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Welcome, Guest You have to register before you can post on our site. Username/Email:    Password    Remember me Search Forums (Advanced Search) Online Users There are currently 884 online users. » 3 Member(s) | 878 Guest(s) Applebot, Bing, Google, jalvarezr, mariaassisf Latest Threads Reading temporal cycles i... Forum: Astrology & Astronomy Last Post: AionVerity 1 hour ago » Replies: 0 » Views: 11 The containers in the Pha... Forum: Imagery Last Post: JoJo_Jost 1 hour ago » Replies: 176 » Views: 111,985 The Modern Forgery Hypoth... Forum: Theories & Solutions Last Post: R. Sale 5 hours ago » Replies: 359 » Views: 32,245 Six onion-roof towers sup... Forum: Imagery Last Post: Jorge_Stolfi 6 hours ago » Replies: 78 » Views: 2,874 Has anyone actually made ... Forum: Analysis of the text Last Post: Stefan Wirtz_2 11 hours ago » Replies: 3 » Views: 116 I found Voynich character... Forum: Analysis of the text Last Post: JustAnotherTheory Yesterday, 08:31 PM » Replies: 12 » Views: 273 [split] Olaus as the auth... Forum: Theories & Solutions Last Post: Rafal Yesterday, 05:59 PM » Replies: 3 » Views: 198 Vessel linework Forum: Imagery Last Post: Jorge_Stolfi Yesterday, 04:47 PM » Replies: 16 » Views: 9,978 "Abnormal" words Forum: Analysis of the text Last Post: Jorge_Stolfi Yesterday, 04:38 PM » Replies: 15 » Views: 2,487 [split] Retracer Thread: ... Forum: Voynich Talk Last Post: Jorge_Stolfi Yesterday, 12:32 PM » Replies: 303 » Views: 37,336

[split] "Plants of the Alchemists" Posted by: MarcoP - 02-03-2017, 10:56 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk - Replies (21) Edit KG: this thread was split from another one in the news section, for the original thread see here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (02-03-2017, 09:14 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I mostly expect her not to be aware of a number of pitfalls us "regulars" know all too well. One of those pitfalls is that certain herbal traditions make for easy pickings, but don't stand the test upon closer scrutiny. Case in point is when one of the experts who wrote an essay for the facsimile edition concluded that there was probably no significant link with the alchemical tradition. Hello Koen,  I guess that your point is that experts are sometimes wrong and can disagree with each other. I certainly can agree with that. I find the way you present your argument worth commenting. First of all, you didn't quote, not even mention, the researchers you are talking about. Secondly, you give the impression of not really having read what they wrote: you seem to be discussing what you grabbed from what “the regulars” wrote about these ideas.  The "facsimile edition" reference seems unambiguous: Jennifer M.Rampling, who, in her essay “Alchemical Traditions” states that “the content of this manuscript [the VMS] is almost certainly not alchemical in nature.” Since, you are talking about the plants, it should be mentioned that her analysis is only limited to “the so-called biological or balneological section.”  Given the reference to alchemy, the “certain herbal traditions” you mention must include the so-called Alchemical herbals (which are the other traditions you allude to?). The expert who you think fell into the “pitfall”, whose views "don't stand the test upon closer scrutiny", must be Sergio Toresella, who associated the Voynich ms with that tradition in 1996 (“Gli Erbari degli Alchimisti”) and, as far as I know, was the first to systematically study that tradition. The name “alchemical herbals” (erbari degli alchimisti) is a tribute to Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) -who had collected a certain number of these herbals binding them together with the label “Plants of the alchemists”; lacking a better definition I will use this word too.- One could argue that the name chosen by Toresella is not optimal: it certainly can mislead paleography newbies like myself. Toresella made clear that the references to alchemy are “only incidental,” mostly textual and connected to the various types of “Lunaria”.  He notes that the VMS contains “tens of plants similar to those of the alchemists, but that do not belong to the same iconographic tradition.” A similar opinion has been recently put forward by Alain Touwaide: “Several plant illustrations in the Voynich Manuscript present a similarity with botanical illustrations from the XIV and XV Century, in particular -but not only- with the so-called alchemical herbals.”  The fact that the alchemical herbals are now an “easy to pick” tradition is due to the fact that Toresella has done the hard work for us all, studying hundreds of manuscripts on the field for decades. This tradition was not “easy to pick” for him twenty years ago, it now is an excellent pick for Voynich researchers. The points of view of Rampling and Toresella/Touwaide are perfectly compatible. Of course, at the moment one cannot be certain that the VMS has no alchemical content, nor that it is related with the so-called alchemical herbals: but both opinions have been expressed in a well documented way and I think they are likely both right. I think that, if our hobby has anything to do with understanding the VMS, a real pitfall is believing that any amount of googling is somehow better than a formal training in ancient languages, art history and paleography: years (sometimes decades) of experience in actually reading and understanding true medieval manuscripts. How many complete pages of ancient manuscript text have I read? In how many languages? How many times have I held in my hands a medieval manuscript? I believe there are many more pitfalls for myself than for Rampling, Touwaide, Toresella or the young Marraccini.   