The Voynich Ninja

That is an interesting map. As JKP says, it's an overview of holdings, kind of a schematic floor plan of the abbey area.

It's getting closer, but still its arrangement is much more chaotic. Look at the central church, and notice how the other bubbles float haphazardly around it. This is because they correspond to the locations of actual things.

Also in the VM diagram, several circles contain not-so-earthly parts with cloud bands and fields of stars.

It's still an interesting parallel though. They label absolutely everything. Even the Sun and moon are labelled "Sun, east" and "moon, west".

(06-10-2019, 10:54 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I haven't had a chance to read it all of it yet, I just glanced through the text, but the folio from the Zwettl abbey appears to me to be more of a map of holdings showing the major possessions of the abbey, rather than an itinerary map.

Or rather both.

Quote:Miniature with the Zwettler foundation legend on f. 12r der Bärenhaut - The drawing on fol. 12r illustrates the founding legend of the monastery Zwettl: at upper left Hadmar I. von Kuenring and Hermann, the first abbot of Zwettl, ride around the area which is supposed to belong to the monastery. This circular ride is represented by a large circle; within the circle there are eight medallions with Zwettl possessions: around the Zwettl monastery church are the granges Dürnhof, Gaisruck, Pötzles, Edelhof and Ratschenhof, as well as the town of Zwettl and the parish church of St. John in Zwettl. On the outside of the circle there are three medallions with Pope Innocent II, King Konrad III and Duke Leopold of Bavaria. On the opposite side (fol. 11v) a hand in a semicircle points to Hadmar and Hermann.

Translated with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:nablator: Or rather both.

I looked at an aerial photo of the Zwettl monastery and you don't really need an itinerary map to get around it. It's big but it's not as big as a lot of college campuses.

It's handy to have a map of a college campus, but I don't think it would be called an itinerary map, especially if its main purpose was to show the major buildings.


I'm not sure how one can define an itinerary map, but if it only takes an hour to walk (or 20 minutes to ride) around the whole thing, would that be enough to require an itinerary? I guess if you had to be at a certain building at a certain time, one could call it an itinerary map, but that's not what was intended with the Zwettl map.

Sorry to split hairs but I really do wonder what the differences would be between a possessions map and an itinerary map.

If you want to see an example of the blurred line between fact and fiction, here is a map of how to get out of Israel that was printed in a British Bible.

Warning: it sometimes takes a while to load the image but it's worth it, it has some interesting stories incorporated with a real-looking (for the time) map:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

With Jerusalem there are a number of unique factors into play. It's a place of extreme importance for Christianity and its pilgrims, but during the late Middle Ages it was already under Muslim rule and often hard to visit. 

This gave rise to the genre of "mental pilgrimages". You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Hanneke van Asperen discusses two 16th century examples, but as she also explains, this way of thinking was already in full swing by the early 15th century. The "mental pilgrimage" was already popularized in the "Moderne Devotie" movement in the Netherlands, 14th century.

We see an increasing obsession with the suffering of Christ; in order to be a good Christian (read: to endure less torture in Purgatory), the devout were encouraged to imagine Christ's suffering as if they were undergoing it themselves.

To facilitate this, the manuscripts discussed by Van Asperen "allow the reader to visit the biblical sites in Jerusalem without leaving the confines of the home. One element sets them apart from the popular devotion known as the Stations of the Cross: both texts mention the exact distances between the sites. This makes it theoretically possible for the readers to duplicate the journey of Christ to Mount Calvary while trying to imagine his suffering. The mental pilgrims could earn remissions of temporal punishment ‘as if they had physically visited the holy places’."

Again, I'm agnostic about what the VM rosettes foldout represents. I can't fit everything together. But I do think that it's more of a symbolic representation rather than an actual "floor plan" of something, whether small scale or large.

I would love to blog about this, I have many more examples, but I don't have time. I'm 42 blogs behind (mostly written, but some have been in limbo for years while I try to relocate one important picture or quote that I've lost track of... they won't get done if I add yet another blog)...


So... I'll post them here...

These drawings are part of a map created by a German who worked as a protestant pastor in the Rhineland and who moved to the Netherlands to work as an engraver.

