Re: VMs: Voynich MS Theory

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Martin,

At 14:17 18/07/2003 +0000, Martin Herron wrote:
> During the documentary, I discovered that a theory of the origin of the 
> manuscript was based on the fact that in the book there is a picture of a 
> Sunflower, dating it to pre-1470 or something (all dates and historical 
> facts I mention are based purely on my memory of the programme and may be 
> way off - you will know the actual dates - they are pretty irrelevant to 
> the theory anyway).  There was a lingering shot of this picture of a 
> Sunflower, and I remember thinking that it didn't look much like a 
> Sunflower to me.  I didn't think much else about it, as I have no interest 
> in plants other than finding them pleasant to look at.

The point about the sunflower ("gira sole", ie "turn towards the sun") is 
that it was introduced into Europe by Columbus, and so was basically 
unknown here pre-1492... and this has been used to argue an earliest 
(European) date for the Voynich of 1492.

But certainly, as you (and others) have pointed out, it doesn't really look 
much like a sunflower, not even the versions originally brought back 
pre-1500. There's more critique on sunflowers on this site:-
http://www.pharo.com/history/voynich_manuscript/articles/mhvm_02a_interpreting_the_images.asp

However, passion flowers are documented as having been brought back by 
Spanish missionaries from Brazil in the sixteenth century, which would 
perhaps point to an even later date.
        http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/ksheets/passion.html

One good suggestion for you might be to trawl the Internet looking for 
pictures, and to then use them to put up your own simple one-page website, 
side-by-side with the picture from the Voynich, and post a link to it onto 
the list. If you're trying to make a pictorial argument, use pictures! :-)

But perhaps the biggest related problem here is that only a handful of 
images in the Voynich seem clearly representative of real plants: many seem 
to be composite, metaphoric or (worse) just plain made-up. This makes the 
whole enterprise of drawing inferences from its depicted plants (ie, 
exactly what a normal herbal researcher would do) fraught with uncertainty, 
which is perhaps why normal herbal researchers tend to leave the Voynich 
well alone. :-o

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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