Morten St. George > 10-12-2018, 11:30 PM
(10-12-2018, 05:26 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Hi VViews,
Nice to see you posting in this thread that you started. I was getting a little frustrated with JP and Koen both of whom are giving me a hard time, so I'm pleased to see a new face here.
Gals with stars would be dead perfecta whereas gals without stars are presumably still living at the time of redaction. We can see in the depiction of the field of Montségur that they used stars to mark those who were burned alive, that is, dead people, martyrs whose souls achieved eternal life in the heavens.
Over the weekend I accidentally (poor eyesight again) encountered another of your threads under Voynich Talk, the one about big red weirdos where you wrote:
Quote:I'm curious to hear what views the forum members may have about what the weirdos are or look like, and whether perhaps we might gather any new insight into them.
Any thoughts?
I have lots of thoughts about them. First of all, I see nothing too weird about them because they appear in my handbook of medieval symbols:
The first weirdo is a variation of the middle symbol, the second weirdo is the top part of the last symbol rotated 90 degrees to the left, and the third weirdo is the penultimate symbol.
I consider it doubtful that these symbols were ever intended to represent the letter 'V' as others have suggested.
Page You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and f66r. Like f1r, both of those folios have text on one side and a plant drawing on the other. It goes to show that they wrote one theme on one side of a pre-folded sheet and then turned it over to finish that theme and move on to another theme. Thus, You are not allowed to view links.
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I'm pretty sure that they didn't decide to insert the weirdos into the VMS because of any meaning those symbols might have but rather because, best among all the symbols, they remind us of birds.
The weirdos, of course, are not the only thing on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. depicts a plant whose bright green leaves flow through the page onto You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. upon where we see the weirdos. The point is that these leaves resemble the leaves of the goose tree, a mythical plant that grew along the coast of northern Scotland. As the name implies, the goose tree gave birth to geese, a type of bird.
A drawing of the goose tree along with geese can be found on page 1391 of The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, dated 1597, where it is the final drawing in said book. This book can be found online as a free download.
As I have previously explained, the shield marginalia of the top of You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. (among other things) links the VMS to Herball. It is therefore possible to conclude that this entire episode of plant history begins with the first drawing in the VMS and ends the last drawing in Historie. That is why You are not allowed to view links.
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On top of its front page, Herball depicts two botanists who worked for William Cecil, himself depicted on the bottom left as sponsor of the project. Cecil had tremendous interest in botanical gardens and he was one of the foremost collectors of books in Europe. There is reason to believe that the VMS came into his possession around a dozen years prior to the publication of Herball.
Opposite Cecil on the front page, there's a depiction of a poet laureate who the historian Mark Griffiths has identified as William Shakespeare. Indeed, as shown in one of my essays, a transliteration of the glyphs under the bar on You are not allowed to view links.
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It would not be surprising if Yale University took an interest in this as it could potentially add millions of dollars to the value of the VMS. That would be the case if the VMS does in fact contain the only extant examples of Shakespeare's handwriting beyond a few dubious signatures that currently exist.
Well, VViews, you asked for our thoughts about the weirdos so I was happy to give you a few. Hope you find them helpful.