F17r plant: Alkanna Tinctoria?

[MarcoP]

I would also like to raise an uncomfortable question:
What is the point of illustrations in a herbal?
From an utilitarian point - there is none. Dioscorides himself complained that physicians do not care about botany. And frankly why would they? Physicians were not expected to go out and harvest herbs, this was considered an inferior task. Physicians bought dried herbs or herbal preparations. Knowing what the plant looked like in vivo was not necessary. Indeed the original Dioscorides is believed to have been lacking any illustrations. The marvelous paintings were only added much later in manuscripts that targeted a bibliophile and rich audience of nobles, not physicians that could never afford such books.

Perhaps an uncomfortable question, but crucially important.

In our modern mindsets, we are so used to the idea that illustrations are there to clarify things, that it is hard to think otherwise.

....

We should not look at the illustrations in the MS as trying to help identify the plant. We cannot be sure why they are there, but NOT to explain what the plant looked like.
Quite possibly just to beautify or to impress.

I agree that "What is the point of illustrations in a herbal?" is a good question, but I am not sure we know the answer. If Dioscorides complained that physicians do not care about botany, I guess he thought that knowledge of botany was important for the physicians, and "De Materia Medica" certainly points in that direction. His descriptions, however short, seem to me to be intended to make the plants recognizable.
For instance, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

Anchusa has many prickly leaves (similar to the sharpleaved lettuce) — rough, sharp and black — on every side of the root joining to the earth. The root is the thickness of a finger, and the colour almost of blood. In the summer it becomes astringent, dyeing the hands. It grows in good grounds.

About the second kind:

Anchusa altera differs from the above in having smaller leaves yet equally sharp. There are thin little branches, with flowers of a purple colour drawing towards a Phoenician [red]. The roots are red and very long. Around harvest time they have something similar to blood in them. It grows in sandy places.

These descriptions take about half of each paragraph (the second half being about the medical use of the plant). From the text, I get the impression that he wanted his readers to be able to recognize the plant in nature. Maybe his readers were physicians who gathered their own plants, or maybe the book was addressed to both apothecaries and physicians. In any case, the paragraphs above would benefit from illustrations: if they were a later addition, they were still consistent with Dioscorides' efforts to make the plants recognizable.

There are late medieval herbals that are somehow comparable with the Voynich manuscript, e.g. the so-called Alchemical Herbal, or the non-Apuleius plants in Trinity O.2.48. In the case of the Trinity ms, my impression is that the illustrations were based on the description in the text. Again, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The illustrator (like ourselves) apparently had no idea of the actual plants described and his illustrations are certainly not reliable. I wouldn't exclude that also in this case the intention behind the images was "to explain what the plant looked like", though in practice the illustrations are not helpful.

The case of the Alchemical Herbal is probably more complex: the anthropomorphic / zoomorphic details appear to be more about the folk names of the plants than about the plants themselves. The text lacks the description of plants found in Dioscorides and Trinity O.2.48, but it does give instructions for the time and places appropriate for gathering: in this case, it seems that the textual descriptions were replaced by the illustrations. Even if the illustrations are very schematic and ambiguous, I suspect that the intention was still making the plant recognizable.

Certainly there were illustrated herbals made for royalty like Anicia Juliana or Matthias Corvinus, but they could derive from illustrated works of a simpler nature and made for physicians and apothecaries.

In conclusion, on the basis of other manuscripts, I am not so sure that the Voynich illustrations were not intended to help identify actual plants. Anyway, since the function of images is sometimes unclear even for works that can be read, we will probably never know with any certainty what the intended function of the Voynich illustrations was.