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[Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

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• [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

• [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  Koen G > 11-02-2018, 10:57 PM

  I'll keep bouncing some "essentials" ideas off you guys
  
  It might be handy to gradually build a list of common misconceptions or mistakes made by people studying the MS. This will allow us in the future to refer to that thread and say "you have fallen for misconceptions 6, 12 and 15". The advantage is that we don't really have to go looking for anything, the material will gradually come rolling in as we go along.
  
  Ideally each misconception or commonly made mistake should be accompanied by a short explanation or a reference. We can divide them into different categories like imagery, text, statistics, linguistics, codicology... depending on what is collected. 
  
  If it takes off, I will link this thread to an essentials thread and collect them there.
  
  An example of what I have in mind:
  
  Imagery

  • Misconception #1: green water is somehow unusual
    Explanation: people often think that the green water in quire 13 needs a special explanation, like herbal baths. However, it was not unusual in medieval art for (salty) water to be colored green. Examples can be found on maps and De Balneis manuscripts.
    
    
    

  
  
  
  And of course any misconceptions we include can be contested at all time.

• RE: [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  Searcher > 11-02-2018, 11:35 PM

  Koen Gh. wrote:
  
  

  Quote:Misconception #1: green water is somehow unusual
  Explanation: people often think that the green water in quire 13 needs a special explanation, like herbal baths. However, it was not unusual in medieval art for (salty) water to be colored green. Examples can be found on maps and De Balneis manuscripts.

  Generally speaking, the green water is not uncommon in medieval manuscripts, but... 
  The VMs contains two kinds of pools: green and blue. Objectively thinking, there can be a few reasons:
  1) the decorator painted pools with green color until its paint ran out, then he/she colored them with blue;
  2) the decorator painted pools with blue color until its paint ran out, then he/she colored them with green;
  3) the author intentionally divided two kinds of pools using different colors to mark their meaning;
  4) someone else painted not colored pools with that color which he/she had or liked;
  5) the water (liquid) flows from cones (clouds, reservoirs...) which are painted in blue and yellow colors, so they are, mixed, become green 

• RE: [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  Koen G > 11-02-2018, 11:39 PM

  Well yeah, there could be various explanations. The point is that they needn't be herbal baths or pea soup or rain forest swamps. Even in more scholarly publications, "strange green pools" is synonymous for quire 13 while it's really not that strange.

• RE: [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  Searcher > 12-02-2018, 12:00 AM

  (11-02-2018, 11:39 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well yeah, there could be various explanations. The point is that they needn't be herbal baths or pea soup or rain forest swamps. Even in more scholarly publications, "strange green pools" is synonymous for quire 13 while it's really not that strange.

  
  I'd say that they are strange not because of the color But I agree, people need to know.

• RE: [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  Diane > 12-02-2018, 10:44 AM

  Koen,
  
  At a particular period - around the time of Matthew Paris, more or less - a convention for which there is no linguistic or cultural foundation among the Latins begins to appear in certain types of imagery.  Some types only.
  
  In maps, for example, we find that a copper-green distinguishes the outer ocean from the deep blue of the sky, and that the Red Sea is coloured red.
  
  An interesting example, whose derivation from an Egyptian precedent is not widely known, is found in the Higden Map. (1350)
  
  A Latin precedent occurs (with less emphasis on the green) in the Paris Psalter map (1260s)
  
  The Anglo-Saxon world map uses green in a different way (1025-1050)
  
  and if you go further back you find no use of green to signify water - salt or otherwise.
  
  So the introduction of a non-indigenous custom of representing salt water by using green appears at a defineable time in the west, but ... I won't go into huge amounts of detail ... it finds its original lineage in the eastern Mediterranean, and there too we find an informing habit of speaking about seas and oceans as green.
  
  The general opinion, then, is that this habit natural in the eastern Mediterranean, and having a linguistic basis which pre-dates even the Hellenistic Greeks and survives through the Islamic era, and occurs also in Persian, came to the west with materials gained during the crusading era, and very possibly - the question remains debated - directly as a result of works commissioned in the holy land or in Egypt, or perhaps in Anatolia by the occupying Latin forces.  There's also the Byzantine question, but that's another still being explored by scholars.
  
