28-08-2016, 04:04 PM
The 'crossbowman' thing has been around for ages.
I understand that someone wanted to know about the maritime bow.
It's included in the full analysis of the image which I've posted as a separate page.
Here's the link.
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I've slowly come to realise that the big gulf between my approach to study of this manuscript's imagery and that of others is that I'm usually analyzing the image and explaining the region and period indicated by the details and by the style.
A majority of others are, as it were writing something between an historical and a historical-fictional narrative, one into which they attempt to fit any given image from the manuscript. So they're chiefly writing about their theory, and using the pictures as illustration of the theory.
It's not a bad method - in theory. The fundamental problem is that the narratives are not based on anything very solid.
Arguments for the 'German' theory, for example, seem to me to rely on peripheral matters such as whether a bit of marginalia is or isn't written in German. But in fact, you can get medieval manuscripts which have marginalia in three or four different vernacular languages, and anybody could learn to speak German. It's not enough to provenance anything.
Same with an argument that the plants represent a herbal. No-one has demonstrated the validity of that idea, yet everyone builds their story about the plant-pictures from that assumption.
And so on.
By criticising the generally-adopted methodology here, I'm not having a shot at anyone in particular. Voynich studies started like that with Wilfrid Voynich's approach, and everyone else has pretty much gone with it.
But arguing that the Voynich archer is German only works if you never look at a wider range of images for Sagittarius, whether that wider range is geographical or linguistic or chronological.
We don't actually know even if the Voynich archer figure was originally designed as a form for Sagittarius, or whether someone decided to use it later in that way. And since the series DOES NOT present us with the Latin European zodiac series, or indeed any known version of the Roman zodiac series, there is so much being presumed and pre-empted before any specialists in Latin European zodiac or astronomical imagery is asked to comment that I think it a bit of a waste.
I'd much rather have asked the author of the two-volume history of medieval Latin astronomical imagery to offer comparisons for the 'sun-and-moon' diagrams. But that's just me.
I understand that someone wanted to know about the maritime bow.
It's included in the full analysis of the image which I've posted as a separate page.
Here's the link.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I've slowly come to realise that the big gulf between my approach to study of this manuscript's imagery and that of others is that I'm usually analyzing the image and explaining the region and period indicated by the details and by the style.
A majority of others are, as it were writing something between an historical and a historical-fictional narrative, one into which they attempt to fit any given image from the manuscript. So they're chiefly writing about their theory, and using the pictures as illustration of the theory.
It's not a bad method - in theory. The fundamental problem is that the narratives are not based on anything very solid.
Arguments for the 'German' theory, for example, seem to me to rely on peripheral matters such as whether a bit of marginalia is or isn't written in German. But in fact, you can get medieval manuscripts which have marginalia in three or four different vernacular languages, and anybody could learn to speak German. It's not enough to provenance anything.
Same with an argument that the plants represent a herbal. No-one has demonstrated the validity of that idea, yet everyone builds their story about the plant-pictures from that assumption.
And so on.
By criticising the generally-adopted methodology here, I'm not having a shot at anyone in particular. Voynich studies started like that with Wilfrid Voynich's approach, and everyone else has pretty much gone with it.
But arguing that the Voynich archer is German only works if you never look at a wider range of images for Sagittarius, whether that wider range is geographical or linguistic or chronological.
We don't actually know even if the Voynich archer figure was originally designed as a form for Sagittarius, or whether someone decided to use it later in that way. And since the series DOES NOT present us with the Latin European zodiac series, or indeed any known version of the Roman zodiac series, there is so much being presumed and pre-empted before any specialists in Latin European zodiac or astronomical imagery is asked to comment that I think it a bit of a waste.
I'd much rather have asked the author of the two-volume history of medieval Latin astronomical imagery to offer comparisons for the 'sun-and-moon' diagrams. But that's just me.