RE: Alain Touwaide - Villa Mondragone - 14 Oct. 2019
-JKP- > 21-10-2019, 02:42 PM
I am not going to show respect for incorrect statements and poor analogies based on credentials... certainly not on a forum devoted to research!
I wasn't questioning Touwaide's personality or his professional work. I was questioning his NUMEROUS very questionable statements about the Voynich Manuscript. I looked up his academic history because I wanted to know why a botanist (it turned out he wasn't a botanist) would make such strange statements about plants.
It's perfectly possible to respect the PERSON and their professional achievements and still disagree with wrong statements. On ninja, I think we are striving for good research, good analogies, and good interpretations.
Touwaide's statements about the plant shapes were misleading from BOTH a botanical and pedagogical point of view. If you know plants, then you can see right away why it's a bad analogy to compare a scabrous calyx from a plant that is probably in the aster family to the fruiting capsule of a poppy. He should have used more neutral terms (e.g., jug, vase) rather than misleading terms that imply that the VMS structure might be a seed capsule, which makes no sense. If you take his statements about the plants as a whole, it sounds like he doesn't know how to "read" a medieval plant drawing. But even if he does, he's misleading the audience with the way he explained it.
In fact, even the statement about the "eyes" in the other plant could be argued to be questionable from a historical/iconographical point of view. In medieval plant drawings, dots in the fruiting bodies almost always refer to seeds. I know this from studying medieval botanical drawings for the last 12 years. Also, there are other VMS drawings where the dots refer to seeds, so it is not just one drawing. Why didn't he mention this? He referred to them as eyes.
How do those statements help the audience understand the VMS? He should have laid out the possibilities (seeds, pores, eyes, etc.) or, if he was short on time, he should have chosen the more reasonable interpretation, rather than the one that is less likely from a medieval phytomorph point-of-view. In fact, why did he choose that plant, when there are better drawings to get the point across?
Everyone makes mistakes, and no one has expertise in every area, and if the talk had provided new insights, I wouldn't have said anything other than a big Thank You to Marco for sharing it and to Touwaide for giving it, but when you read a summary in which 80% of Touwaide's statements are questionable or based on unsupported assumptions, then it would be irresponsible to stay quiet.
I think he muddied the waters (and focused too much on fringe theories) rather than giving his audience something useful to help them understand the VMS.