Guys
I think that the wiki article should be considered a sort of "reader's digest" of the voynich.nu digest of selected material.
I apologise to Rene - obviously if he's quoting a wiki article as a way to address this issue, then he can't be wiki author - that author has just worked off Rene's site.
Rene says that my point was that
Quote:... as reported by Marci when his senility/Alzheimer’s was in its late stages and memory-loss near complete.
This is not correct.
My point is that the document, and *specifically* its reference to Rudolf has been given an inordinate weight.
AMONG the various reasons why no normal historical evaluation would treat that single assertion as worth more than a footnote is that Marci - as we can certainly show - was in the last eighteen months of a degenerative disease which affected his memory.
There are a whole list of other reasons for making the same point: The 'Rudolf' story is a hugely over-inflated idea, about which one should entertain serious doubts. Marci's failing memory is one reason. I've listed some of the others above.
The mere fact that people - and first Wilfrid Voynich - have practiced 'bad history' by creating the usual version of the story, inflating the historical record and then acting as if it were "known fact" (i.e. that Rudolf so much as
saw the manuscript, it let alone owned it ) wouldn't matter a bean if we were creating a group-workshop historical fantasy novel, or playing an online team-player role-playing game.
But we're not. Many of the people here have valuable skills at a professional level and things have come quite a long way in the past two or three years, too. It is now both irresponsible and disrespectful to feed people dubious information as if it were certainty: I mean, look what a laughing stock was made of Stephen Bax, because someone led him to believe that he need only pay any attention to Edith Sherwood's botanical identifications. He had no idea - because he is a specialist in a very different area - of what a range of opinion and debate exists.
And the same waste and dead-ending has resulted from over-inflating the 'Rudolf' rumour and persistently neglecting to show that other views, and less enthusiastic acceptance of it have been voiced. I'm far from the first to try to moderate that enthusiasm.
For years - decades - elevation of the 'Rufolf rumour' led to peoples' time being wasted chasing irrelevant matter in irrelevant parts of Europe, assuming because of the Mnishovsky rumour, the wrong period, wrong cultural, religious milieu etc. wopuld inform the content of a supposed 'imperial' manuscript.
All those red herrings derive from that first, false air of certainty with which the rumour was promoted - an unsupported rumour that any historian would, in the normal way, treat with circumspection.
As it was, Wilfrid blew it out of all proportion, and earlier Voynicheros simply followed his track, trustinglly. So we've seen cumulative bias accrue... comparative images taken from none but Imperial (Carolingian) and German manuscripts, giving a false impression by omission that such images exist in no other medium and no other region.. And not everyone has time to ask "Is that the whole picture?"
We've seen further fantasies, miscalled 'theories' developed from the basis of believing the rumour - including suggestions that the Jesuits must have stolen the manuscript, or in some way improperly come to own any imagined ';imperial' manuscript. Somewhere or other, I recall reading one Voynichero's rapt fantasy that the rebinding was due to aftermath of some battle.. and something about Mattias Corvinus - the last idea quite unsupported by anything at all save development of the 'Rudolf' rumour...
The number of wasted man-hours which might have been spent on more obviously relevant research since 1912 is depressing when surveyed as I've surveyed it .
And all of it because a single, offhand, unsupported rumour, in a letter written to Kircher by a man already suffering from a condition that affected his memory.
Precisely which items of Marci's memory 'went' first; which were distorted before others... whether he remembered names but mis-remembered events.. none of this is known, so no argument can be made that because he remembered one thing, he remembered correctly everything in that letter. I'm speaking about the worth of the item as evidence. To try and turn it into a slur on my character, as supposedly "attacking" the late Marcus Marci is simply childish, but such passion seems to infuse efforts at discussion of the primary and secondary sources that distractions of that sort, too, have become an unfortunate habit in some quarters.
The issue has nothing to do with personalities. On every objective criterion, the certainty quotient deserves to be considered very low indeed - not only, but
also because within 18 months, as we know beyond doubt, the person who wrote that note was able to remember "almost nothing".
People who feel personally attached to the 'Rudolf' rumour are perfectly free to continue imagining it true. Historians cannot control other people's imaginings, but they can try to curb unbalanced weighting being given a particular historical document.
THAT is my point. There is so very little to recommend the assertion attributed to Mnishovsky that it rates low on the scale of reliable information.
)