Re-examining Claimed New-World Plants in the Voynich Manuscript: An Iconographic Reassessment of the Disputed Folios

⚠️ v2 (July 2026) supersedes the original, which substantially over-claimed. Withdrawn: all inferential statistics (the binomial p-value, the family-distribution chi-square, and the Bayesian provenance posterior), the HIGH/MEDIUM/LOW confidence ratings and species counts, the §3.5 "94.1% script-corroboration" claim, and the Northern-Italian/Veneto origin conclusion in full. Retained, narrowly: no Voynich plant illustration requires a New-World reading. The disputed New-World-plant identifications in the Voynich Manuscript (e.g. the Helianthus reading of f93r) are sometimes cited as evidence of a post-Columbian date or a forgery. Re-examining the disputed folios iconographically, I find that none compels the published New-World reading — the flagship sunflower (Helianthus) identification of f93r is contested even within New-World scholarship, and f24v's inflated papery calyces admit an Old-World Physalis reading — and that the recognizable plants belong to the standard European/Mediterranean herbal canon, which indexes a textual tradition rather than a region. Combined with a companion corrected analysis showing the Voynichese text yields no recoverable plant names beside labelled illustrations and has an anomalous within-word statistical structure, this implies the manuscript cannot be read as a conventional labelled herbal, and that its illustrations cannot serve as a crib for decipherment. The single defensible claim is narrow: no Voynich plant illustration requires a New-World reading. The work does not establish Old-World origin, region, date, or authenticity, none of which plant iconography can decide.