15-01-2018, 05:00 AM
Could I just chip in here -
Edith Sherwood identified the picture as a single-portrait image of the ordinary banana plant.
This causes certain historical problems because while there are various members of what our taxonomy groups as the Musaceae, the 'ordinary banana' plant and its appearance were - by all accounts - unknown in medieval Europe.
I am not speaking of schematic drawings such as those which occur in some copies of Ibn Botlan's work, known to the Latins as the Tacinum Sanitatis: the image in the Vms is very detailed, very accurate and nothing at all like those.
What is shows, as do the great majority of the botanical folios, is not a single member of the group but a number of them.
Now, I notice that Vviews takes as his 'default' for knowledge of non-European plants, the later Latin taxonomic system (which of course we now use as a matter of course in modern discussions of any plants).
However, he seems to believe that until something occurred in western Europe, or in western botanical imagery, it could not occur, and thus my recognising these plant pictures as composites is an 'anachronism'.
He is mistaken in both his basic assumption, and in supposing me unware of the history of botanical drawing and plant-pictures as art, whether within or outside the Mediterranean.
The point is not that the depiction of composites is an 'anachronism' but that the fact of such practice being used only in decorative arts of medieval Europe (not in herbal manuscript), shows as so much else does that to presume the content an expression of Latin European culture or learning is a mistake.
I did not try to 'identify the plant'. What I did (and do) is explain what is on the page, why it appears in the very non-European form it does, and to what time and place such customs in art properly belong.
As I said in the highly detailed analysis of that folio - there can be no surer proof than the drawing's accuracy that this picture and most others cannot have been first enunciated in Latin Europe. Like so much else ... in the astronomical section, in the root-and-leaf section and in the astronomical diagrams... the manuscript contains matter which historians of the relevant sciences KNOW beyond doubt were not part of the Latin scientific corpus by 1438.
It is far better to accept the primary document's testimony to its origins, and the body of relevant knowlege in historical, scientific, cultural, and iconographic studies than to keep trying to force-fit everything in the ms to a theory.
But then attempting to talk methodology in Voynich studies is usually considered not-done, so - please continue.
Edith Sherwood identified the picture as a single-portrait image of the ordinary banana plant.
This causes certain historical problems because while there are various members of what our taxonomy groups as the Musaceae, the 'ordinary banana' plant and its appearance were - by all accounts - unknown in medieval Europe.
I am not speaking of schematic drawings such as those which occur in some copies of Ibn Botlan's work, known to the Latins as the Tacinum Sanitatis: the image in the Vms is very detailed, very accurate and nothing at all like those.
What is shows, as do the great majority of the botanical folios, is not a single member of the group but a number of them.
Now, I notice that Vviews takes as his 'default' for knowledge of non-European plants, the later Latin taxonomic system (which of course we now use as a matter of course in modern discussions of any plants).
However, he seems to believe that until something occurred in western Europe, or in western botanical imagery, it could not occur, and thus my recognising these plant pictures as composites is an 'anachronism'.
He is mistaken in both his basic assumption, and in supposing me unware of the history of botanical drawing and plant-pictures as art, whether within or outside the Mediterranean.
The point is not that the depiction of composites is an 'anachronism' but that the fact of such practice being used only in decorative arts of medieval Europe (not in herbal manuscript), shows as so much else does that to presume the content an expression of Latin European culture or learning is a mistake.
I did not try to 'identify the plant'. What I did (and do) is explain what is on the page, why it appears in the very non-European form it does, and to what time and place such customs in art properly belong.
As I said in the highly detailed analysis of that folio - there can be no surer proof than the drawing's accuracy that this picture and most others cannot have been first enunciated in Latin Europe. Like so much else ... in the astronomical section, in the root-and-leaf section and in the astronomical diagrams... the manuscript contains matter which historians of the relevant sciences KNOW beyond doubt were not part of the Latin scientific corpus by 1438.
It is far better to accept the primary document's testimony to its origins, and the body of relevant knowlege in historical, scientific, cultural, and iconographic studies than to keep trying to force-fit everything in the ms to a theory.
But then attempting to talk methodology in Voynich studies is usually considered not-done, so - please continue.