[Book] Prof. Eleonora Matarrese * Nymðe - The Unearthing

[Hermes777]

I say, at a minimum, one has 254 pages to be filled with at least something, and coupled with the professor title

FB: "...2) I’m the Director, CEO and Founder of the only Italian Ethnobotany Magazine; I am an Ethnobotany contract-Professor at University (and Ethnobotany is not Botany)...'e

I don't want to be a bad mouth, but I guess the large number of pages is due to the large number of pictures.

Ethnobotany certainly has much to offer here, I think. 

I have found much useful peripheral material in ethnobotanical journals. It would be good if ethnobotanists studied the Voynich directly. It is a job for ethnobotanists. So this study could be useful. 

Having said that, Ethnobotany, like a wide range of fields of study, is somewhat infected by that blight on contemporary intellectual life, the activist scholar. In this field, activists with a neopagan agenda. Thus this book by Professor Matarrese is billed as "lost knowledge of our Ancestors":

"The Beinecke 408 manuscript contains many references both to the practice of seiðr and to the knowledge of our Ancestors, which have been erased due to the advent of Abrahamic cults and damnatio memoriae."

The Voynich space has a high population of activist scholars - most notably nationalists who are over-enthusiastic about their respective national languages, or post-colonialists intent on righting historical wrongs. Their work can be ok, but it can also be distorted by the agenda, compared to disinterested studies. Professor Matarrese's work could be good, but the blurb on Amazon suggests (to prejudge the work) it is shaped by some degree of neopagan revisionism and "lost knowledge of our Ancestors" signals a work with identitarian concerns. 

The phrase "erased due to the advent of Abrahamic cults and damnatio memoriae" is sort of a simplistic neopagan caricature of the process by which Northern Europe was Christianized. 

All the same, anything that might shed light on the pagan background of the Voynich MS. is valuable. (There surely is a pagan, and magical, background, imo.)