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+--- Thread: [Talk] Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 (/thread-2953.html)
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - R. Sale - 17-10-2019
The coherence and incoherence perspective is interesting. Coherence is good, but what about incoherence. Where does it come from?
Could incoherence be a form of coherence that is unfamiliar to the reader? Could incoherence be based of an alternative form of interpretation that is unknown to the investigator?
Take the VMs cosmos as an example. Does the wobbly line make any sense to someone who only sees it as a wobbly line?? Not so much.
Now, take the same pattern and reinterpret it according to the traditional terminology derived from medieval heraldry. Now it is a nebuly line. Now it strongly ties in with the use of cloud-bands. Now it makes sense. Now the incomprehensible becomes comprehensible and the incoherent can be seen to be coherent according to previously unfamiliar traditional terminology.
The VMs is a game. The VMs is a puzzle as I have suggest years ago. Things have been hidden. They are difficult to see because the have been intentionally disguised They are difficult to understand because, like the nebuly line, the traditional name and interpretation have fallen into obscurity. Incoherence derives, at least in part, when unfamiliarity on the part of the investigator prevents the proper (traditional) interpretation of things that are clearly present.
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - Aga Tentakulus - 18-10-2019
@R.Sale
In the negative/disturbed formation and assessment of the characteristic coherence as a symptom of disease, one speaks of incoherence or of absentmindedness or confusion of the train of thought. Thought contents that do not belong together are lined up and mixed. There is a lack of content structure and orderly flow of thoughts. An example of incoherent thought reported by Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) is: "The girl is always unpleasantly acceptable tips on such occasions". Uwe Henrik Peters writes that, despite the deficiencies mentioned, a thematic overall context remains recognizable.[1] The formulation, which is sufficiently structured in content, syntactically correct and more understandable in terms of logical sequences, would require a longer execution of the sentence. This example shows a work of condensation as described by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in the dream work, see chapter Orthology[2].
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - MarcoP - 19-10-2019
Here is my summary of what I understood of Alain Touwaide's talk at Villa Mondragone. The talk was delivered in perfect Italian, yet I may have misunderstood something: take everything with a grain of salt. After the conference, I read the long New Yorker article linked below and I found it helpful.
** Introduction **
A biography of Wilfrid Voynich, based on his photographic portraits. His career from turban-wearing adventurer to elegant American citizen, from revolutionary to "personified establishment".
A description of the various parts of the manuscript: herbal, astrological, balneological, compound drugs, an index (Q20). This structure is markedly similar to that of a "iatrosophion" the Greek manual of medicine that was used in families and transmitted from grandmother to grandchild.
History of the manuscript: the possibility that Marci's letter to Kircher is about some other manuscript. Mention of various publications about the VMS: Olt, Gibbs, Cheshire. Janick and Tucker's American theory. The recent Italian edition by Bompiani, with two essays by Skinner and Prinke-Zandbergen.
Mention of Rich Santa Coloma's "1910 Voynich Theory" - the ms was created by Voynich using materials he acquired together with the Franceschini bookshop in Florence.
** The Herbal **
Method: systematic comparison of plants both within the VMS herbal and with other manuscripts.
There are motifs that recur inside the VMS, e.g.:
- "cat's tail" representations ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) with parts of the plant hanging down
- patterns of alternating colours ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )
- rosette-like leaves (repeated twice)
- poppy-like globular structures at the top
The poppy-like capsules are combined with a sun-like flower in VMS You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and with emoji-like tiny "faces" in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
* You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. appears to combine nymphaea and lily
The impressive "oak and ivy" image appears almost identically in the VMS and in the BL herbal (VMS You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - Sloane 38v).
Roots are particularly striking. A recurring motif looks like grafting ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ...). Grafting seems suggestive of combining different elements: the same thing that happens with how visual elements are mixed in plant illustrations. New images and new plants are created by mixing in new ways the same visual elements that can also be found in other herbals.
There is a contradiction between the accuracy with which the text was written and the sloppiness of painting. The poor quality of colour application excludes that the manuscript really is a "iatrosophion" - a manual that was intended for actual use would feature more accurate painting.
A medical manuscript that could be partly comparable with the Voynich herbal is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The library dates it to the XV Century, but it could be much later, XVII or XVIII Century.
