[split] Relying on external imagery

[Mark Knowles]

I have noticed a behaviour that is easy to succumb to and quite common and that is the practice of scouring manuscripts for images that look very loosely similar to the image in the Voynich that one is interested in and then postulating a relationship. It is perfectly reasonable to look for a correspondence to images in the Voynich amongst other sources and sometimes this can be very productive, but it should not be pursued to the extent of the man spotting Jesus's face in a pizza. I think, as with Nick Pelling's block-paradigm idea, we should not doubt the extent to which the output of the author's work was original and that a given drawing in the Voynich may not have a parallel in another manuscript.