The Voynich Ninja

This houppelande (thanks davidjackson) seems like a pretty good match to me, although again she's wearing a different undergarment with some sort of lace/tulle pectoral detail: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. detail, Roman de la Rose, Ferrell Collection, private owner. (French, mid-15thC)


EDIT: The MS actually has a bunch of them, short, long, and on men and women:




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So I did a bit more digging on the dagged-sleeved houppelande.

It seems to be rather specific, and is described in all the sources I've found as a style which was in fashion under the reign of Charles VI of France (1380-1422), although it seems to have stayed in style until the 1430's.

In the Bedford Hours (BL Add. MS18850), (painted by a Parisian artist), the dagged-sleeved houppelande seems in fact worn by all (?) the ladies of the French court depicted on 288v. Note that it is not worn by the Queen.
As noted by Edouard Charton in an 1847 article about houppelandes, the surcot (what the Queen is wearing here) was what one would wear for full regalia: " a traditional costume that would be worn at most once or twice a year".
For everyday wear, "both at the court and in the city"..."the houppelande was therefore the fundamental item in a woman's attire".




There was apparently a similar style to the houppelande which was in fashion in Italy, the cioppa, but this doesn't seem to have featured dagged sleeves.

The dagged-sleeved houppelande with a low neckline (as opposed to the collared ones, which can be found in the Netherlands)  seems to have been pretty much a French courtly trend.

In  the Stuttgart Kartenspiel, probably made in Swabia, Southwestern Germany, c1427-1431, we do find a blue dagged sleeved houppelande, but again the neckline is collared:


Perhaps there are more exceptions and I am just not searching properly. But from what I can find so far, the dress we see in the Voynich seems to be very specific to France and the height of fashion for the carbon-date period.
Those Voynich girls may be ugly, but they sure were on trend.

Thank you VViews, this was what I was expecting (the date range). I entered the results we have so far for the men's sleeves into a spreadsheet and the results are conclusive. You see, if you take only the clear matches (i.e. no overall puffy "hulk" sleeves, no cases about which doubt was expressed, tunic in roughly the same style as Archer), you can compare the three decades 1400-1430 to everything that came before and everything that comes after.

[attachment=2442]

The earlier cases are from the Sanitatis MSS. The later cases are mostly outside of manuscript art and several of them borderline doubtful. 

In other words, for the Archer's sleeves we've got 1400-1430 as likely range. If it's earlier, it's trend setting like the highly innovative Tacuinum Sanitatis. If it's later, it would have certainly been considered old fashioned or "retro". (Diebold Lauber does this sometimes, but his models have sometimes even been called "14th century" so he's not exactly a beacon of modern fashion). Given the simple style of the tunic, I'd say that later than 1430 is especially unlikely.

In short, limiting the date range for elbow bags to ca. 1390?/1400-1430 is a reasonable hypothesis. Now the question is: doe the women's dresses allow us to refine this date range? If we look at the various styles of dagging, is there an evolution?

Ah I see.
I hadn't understood that the two threads were related, it"s a great idea to correlate puffy-elbow (batwing) sleeves and dagged sleeves. It makes so much sense now, sorry I didn't get it at first!

I looked at your Tacuinum examples again, from this thread and the other one.

It seems I have to revise what I wrote above: BNF NAL 1673, which is where image n°1 in your OP is from, is actually an Italian MS from c1430. The type of dress worn in your example must be the elusive Italian dagged-sleeved cioppa.

I'm including another example from BNF NAL 1673 (f96v) below. There are others in this MS, but I chose this one because it is blue like the Voynich one. You can see that the cuts (dags?) in the sleeves are very small and discreet.


Going back to the Tacuinum from the other thread, ÖNB Cod. Ser. n. 2644, it actually does feature dagged sleeves too, on f31v. The lady getting groped in the eggplant garden is actually wearing a pretty nice red match for the Voynich dress.


These are, I think, perhaps more consistent with what we find in the Voynich: in the French versions, the cuts are deep and the dagged sleeves tend to be really droopy and almost reach the ground. In the Italian ones it's more of a moderately scalloped edge at the end of a very wide flared sleeve.

In terms of date, I really can't tell a difference between the sleeves in your n°1 example from 1430  and the one from the ONB Tacuinum 40 years prior. Both Italian examples seem to have a very similar shape/size, as well as the low cut neckline, etc... The blue dress in the 1430 one does have more discreet dags, but then it coexists with the dags in example 1, so I don't know.

Here are the date ranges for the examples I posted. I only looked them up now because I like to keep my selections "blind" as much as possible as to not influence myself. For reference I'll repost the image.

