[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.

The persons who made the VM were not hermits who existed in complete ignorance of external society. We know that they were familiar with Zodiac images (whether from churches or manuscripts or both).

Medieval culture was one of images. And the makers of those images would often assume that the viewer was illiterate, and should be able to "read" the image without any text. And indeed, even in manuscripts where image and text go hand in hand, we often see that the images have a programme of their own.

When I look for images of a certain thing (for example most recently, the Beasts of Revelation), the question I want to answer is: how did medieval artists picture this thing? Are there any trends? Difference between time periods? Regional differences? Differences between various traditions? 

I can understand that the VM is a unique creation (or if it wasn't, its other versions are gone). But to know the visual vocabulary of the environment in which is was made, is one of the best weapons we have at our disposal.

I have seen many mutually contradictory theories , i.e. they can't all be true, where people have drawn on an image in a manuscript to justify their theory. In some instances the images are strikingly similar, in other instances the parallels seem pretty weak. Some people believe the 9 Rosette page is an almost exact reproduction of another document, which may or may not survive; I think the author was sufficiently imaginative to invent his own form of illustrating his subject. The author was certainly a person of his/her time, but like you and me, he/she had his/her own ideas and sufficient intelligence to conceive of his/her own forms of representation. So yes, of course, there are and must be significant contemporary influences, but I personally reject the model of the author as someone mindlessly copying from other documents, which some people seem to suggest. Ultimately it is about striking the right balance between recognising the author's influences, including those in other manuscripts, and treating the author as having an inventive mind. I tend to think that Voynich researchers too often site very weak parallels with other documents, the very loose similarities with which could easily be coincidental.