  In addition to that introduction of the non-indigenous custom (which, by the way, didn't last long because it ran contrary to the practice and languages of the west), there is also the type of line used over the pigment.
  
  Now, in the eastern Mediterranean in earlier times, and due to Egyptian set practice, water was denoted by parallel lines of even zig-zags.  We see this echoed in some earlier medieval Christian works, especially e.g. the mosaic at Bobbio.
  
  However, the practice which developed in medieval Latin works was, as a rule, to denote bodies of water with parallel gently-waved parallel lines and when the temporary fad for green water passed, this remained constant and is seen over the blue colour natural to western ways of speaking and thinking.   It is only to be expected, because the intense copper-greens which occur elsewhere - even around Greece - are rarer in the more turbulent seas and colder climates of the west.
  
  So, when we find green water used in copies of the 'Balneis' it doesn't tell us that 'green water is not unusual in Latin works' at all.
  
  What it tells us is the time when the illustrations were made for a particular copy -  a textual tradition's origin is not necessarily contemporaneous with an iconographic tradition.  That's one of those things that's self-evident when you think about it, but which is rarely thought about at all.
  
  As you move down the time-line of copies of the Balneis, you see the shift occurs also in the tone and colour of the pigment used for the water, and the way the overlaid lines are formed.  
  
  But the bottom line is that using green for water is a non-Latin practice, which for a time was adopted into Latin art.   It certainly cannot be used to suggest that because some of the waters in the Vms are coloured blue, and others are green that we can presume the imagery itself originated in Europe.  Indeed, the opposite is indicated in my opinion, because it shows knowledge of a distinction which is entirely in keeping with the eastern tradition by which the 'Great Green' (to translate the original Egyptian term' was the salt water, and the blue signified fresh - drinkable, river-  water.
  
  It is certainly a reasonable argument that,  in a work such as the Vms which is thought (not known) to have been made in Latin Europe early in the fifteenth century, then  IF its imagery (not text)  were known to derive from wholly Latin exemplars (which is not known and rarely even investigated), then those exemplars are very probably ones that we may date to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, when the fashion for green water was strongest.
  
  What cannot be done is to wave away all other possibilities - including the obvious possibility that the bathy- section's imagery has been gained from elsewhere - on the grounds that if Latins did it, then it was a Latin cultural possession, and 'not unusual'.
  
  It is unusual for western Christian art (notice how narrow the range of compaisons offered from Latin works); it is certainly not an indigenous practice there, whereas outside Europe language and cultural traditions made it natural and a long-standing practice. 
  
  It's one of those 'roses are flowers, but not all flowers are roses' situations.
  
  If anyone's interested. 

• RE: [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  VViews > 12-02-2018, 11:49 AM

  On this particular subject, but also regarding the Voynich in general, I think it's also worth remembering that there is no clear evidence that the blue and green used in this section were not added later, or that the person who colored those pools understood Voynichese.
  This of course applies to other sections too. I may be in the minority here, but personally I mostly ignore the Voynich colors altogether.
  In the large plants section there appear to be a few color annotations, but these are far from systematic even in that section and they do not seem to continue throughout the manuscript. I have not seen any in Q13.

• RE: [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  -JKP- > 12-02-2018, 01:29 PM

  I think one of the most common misconceptions is that the VMS can be solved with one-to-one substitution codes. Even now, after thousands have tried and failed, new researchers propose solutions based on this premise.

• RE: [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  davidjackson > 12-02-2018, 07:09 PM

  Getting away from pools of water - I think Diane has given a scholarly enough answer for us all here, thanks - maybe the idea that the nymphs are some sort of "monk's porn" should be dashed. There is nothing sexual about them at all (ah hem, apart from a couple of frisky couples, but we'll ignore them!)

• RE: [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  davidjackson > 12-02-2018, 08:03 PM

  Oooh! Here's another theory to be consigned to the dustbin of history: micro-strokes.

• RE: [Essentials] Most common Voynich misconceptions

  Koen G > 12-02-2018, 08:45 PM

  (12-02-2018, 08:03 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Oooh! Here's another theory to be consigned to the dustbin of history: micro-strokes.

  
  Yeah, though how to phrase this in the thread? It ties in to the much bigger problem of a surprising number of theorists demanding even higher resolution scans. While the current scans already enlarge the MS to a ridiculous degree.
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