1.  ???
   
2. Castello della Manta frescos, Northern Italy, 1410 - 1420, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
   
3. BL Add MS 18850, France, 1410-1430, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
   
4. BNF fr 805 (Roman de la Rose), France, 1400-1415, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
   
5. Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal Ms-664 réserve, Paris, 1411, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
   
6. Gentile da Fabriano, Italy, 1423
   
7. Ms Germ. Quart. 42, Low Countries, 1415, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
   

VViews: I'm a bit confused now. I based my info on the different Tacuinum MSS on Cathleen Hoenigher's article: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

She mentions four early MSS, all made under Visconti between 1380 and 1400. They are now held respectively in Paris, Vienna, Rome and Liège. The Paris MS is BNF NAL 1673, which is supposed to be the earliest, i.e. certainly before 1400. Yet the BNF vaguely marks it early 15th century. This was the MS which ended up as a gift to Verde Visconti.

This means that the MS in which I saw the VM-like pears is actually not "the" paris Tacuinum, but a later one . BNF Lat 9333, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Its images do appear to descend from the (pre-1400) Vienna MS specifically.

(16-10-2018, 08:48 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here are the date ranges for the examples I posted. I only looked them up now because I like to keep my selections "blind" as much as possible as to not influence myself. For reference I'll repost the image.

I try to do that too. While I'm gathering, I try NOT to look at what country, what date, etc., I grab the image, copy and paste the bibliographical data without reading it, and then look for more.

It's not until I have a certain "base" number that I start looking at statistics.

For example, with the zodiac cycles, I didn't feel comfortable making generalizations until I had more than 350 complete zodiac cycles, and even then I squirmed while talking about it. After 500, THEN I felt like I could confidently BEGIN to pull out some patterns.


The same with samples of text that match the marginalia. I wasn't really confident saying anything about them until I had close to 1,000 samples (which is more than 40,000 individual letters) and I'm STILL collecting, trying to get better data.


With the crossbows, tunics, and sleeves, it was more difficult to get the kind of raw numbers one might hope to find, but this isn't always possible and sometimes rarity becomes an asset as it will occasionally point you in the right direction with less data.

.
All of which leads me to the dagged sleeves...

I haven't been talking about it much and haven't mapped it yet, because I found it very hard to find good examples (I'm glad Koen started this thread because I'm not sure I would ever have found enough on my own) and now VViews has posted a good example of what I was hoping to find—delicate, tight, almost lace-like dagging (in fact, I tried to look for lacy sleeves as well ones in which the sleeve fabric itself was dagged). Good example, and POSSIBLY what the VMS illustrator was trying to draw.

Here is one that expressly illustrates an alternative to dagged sleeves. The VMS picture is small and imprecise, so it occurred to me it MIGHT be dagged sleeves or it might be lacy sleeves:

 

The difference might matter.

Lace was handmade and very expensive.
Dagging was the "poor nobleman's" alternative to lace. It looked a bit like lace sleeves but was created simply by incising the fabric, a process that takes minutes compared to the months it takes to make lace (left picture tatted lace; right picture bobbin or crochet lace).

If it is lace, it might fit economically with the very long pouch on the bowman's hat. More fabric frequently meant more money and higher social status.

More lace here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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More dagged: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (inside looks like a fuzzy fabric, maybe animal fur? rabbit?
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Bibliographic info on NAL 1673:

Colloquial name(s): Tacuinum sanitatis, by Ibn Butlân

Date: 1390-1400 (source, Mandragore) or 1380-90 (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
Origin: Pavia or Milan, Lombardy, N. Italy, by Giovannino de Grassi's workshop (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and source, Mandragore)

Detail, Ameto's Discovery of the Nymphs, Wood Panel, Unknown "Master of 1416", c 1410, Florentine. (Met Museum)
A smorgasbord of dagged sleeves!

And some modest (as opposed to low-cut) necklines on the left.

Something that continues to bug me is the issue of corresponding headgear. 
In most of these 15thC images where women sport these sorts of sleeves, they tend to also be wearing horned headdresses or crowns, or have their hair in braids of some sort, as opposed to the veil and headband (?) over loose hair that the Voynich Gemini lady is wearing and the... whatever it is that Virgo has on her head.
I can't remember: have any matches been found for the combo of sleeves and headgear for the Voynich ladies?

It's a good question, but I find the headgear of these two women (if indeed Virgo is a woman) so hard to interpret. I just can't tell what I'm looking at. This makes looking for comparisons near impossible in my opinion :/