The Voynich Ninja

(14-03-2019, 10:07 AM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(14-03-2019, 09:00 AM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.@ nickpelling

Even if the bifolios had been misordered, it does not follow that the quire-number-adding person could not read the ms.

I am quite sure  the quire numbers are Arabic numbers and I don't see what is unusual about them

Hi Helmut,

Back in The Curse of the Voynich (2006), I reconstructed the original gathering nesting for part of what is now Q13. It seems certain that the central bifolio included the double page spread where the water runs across the central fold from one side to the other (f78v-f81r). Moreover, the overwhelming probability (look at the symmetric design and the pair of 'pineapples' at the top of the pair) is that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. originally faced f84v. The central four folios of that quire were therefore originally (what are now) f84 - f78 - f81 - f75. Unfortunately this is inconsistent with the final quire numbering (which is on f84v). If you have a counterargument, I'd be very interested to hear it. Hence the gatherings had been nested in completely the wrong order by the time the Q13 quire number was added: which I believe implies that the person adding the quire numbers was unable to read the content.

The quire numbers use a very specific (and very transitional) (and indeed rather ugly) numbering style: abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals. Very few documents use this in any context.

Cheers, Nick

Agree with central You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f81r, but not with matching the pineapples. They don't match, nor do the water bodies. I realize you treat the blue and green the same but for me they represent differences that would not be shown together. The pineapples do represent similar things though. But it would be like putting an illustrated bible together and facing the story of Noah and that of Moses because they both have mountains in them, rather than following the chronology, or in this case, the shorelines, gulfs, and rivers.

I agree that they were stitched later by someone who either did not understand what they portrayed, and stiched them as found, or who wanted to present them mixed up to further obfuscate their meaning. The former seems the simpler explanation.

My proposed page order is 76, 80, 84, 77, 78, 81, 82, 75, 79, 83.

Getting back to the post of Emma and the 150+years gap, this amount of time it seems to me an eternity. I completely ignore what could happen with the VMS. 
  I am over 50 years old and in this time I've seen many things change. So, in 150+ years  the world and the mentality of the people had to go through a huge change. The proof is that no learned man of the court of Rodolf II was able to understand the Voynich.
  What we do know positively is that in this 150+ years there were many inquisitions in Europe. It is quite likely that there were some works like the Voynich with the same weird script, but is also likely that they would end in fire.

Hi Nick, 

I don't dispute your assertion that something is wrong with the order of Q13. What I  dispute is that the person who added the quire numbers could not read the ms. And I would like to add  that the quire numbers are nothing exceptional but typical for the way the 2d half of the 15th c. played around with numbers and the way they wrote them on the way to exchanging Arabic for Roman numerals

Best wishes

Helmut

P.S
Just as a passing thought: the whole ms. started as bifolios, that is  something most peple don't think about and you can't be sure the author/writer wrote in the correct order for binding

Going back to the blog of Thomas Sauvaget:

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he gives two examples of similar quire numbers, one orginating from Seckau, which is not too far from Graz, and one from Žiče in Slowenia, somewhat South of Graz. The second is datable to 1436.

I remember seeing several other examples of 'Pmus' as written on quire 1, in blog post comments from Darren Warley (if I remember correctly).

The VMS writing of p[ri]m[us] is not uncommon, I have dozens of examples, maybe more, but putting the 9 abbrev. on the other ordinals is a little less common than using "m".

In general, quire numbers are difficult to find, which makes it hard to know what is genuinely rare.

(13-03-2019, 11:37 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is good codicological evidence (that I presented at Frascati in 2012) that the bifolios had already been misordered / shuffled by the time that the quire numbers were added (certainly from Q13, but I think elsewhere too). This would run counter to the suggestion that the quire-adding owner was able to read (or even parse) the manuscript in any way.

The quire numbering style (abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals) is extremely unusual, and so far we have found examples (as I recall) only from circa 1470 or so in Switzerland / Lake Constance. My inference is that the manuscript had by this time probably entered some kind of Swiss monastic library: but I see no sign that anyone had the faintest idea what it was saying.

Lets say the binding did happen in this way. If that is the case that no one could read it by 1470 then the original owner had likely died without passing along its secrets, or this was the case with the person they did transfer it to, and the binder was perhaps a third person to be in possession of it. 

Or, it could have gone through many hands by this time, perhaps a society of people, passing the pages to each other in turn, and this latest one found the folios in disarray so decided to have it bound so as not to lose any of it, perhaps he was going on a trip and wanted to be able to transport it more easily, or thought perhaps the ordering he received it in may have been important and didnt want to lose track of this. 