Voynich presentation at Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference Posted by: Koen G - 02-03-2017, 08:29 AM - Forum: News - Replies (15) Nick posted about this presentation here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. The Thirteenth Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference Merton College, Oxford March 31 - April 1, 2017 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. On April 1st, there is a presentation by  Alexandra Marraccini of the University of Chicago: “Asphalt and Bitumen, Sodom and Gomorrah: Placing Yale’s Voynich Manuscript on the Herbal Timeline“. Quote:Yale Beinecke MS 408, colloquially known as the Voynich manuscript, is largely untouched by modern manuscript scholars. Written in an unreadable cipher or language, and of Italianate origin, but also dated to Rudolphine court circles, the manuscript is often treated as a scholarly pariah. This paper attempts to give the Voynich manuscript context for serious iconographic debate using a case study of Salernian and Pseudo- Apuleian herbals and their stemmae. Treating images of the flattened cities of Sodom and Gommorah from Vatican Chig. F VII 158, BL Sloane 4016, and several other exempla from the Bodleian and beyond, this essays situates the Voynich iconography, both in otherwise unidentified foldouts and in the manuscript’s explicitly plant-based portion, within the tradition of Northern Italian herbals of the 14th-15th centuries, which also had strong alchemical and astrological ties. In anchoring the Voynich images to the dateable and traceable herbal manuscript timeline, this paper attempts to re-situate the manuscript as approachable in a truly scholarly context, and to re-characterise it, no longer as an ahistorical artefact, but as an object rooted in a pictorial tradition tied to a particular place and time. Since Marracinni is a trained art historian, I am quite curious to see what she's got to say on this matter.   Plant Pictures - Sources and references - query Posted by: Diane - 26-02-2017, 01:59 PM - Forum: Imagery - Replies (9) I'd like to ask members about which sources they have found most helpful in studying the Voynich plant-pictures.   I should also mention that it would be most unwise to rely too heavily on Minta Collins, Medieval Herbals: the illustrative tradition.  To quote from Alain Touwaide's review of 2004: Quote:Medieval Herbals does not fulfill its promises and falls short of the expectations it ambitiously raises. Moreover, the combination of lacunas and mistakes in the information and the inappropriateness of Collins’s method generates misleading conclusions, particularly on the mechanisms of the creation and diffusion of herbals. Nonexpert readers will probably be favorably impressed by the book because of its lavish illustrations, the quality of its presentation, and the renown of the series in which it appears. They will not be aware, however, that Medieval Herbals reinforces the defects of the earlier literature that it criticizes, introduces many mistakes, and in the end provokes more confusion and presents more misleading information than it corrects. So what other works do members recommend and rely on, themselves?   Black ink fading Posted by: Koen G - 26-02-2017, 01:22 PM - Forum: Physical material - Replies (14) VViews posted an interesting resource about ink production in the library. I checked it hoping to find a clue to something that can be observed in the VM. The fact that the ink used for drawing and writing has faded considerably, but that certain other parts are still quite black. Iron gall ink generally has the drawback that it fades over time. So is this unfaded ink from a different recipe? I found the following fragment about this: "And note, that ink made with wine is good for writing books upon the sciences, because, when books are written with it, the letters do not fade, and can hardly be scraped out or discharged from parchment or paper. But if they are written with ink made with water, it is not so, for they can easily be scraped out, and it may happen that the letters written with it will fade." From the manuscripts of Jehan Le Bégue, composed in Paris in 1431, which are found in Original treatises, dating from the XIIth to XVIIIth centuries on the arts of painting, in oil, miniature, mosaic, and on glass; of gilding, dyeing, and the preparation of colours and artificial gems; preceded by a general introduction; with translations,prefaces, and notes. By Mrs. Merrifield. v.1, Merrifield, Mary P. (Mary Philadelphia), London, J. Murray, 1849, p. 68. What I find interesting here is that apparently the "fading" ink was very easy to erase (!). Also, that non-fading ink was apparently of a finer (more expensive?) quality. Some examples are quite striking, for example in the later Zodiac pages where "dark diadems" have been added. Everything has faded apart from these few black details and the month name (!)   