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Iconography and Phytomorphic Identification

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Flora of the Voynich Codex

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Abstract

The Voynich Codex, discovered in 1912 by Wilfred M. Voynich in Italy, had been long assumed to be of pre-Columbian European origin. This conventional dogma was put into question in 1944 by the distinguished botanist Rev. Dr. Hugh O’Neill, who identified in it two New World plants, sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) and capsicum pepper (Capsicum annuum L). Despite his credentials as a botanical taxonomist and an expert in Mesoamerican plants, his work was either ignored or ridiculed. In 1991, an obscure note by an Australian, Jacques B.M. Guy, confirmed the sunflower identification and noted not a single European species. He mentioned that a botanical colleague identified passionfruit. Tucker and Talbert, in a seminal paper (2013), extended the identification to 39 plants as either indigenous to the New World or circumboreal, such as Actaea rubra (Aiton) Willd. Tucker and Janick (2017) extended the list to 55 species while Tucker and Janick (2018a) added two additional ones. The identification in the Voynich Codex of New World plants as well as a mineral and 21 animals (Flaherty et al. 2018) provides hard evidence that the Voynich Codex is post-Columbus and not a fifteenth century European work, as had been almost universally assumed by Voynich Codex researchers (Zanbergen 2004–2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Delaware State University, Dover, DE, USA

    Arthur O. Tucker

  2. Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Jules Janick

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  1. Arthur O. Tucker
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  2. Jules Janick
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Tucker, A.O., Janick, J. (2019). Iconography and Phytomorphic Identification. In: Flora of the Voynich Codex. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19377-5_3

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