Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

You have this crazy idea that I WANT the manuscript to be European even though I keep telling you I don't care where it's from. I don't! I was hoping it might be from Madagascar or the Canary Islands or Central or East Asia or something interesting like that but the data doesn't point in that direction.

For the record, there is a pocket in the U.S. that has almost the same climatic conditions as sections of Italy where these kinds of plants might be found. But it is not Meso-America.

For reasons unknown, you seem to have some type of hangup against the Americas. I think you should revisit the arguments for American plants. Some of those arguments can be found in the following paper (40 pages) from Purdue University:

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It begins with the following words:

This Chapter is based on three published works: (1) a paper by Hugh O Neall (1944) that identifies
two New World plants (sunflower and chili peppers) in the Voynich manuscript; (2) a paper of
Tucker and Talbert (2013) which identified 39 plants in the Voynich as indigenous to the New
World; (3) a paper by Tucker and Janick (2016) which extended the list to 59 species.

We already know what you and Koen think of the sunflower, but many of the other comparisons are much harder to dismiss.

Instead of seeking out the data and following it where it leads, you are imposing your theory on the data. A theory is like putting on a pair of red glasses, which tints everything so that it's hard to differentiate the actual colors. Everything looks reddish. But if you take off the glasses (remove the theory and just look at the data), you might see a broader range of colors.

I won't say what I think of your "tradition" theory, whereupon a depiction of any Old World plant, depending upon the artistic or herbal tradition employed, can come out looking like a VMS plant.