** Edmond Locard and the psychology of forgery **
Locard is the father of modern criminology; he wrote about forgeries and the psychology of forgers. In particular, "Traité de criminalistique" Vol 4, and "Les Faux en Ecriture".
Items that can be compared with the VMS:
- The Phaistos Disc
- Stone heads by Modigliani found in the Arno
- The Artemidorus Papyrus
- The Nuntius Sidereus fake (discussed in an article by Nicholas Schmidle, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
As the case of the Nuntius shows, gaining money is not the only reason for forgery. The second motivation is a game, a challenge, between the forger and art critics / experts.
Locard's "exchange principle" suggests that criminals always leave traces behind them. For the VMS herbal, "grafting" could be the key: it points out that the plants were created by assembling elements derived from several different plants. Other details in the illustrations (e.g. the two faces in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) can be seen as more or less deliberate hints to the reader / expert. This hide-and-seek game creates something like a complicity between the forger and the expert.
Other anomalies can be seen as the forger overdoing his job, resulting in an object that is "truer than truth". The worm holes that appear in f1 are absent in f2, but worms do not stop at one page. The forger decided he needed to also add worm holes to his repertoire of signs of authenticity. In his game, by stopping at the first page, he also provided a hint to forgery.
Assuming that the author of the MS is a forger, he clearly was an expert of the field, with a deep knowledge of manuscripts and medieval scientific literature. The way in which he reproduced a "iatrosophion" structure, including an index and compound drugs, is sophisticated: the author was likely familiar with the works of Galen.
Following the parallel with Sloane 4016: Voynich used to frequent the British Library. He might have taken sketches of the manuscript there and later reworked the illustrations to create the VMS.
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - -JKP- - 19-10-2019
Thank you, Marco. I very much appreciate you taking time to summarize the talk.
Wow. I confess to being surprised at Touwaide's various descriptions of the plants. I know this is supposed to be one of Touwaide's areas of expertise but... I don't know what to say.
For example:
Touwaide Summary - Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows different motifs:
- rosette-like leaves (repeated twice)
- poppy-like globular structures at the top
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Many plants in the aster family have rosette-arranged leaves, so there's a good chance that the VMS plant is from the aster family. I don't think there's any possibility that it is from the poppy family (and I think it is misleading to compare the shape of a flower calyx to a poppy capsule).
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Touwaide Summary - Wrote:The poppy-like capsules are combined with a sun-like flower in VMS [/font]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and with emoji-like tiny "faces" in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It's not a good idea to call these capsules, even when talking casually. Those are part of the flower calyx. The term "capsule" usually refers to the seed capsule which develops as the petals are falling away (or are completely gone). But... this has gone from French to Italian to English and it's easy for this kind of term to change in translation, so don't take this as a criticism, but rather as an observation. I know how hard it is to transfer terms through several languages.
I'm not sure why Touwaide mentions "emoji-like" tiny faces in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . In medieval iconography, a dot inside a pod or stamen or other similar structure usually refers to pollen or seeds and I think it's more important to mention this than what is probably a coincidental resemblance to faces. In fact, one of them as three "eyes" which does not seem like a reference to faces.
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Touwaide Summary - Wrote:* [/font]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. appears to combine nymphaea and lily
I think this is an incorrect assessment. This is not a combination plant. This is quite a good drawing of a plant from the Villarsia/Menyanthes family and the flower is pretty accurate (probably Nymphoides or frogbit group).
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Touwaide Summary - Wrote:[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] [/font]A medical manuscript that could be partly comparable with the Voynich herbal is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The library dates it to the XV Century, but it could be much later, XVII or XVIII Century.
I'm very familiar with LJS 62. I've gone through it many times.
I'm not sure why Touwaide would consider this more similar to the VMS than others. There aren't a lot of plant drawings (only 10 folios) and they are similar to many herbal manuscripts. The snakes next to the roots in 8v are found in many manuscripts and are drawn with cross-hatching that was in style in late 15th-century and later. There's nothing especially remarkable about the drawings and unlike the VMS, most of the roots are quite simple and naturalistic. The leaves are naturalistic also. They do not look like they are mnemonic or symbolic. They're more similar to early 16th-century drawings than they are to older ones (or to the VMS).
As for the dating of the LJS 62...
