Plant Pictures - Sources and references - query

[-JKP-]

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:

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?

I rely on botanical drawings, botanical specimens (both live and herbarium speciments), my prior knowledge of plants (which has been a lifetime interest), and I have gone through every digitized medieval plant book I can find numerous times (to the point where I have many of the plants memorized). I also read the text that goes with them in Latin, Italian, middle English, etc.

I own more than 100 books on plants, wildflowers, and herbal medicine, some of them going back to the 19th century, along with facsimiles of a few of the historic books (e.g., Circa Instans).

I have downloaded several timeline "maps" of illustrative traditions offered by different researchers. They tend to agree in overall pattern, but not always in specific details and some include more manuscripts than others.


I have been involved in a decade-long project to create a botanical reference database cataloging more than 21,000 species of plants. It includes botanical illustrations, photos of actual plants, including each part of the plant for identification, medicinal information (both folk lore and contemporary), ancient Galenesque and Pliny designations (hot/cold/wet/dry), preferred habitat, origin, distribution, a list of which parts of the plant are used for what purposes, and the names of the plants in up to 56 languages. It currently includes more than a quarter million images that can be searched and sorted by any of the properties associated with the plant.