20-07-2015, 05:53 PM
David,
For what it's worth, I think the absolutely fundamental error has been to assume that we know enough to imagine the cultural origin and background of this text.
we...do...not..
The fact is that to say
"The name of the plant will either be its common Latin name which we know from herbals. Or it will be a local vernacular"...
is just to keep begging questions which have never been investigated at all. How do we know these plants are medicinal (Georg Barsch thought so... is that good enough?)
How do we know they are from the standard Latin herbal compendium - we don't. In fact the same Georg Barsch said categorically that they were foreign plants - exotics - peregrinae which the very learned botanists of Germany did not know!
But if a general inability to recognise the drawings is simply due to the drawings and their style ... well, why not begin by looking at as wide a range of comparative drawing styles as one can, in order to see where plant-images are drawn in the same way. Are they patterns for embroidery, or mosaic, or weaving, perhaps? How far from Germany would you call a place where 'exotic' plants grew? Italy? Holy Land? Further?
No-one has ever proven that the Voynich manuscript's content relates to the Latin herbal genre,let alone that it springs from that genre. People came to believe that mainly because they failed to consider how rash an assumption it was when first made by Wilfrid Voynich on (apparently) no evidence at all.
Since then, most people have started off assuming it a work in the western herbal tradition, and spent all their time thereafter trying to prove what they had already decided must be so. Not a very scientific attitude, really.
David, if the milieu natural to those drawings were identified.. same as any other painting or drawing.... then we might get somewhere collectively rather than (as at present) individually.
It will be a great moment when the Voynich collective realises that what they have on these folios aren't "plants" or efforts to "draw plants" in the European way. What they are coloured drawings which will tell the informed scholar where and when the imagery first took its present form.
Just as a Dutch painting of the fifteenth century can hardly be mistaken for a Italian painting of the tenth century... so these ought to tell us about their origins. Once that is known, hunting the plants (or not) should be a much simpler business, don't you think?
For what it's worth, I think the absolutely fundamental error has been to assume that we know enough to imagine the cultural origin and background of this text.
we...do...not..
The fact is that to say
"The name of the plant will either be its common Latin name which we know from herbals. Or it will be a local vernacular"...
is just to keep begging questions which have never been investigated at all. How do we know these plants are medicinal (Georg Barsch thought so... is that good enough?)
How do we know they are from the standard Latin herbal compendium - we don't. In fact the same Georg Barsch said categorically that they were foreign plants - exotics - peregrinae which the very learned botanists of Germany did not know!
But if a general inability to recognise the drawings is simply due to the drawings and their style ... well, why not begin by looking at as wide a range of comparative drawing styles as one can, in order to see where plant-images are drawn in the same way. Are they patterns for embroidery, or mosaic, or weaving, perhaps? How far from Germany would you call a place where 'exotic' plants grew? Italy? Holy Land? Further?
No-one has ever proven that the Voynich manuscript's content relates to the Latin herbal genre,let alone that it springs from that genre. People came to believe that mainly because they failed to consider how rash an assumption it was when first made by Wilfrid Voynich on (apparently) no evidence at all.
Since then, most people have started off assuming it a work in the western herbal tradition, and spent all their time thereafter trying to prove what they had already decided must be so. Not a very scientific attitude, really.
David, if the milieu natural to those drawings were identified.. same as any other painting or drawing.... then we might get somewhere collectively rather than (as at present) individually.
It will be a great moment when the Voynich collective realises that what they have on these folios aren't "plants" or efforts to "draw plants" in the European way. What they are coloured drawings which will tell the informed scholar where and when the imagery first took its present form.
Just as a Dutch painting of the fifteenth century can hardly be mistaken for a Italian painting of the tenth century... so these ought to tell us about their origins. Once that is known, hunting the plants (or not) should be a much simpler business, don't you think?