There are parts of what is today northern Italy that until 1918 belonged to Austria (Trento), and the area bordered on Tyrol in Switzerland. The Habsburgs of Austria were also the Counts of Tyrol by that time and ruled the whole area. The northern tip of Lake Garda and the eastern tip of Lake Constance are included in the greater area described, ie Trentino Tyrol Austria. 

It seems interesting to me that Northern Italy keeps coming up in terms of where the manuscript originated, or from whence the author may have come or travelled through, but here is an area that falls under both that description and as part of the Habsburg dynasty, which makes this area directly connected to where the manuscript was later known to be, in Prague, even though it seems like quite the distance for it to have travelled.



So one guess is that the manuscript would have found its way to Vienna sometime after 1470. It may have come into the possession of the government at an early time, or the binder kept in in their family for a time, or it continued to be passed around, at least we know it was kept dry and did not succumb to fire. 



By some means it may well have belonged to Rudolf II, whether purchased for the 600 ducats or already in his possession, or simply in possession of the greater court, which was moved from Vienna to Prague in 1583. This would explain how Tepence came to have hold of it there in or after 1607, when he was given that name by Rudolf II. He would likely have had interest in the herbal section from a medical point of view.



Tepence died in 1622. By 1637 Baresch wrote his first letter to Kircher, the 1639 letter delivered by Moretus evidently mentions Baresch had had it for some time, presumably longer than the 2 years that had passed since the previous letter. Could it have meant 15 years?

The connection with the tip of Lake Garda seems especially appropos since i think this area is depicted within the manuscript itself on f80r, and Lake Constance on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Linda: There are parts of what is today northern Italy that until 1918 belonged to Austria (Trento), and the area bordered on Tyrol in Switzerland. The Habsburgs of Austria were also the Counts of Tyrol by that time and ruled the whole area. The northern tip of Lake Garda and the eastern tip of Lake Constance are included in the greater area described, ie Trentino Tyrol Austria.

The connections go back much farther.

The Lombards settled and ruled what we call northern Italy and the southern boot of Italy (Salerno/Naples area). They were southern Scandinavians (from the same general area as the Angles that colonized England and the Normans that spread west). Some of the southern Scandinavians also settled in Switzerland.

So, even though they lived for many generations between Germany and the Italian states, their ancestral ties were with the north (and with the colonies in the boot), not so much with central Italy.

One can see this orientation in their political support of the Holy Roman Empire when it was in a power struggle with Rome, and in the transmission of manuscripts. While reading itineraries of travels, I noticed that some writers still considered Florence to be within the boundaries of Lombardy in the 15th century. Historians say that Lombardy had been pushed back to the Po River by this time, but clearly some travelers still had friends or relatives in this area, enough that they did not recognize the border of Lombardy to have receded yet.

So... we see a lot of medieval herbal literature from Lombardy disseminated through France, England, and Germany, along with other kinds of manuscripts.

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Another interesting example of cross-pollination between Italy and the north...

It took me quite a while to figure out why John Dee's handwriting (his formal script, not his note-taking hand) was so similar to Isabella d'Este's handwriting.

After Marco posted those examples of handwriting, I looked into the Italic-to-Humanist evolution and discovered that Poggio (who was from beautiful Tuscany) had spent five years in England. He had very fine handwriting and was one of the main teachers and proponents of this style of script and probably influenced the early humanist handwriting revolution that occurred in the north (good thing too, his writing was far more attractive and legible than Gothic scrawl). He was also an avid collector of manuscripts and apparently traveled extensively in France and Germany seeking them out, and may have traded some of what he had for better ones along the way.

We also know that Dee, another avid bibliophile, spent several years living at Trebon, and it's more than likely that he looked around the region for manuscripts that ended up in England when he returned to his homeland.


All of which is to say that there were a lot of connections between Italy (both north and southern boot) and northern Europe in those days. People traveled much more frequently and for greater distances than I ever realized.

Fascinating. 

I just noted recently that one of the trails through the mountains was referred to as the road to Germany.

Some Irish manuscripts caught my eye the other day as being somewhat similar to the vms in handwriting. I figured it was far fetched. 

But it just depends on who went where and when, i guess.

Oh, and the society of people i mentioned that could have been passing the vms to each other could have been scribes who worked on copying and translating manuscripts. A faction of such could have been geographers, many of which were also sea captains, especially those with portolan map experience, so there you have travellers in their own right. Astronomical sections to help with navigation, along with the map and periplus. The herbal sections could be about feeding the crew if they should get lost or wreck in unpopulated areas.