Full scans of Firenze ms 106 can be seen online. The ms includes one of the earliest copies of the Alchemical Herbal.
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Excellent!
It is good to see also the second part of the MS, i.e. after the alchemical herbal part.
I attach a detail of the cipher alphabet that Rene mentioned on You are not allowed to view links.
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Which confirms, once again, how incredibly common simple-substitution codes were,
Hi Marco,
This alchemical cipher alphabet, or relatively minor variations of it, seems to have been used fairly widely. There's a similar one in Vigenère's Traité des chiffres ou secrètes manières d'écrire, published much later in 1586:
Interesting that the ampersand is included - I would have thought 1580 was a little early for its inclusion into the French alphabet?
The etcetera symbol et + c (which evolved into the ampersand) was quite common in Latin manuscripts.
I wasn't sure I could find examples quickly, but I got lucky... here are two from early medieval manuscripts:
![[Image: AmpersandEarlyMedieval.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/AmpersandEarlyMedieval.png)
(21-05-2018, 06:22 PM)Hubert Dale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Marco,
This alchemical cipher alphabet, or relatively minor variations of it, seems to have been used fairly widely. There's a similar one in Vigenère's Traité des chiffres ou secrètes manières d'écrire, published much later in 1586:
Thank you, Hubert! I was not aware that the alphabet had also been connected with alchemy!
Yes jkp but this is French. It was used as the 28th letter in English from the 1650s onwards but I didn't realise it was in French so early on. Doesn't matter
Only a small proportion of the population could write. It seems to me that those who were writing in Latin would be the same people who were writing in French.
Latin abbreviations were widely used in French, German, English, Italian, and Czech, so the ampersand was well-known during the medieval period (and is the kind of shape that shows up in cipher alphabets).
I don't have time to explicitly hunt for them, but if I come across ampersands in vernacular manuscripts, I'll post. Maybe we can get a sense of when they started using them in specific languages.