in the drawing.
If we entertain the possibility of "ideal" grafts that the author imagines could be done, then there really is no difference between saying an image represents a graft or a composite.

VViews,
I guess the difference is that the 'grafts' idea is just an idea.  Not sure whose. It was floated already by 2010 and while I think it should have been allowed a peaceful death long ago, iit keeps being woken up and passed before us, over and over..

It is true that some people in medieval Europe knew how to graft plants.  I could produce imagery proving that people on the other side of the world knew how to graft plants.  It isn't proof that the imagery in MS Beinecke 408 was intended to convey anything of the sort.


I won't mind if I never have to read  another issue of the Journal of Historical Botany, or of ~ Ethnobotany or ~ Economic Botany, or wade backwards through the ever-changing taxonomic descriptions for plants, or undergo again the agony of reading  polyglot dictionaries looking for the word that was used to name such and such a plant in such and such a period and such and such a place.

But without preliminary study of that sort, in addition to a solid grounding in how to analyse imagery as imagery, and identify its proper historical and cultural position, anything said is no more than a bit of trivia.  "Looks-like-to-me" sort of thing. 

I'm not into floating ideas and then trying to find things to make them seem plausible. I prefer the analytic, forensic approach, and a suitable range of comparative study as preliminary to any opinion offered.  The aim is surely to assist the people working on the written text, so kite-flying might seem personally satisfying but wastes their time IMO.

So my conclusions about the imagery are conclusions from the research, not 'ideas' for which I later sought something in support.  There hasn't been any particular benefit in being honest, either.  The conclusions weren't well received, and if I could have done so, it would have been by far the wiser course to pretend that the imagery was appropriate to medieval Latin Christian Europe and the subject of the botanical images was grafting and plants of the standard Latin herbal manuscripts.

But it just ain't so.

I don't know who originated the idea of grafted plants but I suspect the reason it was mentioned is because some of the plants are drawn with bole-like bases. This is not unusual, however, especially if the plants have large root systems or can be grown from cuttings. Bole shapes can be found elsewhere.

Diane,

What I was trying to convey is that it has long been observed (and by "long" I mean at least since the first mailing list, perhaps before) by those trying to carry out plant ID's, that for many folios, part of the illustration seemed to match one plant, while other parts matched another. So if someone says "the flower looks like plant x but the leaves look like plant y" then that to me is basically equivalent to saying that the drawing is a composite, or that it appears composed of parts of various different plants.

Regarding grafts, I did not make any assertions about the likelihood of that. Instead I merely explained that this has been suggested as an explanation, not only for the type of observations I mention in the paragraph above, but also for the specific phenomenon we see in the inconsistent diameter of stems, generally near the root.
As you can see this is recently discussed on S. Bax's site
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and also on this forum
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But the observation is much older, and  it is not a preconceived idea, but an explanation that was proposed to account for the phenomenon I describe in the first paragraph of this post.

If you check the ML search engine on this site you will find posts about "grafting" going back as far as 1998.
In a November 2001 post, ReneZ explains that Gabriel Landini had proposed the idea "many years ago".
I'm not sure if I linking to these old posts will work so I'll just copy/paste one of the discussions I unearthed from the mailing list back in 2001 (excerpts so this doesn't get too long):

• Subject: Re: Gerry Kennedy...
  
• Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2001 06:58:47 -0800
  
• From: "Dana F. Scott" <>
  

Hello Nick,
...
Grafting should be kept in mind and may solve some of the botanical questions
seen in the VMS. Experiments in hybridization/cross pollination may also have
been employed.

Regards,
Dana Scott

Nick Pelling wrote:

> Hi Dana,
...
>
> Gerry Kennedy and his co-author dropped by my house the other evening:
...
> One thing Gerry mentioned I thought I'd pass on to you: he was quite
> convinced that many of the VMS plants showed signs of them having been
> grafted... I know that Theophrastus discussed grafting, so it wasn't
> exactly new in 1480, but was it in active use in European gardens then? Who
> were the grafters of the day? Were there schools of graft? :-)
>
> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

Again just to be clear, I am not arguing in favor of there being grafted plants in the Voynich, but simply drawing your attention to the fact that this is an explanation for the Voynich plants' composite appearance that has been around for a while, and considered by many researchers.
Whether or not they actually used the word "composite" is a technicaliity, they are obviously referring to the same idea of a drawing incorporating parts of various plants.
It may even be older than that but I don't have all of my resources with me at this time to check.

