[Talk] Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019

[-JKP-]

[portion deleted for brevity]

This, especially since it appears that much of Mr. Touwaide's belief in the modern forgery possibility is BASED on his observations relating to botany. They do seem connected to me, and I'm not sure how to disentangle them. For instance, the summary states,

"Locard's "exchange principle" suggests that criminals always leave traces behind them. For the VMS herbal, "grafting" could be the key: it points out that the plants were created by assembling elements derived from several different plants." This, after pointing out several similarities between plants in the VMs and other, known herbals... suggesting they were copied from them by Voynich, by being sketched at the British Library, "Following the parallel with Sloane 4016: Voynich used to frequent the British Library. He might have taken sketches of the manuscript there and later reworked the illustrations to create the VMS."

So the two seem to me to be inextricably linked: If Mr. Touwaide's botanical observations are correct, the evidence points to forgery; if he is poor with his botany, his forgery beliefs are undermined, too. So it may be purely coincidental to see them both independently, but you have to understand why I would have initially believed they were being linked.

I did not want to read too much into the forgery hypothesis based on Touwaide's botany statements because his forgery statements might be based on a number of other beliefs/factors/assumptions besides his observations about botany. His primary interest, as far as I can tell from his vitae and publications, is in the history of science/medicine in a more general sense.

Yes, I agree they may be linked, perhaps even strongly linked, but I don't have enough information about Touwaide's ideas to know how much weight his botanical observations gave to his ideas about forgery. Maybe over time that relationship will become more clear, but for the present I prefer to comment only on what has been explicitly mentioned so far.