The Biological Section of the Voynich Manuscript: A Textbook of Medieval Plant Physiology?

摘要

The Voynich codex is currently housed at the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, which maintains a gallery of digitized images of the 246 pages of the manuscript on its website (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_cross-collex/SearchExecXC.asp). The first part of the codex (folios 1r-66v), often referred to as the "Botanical" or "Herbal" section, contains crudely executed paintings of stylized plants, sketched in ink and filled in with washes of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red (D'lmperio, 1978). Few, if any, of the plants are identifiable, although resemblances to actual plants can be found by the determined observer. For example, the plant in Fig. 1A is stylized beyond recognition, although the plants in Fig. 1B and C bear some resemblance to sunflowers. However, sunflowers only appeared in Europe after 1492, decades after the supposed age of the manuscript according to the carbon-14 dating results. A closer inspection of the "sunflower" in Fig. 1C reveals a cross outlined in seeds(Fig. 2). This suggests that the artist considered the religious or philosophical significance of the drawings in the Herbal section at least as important as naturalistic representation, if not more so.