VViews,

yes, I agree that lots of people thought the botanical images senseless "bits and pieces" of different plants - and also that many speculated vaguely about some of the pictures showing grafting.

It is telling, however, that the first time I deconstructed one of the botanical folios, identifying not only each of the plants, but explaining how those chosen for inclusion related to each other in terms of habitat, and practical/economic uses, and also explained that the constructions were along rational and systematic lines: that there was a basic template..  not a single person said other than that the idea was ridiculous.  No, sorry - Nick Pelling referred me to one phrase in Tiltman's paper, repeated by d'Imperio.

And for the next several years, as I was demonstrating how these images work, everyone - I mean everyone - kept hammering the idea that the botanical folios were part of the Latin herbal tradition, and identifying just one plant as the subject of each image.  Idle speculations from eight years before I came to the manuscript - speculations never investigated or demonstrated valid - don't count for much, especially when ignored by the same people who now seem so eager to find excuses to adopt the idea.

Same goes for the 'grafting' notion.  It isn't the reason the image is constructed so.  The white circumscription line signals a plant which is .. tamed - one under cultivation.  The cut-bole indicates a plant used for its wood; rapid-springing young shoots tell you that the plant regenerates rapidly.  That is a conclusion drawn after identifying the plants which are referenced by the drawing.

But as you like..

It seems to me that some plants show somewhat non-natural growth due to the fact that they have been removed from their natural habitat and delivered to someone in the form of bare roots or cuttings of some kind, for further growth experiments. Some seem like they could have been derived from cuttings of cuttings, i.e. a slice of root rather than the whole root. Perhaps the piece that arrived had to be shared amongst interested parties or parts were distributed along the way. It seems to me as though the plants are drawn once they have resumed flowering. So a plant prone to hardy regrowth may show multiple shoots, whereas one not so hardy may only show small growth coming from a larger rootstock. It may be that other experiments were done, such as today is done to create rainbow roses and the like. This may explain some of the strange colourations. I have noticed that sometimes the leaves seem to be drawn as what they look like after they are taken from the plant, rather than what they look like while growing on the plant, as though the completed drawing is a composite of the plant in various states, during growth, after wilting, dried, from memory, etc. and that this may explain some of the discrepancies as well, insofar as their identification. They may also be hybrids, I know that I myself have created different versions of plants from proximity growth, i.e. natural cross pollination, in both Silene (I have an inflata that has pink petals instead of white, I believe it happened because I once had a pink silene garden species growing nearby the native inflata) and also have had various versions of gloriosa daisies from the mixing of garden varieties with native black eyed susans, the resulting plants were some with pointy petals, some with round, various combinations of rust and yellow colouration making them look very different indeed from what I started with. Someone doing purposeful cross pollination between delivered plants from various regions and their own local versions might come up with some very interesting plants indeed. I found it very interesting to find that beetroots as we know them now (root veggie) did not really exist for long before the time of the manuscript, but were developed through human selection in the time since, perhaps it was initially from the mixing with another compatible species from some far off place, is that what is being portrayed perhaps?

Some of them have been drawn from dried plants.

I've mentioned this a few times, how some parts of the plant are more fragile than others when they are dried, how some parts change color more than others and how the petals are often the most fragile and the part that often changes the most in both color and shape.


I'm pretty confident that many of the VMS plants were drawn from dried specimens. It's not just that the leaves have been flattened and oriented toward the viewer (plants drawn from dried specimens have that certain flattened uncluttered look that's different from plants drawn from life), but there's confirmation of this likelihood from stains in the manuscript that look like part of a dried plant (I didn't actually spot these stains until a couple of years after I noticed some of the plants appeared to be drawn from dried specimens).

The first screensnap looks like the residue from two bell-shaped flower heads that appear to have been pressed against the vellum. This is not a stain from the other side.

The second one, I'm less sure of, but it is on the same page. It may be a compressed calyx, with quite a bit of the plant matter still there but parts of it look like a glue blob or white paint blob, so I don't know what happened here, perhaps an attempt to adhere it to the vellum? or perhaps a part of the petal remains or... perhaps this isn't a plant at all, maybe it's a blob of wax?