fading.jpg (Size: 183.97 KB / Downloads: 346) Does this mean that the person who added or traced the dark lines also wrote the month names? It looks like the same pen to me (line thickness). Thoughts?   Tables without vertical columns? Posted by: Koen G - 25-02-2017, 11:13 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text - Replies (21) In another thread, JKP mentioned the following in response to Diane presenting a table. (24-02-2017, 11:45 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I've often wondered if some of the pages were calendrical pages (or something similar, like moon tables) minus the rigid vertical columns.  I, too, have wondered at times whether the text of some Voynich pages actually belongs in columns. It would surely explain some things, like repetition and, depending on the kind if table, low entropy.  Why does it explain low entropy? Well, in a table the position of the entry also carries information, not just the entry itself. (This is an intuitive proposal, I'll probably get slapped by Anton and Nick for saying stupid things about entropy  )  The reason why this had also crossed my mind is because the type of manuscripts that contain star-related information also often contain mostly tables (Ptolemy). Additionally, these tables can be accompanied by images from other astronomical traditions. And finally, if you look at such a table and imagine that there are no borders and no decent alignement, won't it look a bit like Voynichese? For example in this one (and the following folios) all line-initial words start with either "o" or "T". You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. This is also the kind of script where one might expect a somewhat structured introduction of "false" spaces. I'm not saying that this is the solution, but it might be worth its own thread.   [split] The Zipf law and the Voynich Manuscript Posted by: Sam G - 25-02-2017, 09:21 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text - Replies (47) Basically the labels don't obey Zipf's law.  Most of them only occur once.  But that's actually normal since lists and other kinds of data are known not to obey Zipf's law. If you think about the labels in a visual dictionary, for instance, nearly all of them are only going to occur once.  I would guess that labels accompanying illustrations in scientific textbooks would have a similar distribution. That the main text obeys Zipf's law and the labels do not is not going to be easy to explain if you think it's something other than a meaningful text.  Maybe someone in the early 15th century had already discovered Zipf's law and consciously created a nonsense text to emulate these properties?   Where are the numbers? Posted by: Anton - 24-02-2017, 12:00 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text - Replies (9) The question "Where are the numbers in the VMS?" now and then is touched upon in Voynich discussions. I would suggest to turn this question into the direction of reverse engineering and transform it as follows: Where should we expect numbers in such manuscripts, to begin with? The reader will reasonably ask: "what "such" manuscripts"?" Well, I don't know. Let's judge by the graphical content. First of all, obviously, we would expect numbers in the page and quire numbering. They are there, indeed, but unfortunately they are in plain text, nothing special. There also is that strange f49v. What about other places where numbers would be appropriate?   The Oresme challenge Posted by: R. Sale - 23-02-2017, 09:08 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk - Replies (1) If the first rosette is a cosmos, what cosmos is it? With the plain nebuly line around it, the first choice might be Oresme, if that example is known. And there may be a better match to be discovered. But the details of this cloud band illustration are far more subtle in the Oresme illustration than what is seen in the frilly scallop patterns of de Pizan. The plain nebuly line in the first rosette does not have the level of detail found in Oresme or de Pizan. Such a pattern, with the full scallop-shell design, is found in the VMs central rosette. Hidden in plain sight, and when you know to ask for scallops, there they are. So, what's up with that? First off it seems that the combination of the central sphere of the first rosette and the full-on, blue-painted scallop pattern of the central rosette would produce an even stronger resemblance of the Oresme illustration. Second to none, as far as I've seen. But what we have is not combination, but separation. Why is that? And yet with a convenient closeness. In my view, this is the VMs creator's way of demonstrating a mastery over the artistic elements in the illustration by separating one from the other. This is a simple step to disguise and dissemble the obvious. The VMs is not a puzzle that will open at the first touch. Neither is it phased by a thousand pecks at its surface. The VMs creator has provided the parts, but the challenge is that it is up to the reader to put those parts together properly. If one accepts that the proposed VMs combination of center and circumference as a potential copy of Oresme, that is an interesting and reasonable possibility where additional information would certainly help. But if this is thought to be the extent of this situation, then something has been missed. The VMs is not a normal text that is read for information and instruction. The VMs is a text that poses questions. Can the reader put Oresme's cosmos back together again? For those of us who had never given Oresme's cosmos thought one, that is clearly a problem. "NOT KNOWING" the basis on which a visual analogy was made presents the researcher with a significant obstacle. Learning is changing one's mind.  But it's not just the analogy, it's also the methodology. The VMs is a puzzle because things are separated, things are disguised, things are hidden, things are not entirely identifiable by their appearance, but by the combination of appearance and the proper (traditional) location. And unlike appearance, location is objective according to tradition. .   Some letters aren't letters Posted by: ReneZ - 23-02-2017, 09:08 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text - Replies (36) I made the following statement elsewhere: (23-02-2017, 11:35 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Suggesting that some symbols represent vowels assumes that the symbols represent either letters or sounds. Both are natural assumptions, but I have very severe doubts about them. The following symbols:  q  f  p  m  y   are demonstrably not to be identified with letters. That's five out of (say) 25. How confident can one be that the others are? And even if they are, what to make of a mixture of letters and non-letters? This (naturally) caused some reactions. To discuss such things in a meaningful way is usually difficult, because, in order to be precise, one really has to write in great detail, and chances to be misunderstood or misinterpreted are always great. (23-02-2017, 06:47 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not know why the characters you state are "not to be identified with letters". I find absolutely no problem with both q and y being straightforward characters which represent phonemes. The characters f p m can be linked to other characters and have strong positional rules, suggestive of being variants. I would like to stress that, when I wrote "letters or sounds", for me these are two different things. Sounds = phonemes. With letters I mean characters of an alphabet, or as in German "Buchstaben". It is possible to show that the five I mentioned (but also the less frequent g ) are not representations of plain text characters, but the reasons (arguments) are different, and fall into three classes. The same arguments cannot necessarily be applied to the question whether these symbols could represent phonemes, so I specifically wrote "letters". However, there are also problems with that. Many proposed solutions of the Voynich MS text include a table that translates the Voynich symbols to plain text characters, and then present bits and pieces of plain text. (Note that "many proposed solutions" are not You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.   here. I am talking about specific cases, including solutions that I have received by Email over the years). If such a table maps the 5 or 6 characters in question to plain text characters (and especially if f p m g are not variants of other characters) there can be no doubt that this is wrong. There is (much) more to be said about this, but not right now.   A return to f25v - the dragon is the key, obviously, but is it basil? Posted by: david - 22-02-2017, 09:04 PM - Forum: Imagery - Replies (61) Well, I must admit that tonight it struck me that it could be basil, as I've been going through different plants that were associated with wyrms and their ilk. What really tipped me off was the mnemonic of the dragon. T.H. White makes mention of basil being an antidote to basilisks, and by extension, to other stinging worms such as scorpions and the like. He notes: Quote:Basil and Basilisk both derive from the same Greek root meaning Royal, so the one was presumed to be the antidote to the other. Turner's Herbal says: "it is goode for the stryking of a dragon or sea serpent". In White's 1954 translation of The Books of Beasts (a translation of a 12th century bestiary) the scribe mentions that basil is used to catch animals under the sign of Scorpio, as it is the active ingredient in the bait recipe given. Aldrovandus adds a recipe including basil to catch sea scorpions, as well as carp for some reason. The only thing stopping me from crowing here is that despite the obvious similarities in the crowned leaf arrangement of the depiction and original plant, basil leaves have a single distinctive central vein with arteries radiating out to the leafs edge, whilst the Voynich plant has multiple strong central veins with no radiating arteries. Can anyone think of a plausible reasoning for this? Is there a close family of the basil with these attributes, or do dried basil leaves go like this? First Previous Next Last