I've learned to date Gothic Latin script fairly well, usually within a couple of decades, but I am not particularly good at dating Greek text. I can only narrow it down within about 100 or 200 years for some of them. So I cannot comment on when the main text was written (if I were forced to guess I would guess maybe late 15th century or 16th century, but I would not be confident about it).
However, I have gotten reasonably good at numbers—I've studied them extensively. The numbers in the contents and the foliation are mostly likely later than the 16th century (or possibly from the latter half of the 16th century, but I'm leaning toward 17th century. They may have been added sometime after the main text. Some of the ones on the back leaf look like they are even later (maybe as late as 19th or 20th century).
So, it's my belief that LJS 62 was created some time after the VMS, perhaps by about a century and I honestly don't find them that similar, at least not when other herbal manuscripts are included in the comparison
Just looking at it overall, I would be surprised if LJS 62 were earlier than 1480 and it might be up to 50 years later than that.
So, I do not think LJS 62 is early enough or similar enough to compare to the VMS (especially when so many manuscripts are more similar). I'm surprised he chose it as an example.
I hate writing responses like this. I had high hopes for learning something from Touwaide. I am disappointed. He might be an expert in his respective field, but his understanding of the VMS seems to me to be superficial.
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - davidjackson - 19-10-2019
I was quite intrigued to see that the modern forgery hypothesis got such a big mention, especially with no real justification other than an attempt to explain our failing to understand the book .
The justification for it being a fake seems quite flimsy.
I understand that the theory behind the woodworm holes is that they infested the original binding and only nibbled a little way into the book because they don't eat parchment, which seems a reasonable assumption.
The other points can easily be rebutted.
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - -JKP- - 19-10-2019
I'm also surprised so much lip-service was given to forgery. It makes it sound like Touwaide is leaning in that direction.
But I find it surprising that anyone would suggest that Voynich himself sat there for several months drawing medieval plant illustrations to create this manuscript. He was a book-seller, not a calligrapher.
If someone forged the VMS, they would have to:
- know how to convincingly write seven different styles of 15th and 16th-century writing (de Tepenecz, column text, foliation, quire numbers, 116v, color annotations, and VMS main text),
- have an in-depth knowledge of Latin scribal conventions,
- have an in-depth knowledge of numeral styles (which changed in this specific time-period),
- have an in-depth knowledge of a small subset of medieval Zodiac traditions,
- have an in-depth knowledge of medieval plant-drawing traditions,
- have an in-depth knowledge of early 15th-century fashion,
- have skill at using a quill pen (this is not easy, it is basically calligraphy on a material that tends to resist ink, and the quill sometimes has to be sharpened numerous times per page),
- have an in-depth knowledge of how to make medieval inks and pigments AND the raw materials with which to make them,
- have 100 sheets of clean 500-year-old vellum on hand, including sheets large enough to create several foldouts.
How many years does it take a Voynich researcher to acquire the knowledge to understand all these things? Wilfrid Voynich did not have access to the Internet.
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - Koen G - 19-10-2019
I thought exactly the same, David. But this problem is not particular to Touwaide's talk; in overviews, the modern forgery hypothesis is usually given equal footing, as if it's an equally viable possibility as the rest. This is a self-sustaining problem I think.
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - RenegadeHealer - 19-10-2019
(19-10-2019, 09:44 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I thought exactly the same, David. But this problem is not particular to Touwaide's talk; in overviews, the modern forgery hypothesis is usually given equal footing, as if it's an equally viable possibility as the rest. This is a self-sustaining problem I think.
To be fair, the VMS having no meaningful content *is* the null hypothesis. And somehow, some way, at least for now, the null hypothesis still stands. Don't get me wrong, I'm as taken aback as all of you guys at how much credence Prof. Touwaide appears willing to lend to the idea. I'm just saying it's not an unwarranted stance to take.
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - -JKP- - 19-10-2019
Meaningful content and forgery are two different issues.
Whether it has meaningful content or not, I don't believe it was created in the 20th century.
RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019 - RenegadeHealer - 20-10-2019
(19-10-2019, 11:23 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Meaningful content and forgery are two different issues.
Whether it has meaningful content or not, I don't believe it was created in the 20th century.
True. A 20th century forgery is a pretty bold claim to make.