Edith Sherwood Ph.D.
  • The Handwriting of Leonardo da Vinci and the Voynich Manuscript

    A sample of Leondardo da Vinci's handwriting shows similarities to the handwriting in the Voynich Manuscript.
  • The Composition of Ife Heads - A Numerical Analysis

    Recent studies show that it is possible to routinely make brass alloys (<28%) with the same concentration of zinc using the cementation process. This suggests that the brass Ife heads may have been cast from a combination of copper, brass (of the same composition) and lead bars and not by the cementation of leaded zinc ores.
  • The Voynich Botanical Plants 2.0

    One logical approach that should be considered when identifying the plants in the botanical section of the Voynich Manuscript, is a comparison of the drawings with illustrations from 15th century herbal books and manuscripts. I attempted to do this in my earlier paper, but was unable to find any useful medieval herbals. A number of 15th century herbals are now available. I found that about 19% of the VM’s drawings are very similar to, if not copies of some of the illustrations in these books and manuscripts, another 48% were sufficiently similar to these illustrations to allow identification. These herbals also display the same bizarre features that cause botanists to regard the VM’s drawings as a meaningless jumble of plant parts. The remaining 33%, of the botanical drawings were drawn from nature and a number were of plants native to alpine regions of Europe.
  • An Unidentified Painting by Leonardo da Vinci

    A painting from Arabella Huntington’s Madonna and Child collection, ascribed to Italian Artist Pinturicchio, shows characteristics of works by Leonardo da Vinci.
  • The Voynich Manuscript: Full Circle

    In this article I identify the author of the Voynich Manuscript. He not only wrote the manuscript using his own alphabet and a secret code but he also hid his name among the stems and roots of some of the plants in his botanical drawings.
  • The Voynich Manuscript Decoded?

    I give examples to show that the code used in the Voynich Manuscript is probably a series of Italian word anagrams written in a fancy embellished script. This code, that has been confusing scholars for nearly a century, is therefore not as complicated as it first appears.
  • The Voynich Manuscript Decoded? – Part II

    I offer my interpretation of Folio 116v, the Michitonese page, of the Voynich Manuscript. Using the modified Voynich alphabet outlined in my previous paper and analyzing the subsequent Italian anagrams, I have deciphered the top paragraph of Folio 99r. This folio was chosen because it and the Michitonese page appear to be discussing the same subject matter. This may be the first time, in about 500 years, that anyone has read any of the text of this mysterious manuscript. What I found was very surprising and unexpected. I also present my deciphering of a botanical page and an astrological page.
  • Leonardo da Vinci and the Voynich Manuscript

    The Voynich Manuscript may have been written by a young Leonardo da Vinci as evidenced by a similarity to Leonardo’s script and signature, an indication of mirror writing, and an astrological chart that corresponds to Leonardo’s birthday. Mistakes in the manuscript point to the possibility that a precocious child could have been the author.
  • Voynich Manuscript: was the author left-handed?

    In this paper I suggest that Tarot cards were the source of the sun, moon and star motifs found on drawings in the Voynich Manuscript and carvings on an Afro-Portuguese ivory horn. In addition it likely that the VM’s illustrations of little nude ladies, bathing in green pools, were inspired by 14th century manuscripts based on Roman/Greek mythology. These observations make it unlikely that Roger Bacon was the author of the VM, or that John Dee, Edward Kelley or Wilfred Voynich forged the manuscript. Additional evidence indicates that the author of this mysterious manuscript was left-handed.
  • The Voynich Botanical Plants

    It would normally be regarded as a distinct handicap when viewing the botanical drawings in the VM, never to have seen a medieval herbal or botanical manuscript, however having no preconceived ideas as to what to expect, I am able to view the drawings without bias. Like everyone else who sees these drawings for the first time, I was totally confused by some of their fantastic and eccentric characteristics and was ready to abandon the project. Fortunately I printed out a few of the more normal drawings, and while studying them at home one night I realized that the creeper illustrated in folio 32r was growing outside my back door. The following morning I confirmed that the flowers and leaves were very similar to this creeper.
  • Leonardo da Vinci and Bartolomeo Marchionni

    The intention of this paper is to show that Leonardo da Vinci may have had a life long association with Bartholomeo di Domenico Marchionni, the wealthy Florentine banker in Lisbon, who financed some of the Portuguese voyages of exploration to West Africa, India and Brazil and who played a prominent role in the early years of the African slave trade. He may have been the person Leonardo referred to as "Bartolomeo the Turk."
  • Bartolomeo Marchionni and the Afro-Portuguese Ivories

    During the latter part of the 15th century, the king of Portugal sold rights to trade with Guinea and Benin to the wealthy Florentine merchant banker and slave trader, Bartolomeo Marchionni. This paper investigates the possibility that he may have been responsible for having African artists from Sierra Leone and Benin trained to carve ivory artifact, which he subsequently sold to his wealthy clients in Europe. Those ivory pieces that have survived the last five centuries are now known as the Afro-Portuguese ivories.
  • Analysis of Radiocarbon Dating Statistics in Reference to the Voynich Manuscript

    The purpose of this article is to identify potential errors in radiocarbon dating with the view to evaluating the Voynich manuscript 14C data. Anyone reading this article should have a basic understanding of statistics.
    Download this document in pdf format
  • Analysis of Radiocarbon Dating Statistics in Reference to the Voynich Manuscript – Part II

    The current method of stating the estimated error for the calendar year from a single 14C BP age is over-simplified and as I indicated Analysis of Radiocarbon Dating Statistics in Reference to the Voynich Manuscript, an increase in the error estimate for the 14C BP age estimate is justified and, depending on its magnitude, could would lead to a proportional increase in the calendar year error estimate.
Website design by Erica Sherwood
http://www.edithsherwood.com/
www.edithsherwood.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-10
10765
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:6HVTCIFS2FMTNEMHCZGNZETHUJPD5KLH
<urn:uuid:46383657-b48f-443e-be4d-12689b02baa6>
2014-03-08T00:38:35Z
66.96.132.120
sha1:DLUBW4YUBWHM6DTXFLPB2UGPXJI3Z7W7
<urn:uuid:185064b3-f3d2-4aff-95b1-21093cb9a520>
http://www.edithsherwood.com/
response
<urn:uuid:f6c1be34-20ff-4abe-87a0-c7e425f403b9>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-10
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf