Thread for random remarks and questions about Voynich images

[Doireannjane]

Which raises the question: if the Scribe was copying the scene from a book -- like your citation above, or any of the other sources that have been posted -- how could he not understand that the "loop of little circles" was a rosary?

I used to tell people that the drawings in the MS actually weren't all that bad, which is now something I wish I'd never said. In many parts, the drawings are really bad, and it's clear that the artist misinterpreted sources. I'm currently making (read: struggling with) a video about the animals in the MS, and let's say I've gotten a renewed appreciation for how dire the situation is.

I'll add though, that artists misinterpreting exemplars is not exceptional at all, and it doesn't say much about their intellectual capacities. More often than not, these changes are incremental: at one point in the transmission, an artists draws an ambiguous object, and the next time it is copied, the thing has changed. 

Given the fact that the Voynich manuscript likely wasn't produced as a high-end product, there's also a good chance that its source material (which it definitely had) was not of the highest accuracy.

“Really bad”? Or maybe just not for you. Maybe you were not the intended reader? Texture and time collapse (bud, growth pattern, flower, stamen, stem pattern all depicted in one) seemed to be particularly important, perhaps to accompany those with impaired vision and/or to encompass other plants in the same family across the coast (as I argue on my free Substack) Maybe what you consider “really bad” is actually quite exceptional identification wise. Just a thought.