(10-04-2016, 10:36 AM)Koen Gh. wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Ellie, that plant does look similar to the VM one. Did you find illustrations of it in other manuscripts? It would be interesting here to compare them.
I found it in the Russian Library Platearius - it is a late 15th century French manuscript - the Ricinus drawing in the same manuscript is similar to the one in the VMs.
(10-04-2016, 11:41 AM)MarcoP wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thanks everybody for your great comments! I hope to collect some more ideas, then I will attempt a synthesis.
Ellie, I agree with what you write about the Voynich manuscript being consistent with the other sources. Yet it has its peculiar traits (as all manuscripts do). Since I know you have seen many, I would appreciate if you could share the details of some of the differences you find relevant, if there are any.
I attach an example of Plantago with an accompanying animal (quite frequent, but absent from the four manuscripts I chose from comparison). This is from BNF Lat 17844 (Italian "alchemical herbal", 1440-1460).
I have updated the attachments in the first post, adding plant names for easier reference and using a slightly higher resolution.
Hi Marco, honestly, I found examples in the medieval herbals for about every "strange" feature of the plants in the VMs. There are some with worst paint job than the VMs (we have to keep in mind that the VMs is pretty small book and I think it is just a perception problem that the paint job is very bad because we keep zooming-in the pages. In actual size the paint is not as badly out of line. Of course, the quality is not at the level of the Book of Hours etc. fancy works). I've seen herbals that include both realistically drawn plants and highly symbolic ones. I've seen roots that show the use of the plant and drawings that are simple word plays (houseleek for example is often drawn coming out of actual house in some old herbals). I think the "balneao" section is more interesting - I think it shows curious level of human anatomy knowledge, but the plants and the calendar (as you've demonstrated) seem to me to be just fine in the context of 15th century. This is all just personal opinion - not a fact in any way.
Thanks for the plantago find. I havn't noticed this one before. I don't have this one in my plant id list because I've seen few suggestions about it that I like - including plantago (I think Steve D really likes the plantago), Dana Scott's dracaena etc. I personally like the plantago lanceolata best, but I haven't made my mind completely. Here is funny one - maybe the dragon is just a badly drawn mouse - check out the mouse ears herb

(10-04-2016, 12:06 PM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Rather than repeating them here, I might as well provide a link to some of my thoughts on 25v:
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Thanks JKP, this is a nice summery on fol. 25v.



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