The map is populated with northern-Lombardic/Swiss/west Bohemian/Bavarian buildings, with saddleback portal gates and Byzantine-style towers, etc., that were partly copied from other maps, but probably also familiar to him when he was growing up in Germany.


[attachment=3460]

You'll notice the labels are in Hebrew. He converted to Judaism after moving to the Netherlands.

So what kind of map is it?

It's a map of Africa—the region believed to be part of the Exodus story of the Bible. He created maps of Egypt and the Levant. Nothing on this map looks particularly African (or Levantine). The nude lady on the crocodile in the bottom right (who also doesn't look African) is the European symbol for Africa:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

It was created in the 17th century, but it's so similar to late 15th-century and 16th-century maps, and illustrates the concept so well that I thought it was worth posting.

People drew what they knew.

(06-10-2019, 11:39 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(06-10-2019, 10:54 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I haven't had a chance to read it all of it yet, I just glanced through the text, but the folio from the Zwettl abbey appears to me to be more of a map of holdings showing the major possessions of the abbey, rather than an itinerary map.

Or rather both.

Quote:Miniature with the Zwettler foundation legend on f. 12r der Bärenhaut - The drawing on fol. 12r illustrates the founding legend of the monastery Zwettl: at upper left Hadmar I. von Kuenring and Hermann, the first abbot of Zwettl, ride around the area which is supposed to belong to the monastery. This circular ride is represented by a large circle; within the circle there are eight medallions with Zwettl possessions: around the Zwettl monastery church are the granges Dürnhof, Gaisruck, Pötzles, Edelhof and Ratschenhof, as well as the town of Zwettl and the parish church of St. John in Zwettl. On the outside of the circle there are three medallions with Pope Innocent II, King Konrad III and Duke Leopold of Bavaria. On the opposite side (fol. 11v) a hand in a semicircle points to Hadmar and Hermann.

Translated with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Looking at the map and reading the description, it reminds me of boundary clauses in medieval charters. Medieval people cared about land ownership and even in the early middle ages medieval people were writing documents to record the ownership of land and the transfer of land. Charters (or sometimes just the boundary clauses) were sometimes copied into liturgical books as a safe place to store the ownership information, charters were regularly recopied into things known in English scolarship as 'cartulary collections' for safe-keeping, and by far the largest class of medieval forgeries (i.e. forgeries made in the medieval period by medieval people) are forgeries of writs and charters.

This is a translated boundary clause from an early medieval charter You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

These are the land-boundaries of Eaton - first from beetle's stream up along the streamlet till it comes to the coloured floor. Thence along the valley by the two little barrows till it comes to the spring at Wulfhun's plantation. Then diagonally over the furlong to the thorn bushes westward where the large thorn tree used to stand, and so to bird pool. Then along the ditch till it comes to the muddy spring, and so along the water course till it comes to the Cherwell which forms the boundary from then on.

I know Anglo-Saxon charters are a bit far removed from what we're talking about, but I wanted to provide an example of how medieval people thought about and described space and place (particularly local and familiar space and place) in the absence of detailed maps. Of course people were making aps and diagrams throughout the middle ages, but maps were not always acessible or sufficiently accurate. The circle diagram in Zwettl, Zisterzienserstift, Archiv, Cod. 2/1 looks to me a little bit like someone illustrating a written description of the land holdings, which is not something that I have seen before.

I see the map this way,
Right: Nile Delta
Top right: the rest of the Red Sea
Top right: Dead Sea, left; Lake Genetzareth.
It shows the coast of Israel, you have to turn the map 90° right.

Quote:Aga: I see the map this way, 
Right: Nile Delta
Top right: the rest of the Red Sea
Top right: Dead Sea, left; Lake Genetzareth.
It shows the coast of Israel, you have to turn the map 90° right.

There's a compass at the bottom of the Hebrew map that shows North to be bottom-left.

Putting east or south at the top was normal in the Middle Ages (and sometimes in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well).

[attachment=3470]This map is south facing.
Above: Northern Italy, Po Valley
Below: Switzerland

Sorry if it's so big. I have shrunk it from 2.4 mega, to 600 kilos. But still too big.