29-08-2022, 02:51 PM
More than once I have commented that no attention is paid to what the Voynich tradition teaches us. When it comes to plant identification, what Georg Baresch (Georgius Barschius) wrote to Kircher is not taken into account.
Baresch, the earliest confirmed owner of the VM, said that the volume contains pictures of exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany.
As a member of the court of Emperor Rudolf II, Baresch would presumably have consulted with the best botanists in the empire before saying that. And they, in the seventeenth century, would be better placed than we are to make that claim.
What I mean by this is that the authors of the VM who drew the herbs were not interested in their description, like the herbariums of their time, first because they would not know how to do it and second because their purpose was different: to show how plants receive their virtues of heavenly influences
Baresch, the earliest confirmed owner of the VM, said that the volume contains pictures of exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany.
As a member of the court of Emperor Rudolf II, Baresch would presumably have consulted with the best botanists in the empire before saying that. And they, in the seventeenth century, would be better placed than we are to make that claim.
What I mean by this is that the authors of the VM who drew the herbs were not interested in their description, like the herbariums of their time, first because they would not know how to do it and second because their purpose was different: to show how plants receive their virtues of heavenly influences