I think there are two things to understand here:
1) Before the rise of book printing, people were much, much more reliant on their memories than we can even imagine. Their whole culture was entrenched with mnemonic devices. Many texts were set to verse and rhyme, many tales were set to song. Authors in antiquity already knew that to remember large amounts of data, you had to activate the spatial and visual parts of the brain.
Before the invention of the printing press, people did this naturally, and from the poet to the humble peasant they were all masters of memory compared to today's standards. So could a system like this exist in other works? Yes. Could it have been made up for this particular set of plants? Yes, why not?
Mary Carruthers' work is a must read if you are interested in medieval memory techniques.
2) The word "mnemonics" is used somewhat loosely here. Diane used it to describe what she saw in the plants, and from there on it took a life of its own to refer to any "additional" image in the plants. In Voynich studies we call these non-botanical elements that have been consciously worked into the plant image "mnemonics". This doesn't mean that all people who use this term think that they are used to help the memory, but it's a convenient term for the phenomenon. And seeing these things as mnemonic devices remains one of the most plausible explanations.
1) Before the rise of book printing, people were much, much more reliant on their memories than we can even imagine. Their whole culture was entrenched with mnemonic devices. Many texts were set to verse and rhyme, many tales were set to song. Authors in antiquity already knew that to remember large amounts of data, you had to activate the spatial and visual parts of the brain.
Before the invention of the printing press, people did this naturally, and from the poet to the humble peasant they were all masters of memory compared to today's standards. So could a system like this exist in other works? Yes. Could it have been made up for this particular set of plants? Yes, why not?
Mary Carruthers' work is a must read if you are interested in medieval memory techniques.
2) The word "mnemonics" is used somewhat loosely here. Diane used it to describe what she saw in the plants, and from there on it took a life of its own to refer to any "additional" image in the plants. In Voynich studies we call these non-botanical elements that have been consciously worked into the plant image "mnemonics". This doesn't mean that all people who use this term think that they are used to help the memory, but it's a convenient term for the phenomenon. And seeing these things as mnemonic devices remains one of the most plausible explanations.