The Voynich Ninja

(01-02-2020, 04:54 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."Italy" is something vague and misleading, it's just some common misconception which crawled into Wikipedia, this would-be knowledge-reference, and nobody takes the trouble to correct that.

That is of course correct. The term 'northern Italy' is only intended to give an idea of the region, not the actual conditions of the time.


Italy around 1300

Then in the 15th century a few more profound changes took place. The early - mid 15th century saw a steady consolidation of the medieval city-states of northern Italy.


Italy 1454

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(01-02-2020, 03:22 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think the origin can best be deduced from the design of the illustrations. When I make stylistic comparisons, I often come to Alsace or the Lake Constance region. This is of course very speculative and far from being proven.
I would not overestimate the swallowtail merlons in this context. One can only safely assume that the author has seen or heard of them. But that does not automatically mean that the VMS was also written in Northern Italy.

I recently fell into a wikihole that included the western Alpine region historically called Savoy, which includes parts of modern day France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. It struck me that Savoy is a region at the intersection of lot of clues the VMS seems to be giving us. There have been a number of distinct Romance and Germanic dialects used there since the Middle Ages.

I think it’s wise to simply refer to “the Alpine region of Europe” as a major contender for the VMS’s place of manufacture. This pays respect to the fact that the political and ethnic map of Europe was drawn rather differently than today. It also discourages theorists from any of the modern nations that have land in the Alps who have ethnonationalist motives for claiming the VMS as their people’s cultural property. Anything that cuts down on the number of cranks in Voynich studies is a good thing.

When I was researching this region, I found it very important to look at how differently the Tirol, Bavaria, Lombardy, Bohemia, Dalmatia and the Veneto thought of themselves in the Middle Ages, because borders and allegiances were quite different.

Not only was there no Italy as we know it today, there was no Germany either. There was a Germanic-speaking collection of nations united mainly through the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was a bit like today's EU (not a particularly good analogy since towns were much more independent and monarchies prevalent, but you can get the general idea).

Latin had been the lingua franca for centuries, but some of the HR emperors chose German rather than Latin as the official language. This probably impacted the allegiances of some of the non-German-speaking areas, just as the imposition of specific religions would sometimes attract or alienate certain areas. It also complicated life for non-German-speaking intelligentsia who had learned Latin as their second language and now had to learn another.


There was a huge variety of languages in those days (many of which have gone extinct in the last 200 years and many of which will be extinct in the next 30 years). People from one village often could not understand those in the next village. In Switzerland, they spoke many languages and dialects, as they did in other parts of the Alps, as well as Provençe and Dalmatia.

Also, there were significant Greek colonies in Venice, Florence, Marseilles and the southern boot of Italy, as well as Arab culture (and many Arab traders) in the south of Spain.

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And, as Koen mentioned, people traveled. They traveled to attend different universities. They traveled to offer their services (unless they could find a wealthy long-term patron, stone masons, teachers, scribes, doctors, and many others traveled regularly, and entertainers traveled as part of their lifestyle). Poggio spent five years in England. John Dee and Kelley spent years in Bohemia. There was nothing unusual about this.

The person who designed the VMS could have been from anywhere. The persons who wrote the text were not necessarily the same as whoever created the drawings. The text was not necessarily added at the same time as the drawings (although I suspect the two were contemporary).

There was probably a mastermind for the VMS (there's a certain consistency to it) but unless it was a family project (which I think is possible), it may have been created by a group of people from very different backgrounds. Universities and monasteries were quite multicultural. There were strong ties between St. Gall and Bury St. Edmunds in England, even though the walking distance was considerable. Some of the staff at St. Gall came from Bury St. Edmunds. There were strong ancestral ties between southern Scandinavia, parts of Lombardy, and colonies in southern Italy, just as there were strong ancestral ties between Marseilles and Greece. The reason I was interested in ancestral ties is because they affected how heirlooms (such as manuscripts, which were luxury items) were passed from one person to another.

It's difficult to know where something originated based on where it was found. Look how many treasures are pillaged in war. The crusaders brought back many middle eastern treasures (including herbal manuscripts), the 30 Years War resulted in whole storehouses being carted off. Treasures from Egypt went to England, treasures from Rome ended up in America.

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I'm quite firmly convinced that the scribes were familiar with Latin scribal conventions (not just the alphabet). Based on my research, I'm also convinced that the exemplars for the zodiac figures were from a subgroup that originated in northeast France/Flanders/Normandy that gradually migrated east and south through the Holy Roman Empire over a period of several centuries.

Other than that, I have no idea who might have made it or where it might have been made. Manuscripts often lay unbound for decades or centuries, so the binding often does not tell us where something originated, only where it has been at some point in its life. I am hopeful that there might be a DNA test of the skin to see if it belongs to an identifiable species of bovine. This might give us  some good regional data.

About the university.
I'll just take the average value of 1420, assuming that you were 14 - 16 years old to study.
According to a documentary, universities were not as common as around 1500+.
Was traveling around at that time really as normal as in the 1600 century ?
Where could one study at all around 1400, except in a monastery ?

(02-02-2020, 11:03 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Where could one study at all around 1400, except in a monastery ?

Hi Aga,

In 1400, you can study in Paris, for instance, in the university of La Sorbonne.
In 1400, you can also study in the Faculty of medicine, in Montpellier, among aother faculties.

Thanks for the advice.
Afterwards I have to ask questions, where could one study everything together.
Herbalism, medicine, astronomy, alchemy (pharmacy and chemistry).

(02-02-2020, 11:03 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Where could one study at all around 1400, except in a monastery ?

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Universities of Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Vicenza, Cambridge, Palencia, Salamanca, Padua, Naples, Toulouse, Orleans, Siena, Valladolid, ... (I'm still at universities founded in the 1200's here)

It seems like the earliest medieval European universities were all in Italy, France, UK, Spain. The first one in Portugal came in 1290, Ireland 1320. Bohemia 1348, Poland 1364. Austria, Hungary, Albania and Germany all late 14th century. In 1420, German options alone were Heidelberg, Cologne, Leipzig, Rostock. Belgium is just late with the foundation of the old university of Leuven in 1425.

(02-02-2020, 03:04 AM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It also discourages theorists from any of the modern nations that have land in the Alps who have ethnonationalist motives for claiming the VMS as their people’s cultural property.

Of course the Holy Roman Empire, for example, was also just a "patchwork carpet" of different principalities and duchies. These were largely autonomous and could often only be integrated with difficulty by the emperor. One can say that the kings in other European countries had more power in their territories than the (elected) emperor in the HRE.

Ethnonationalist motives for claiming the VMS as a cultural asset could therefore at best be limited to a small region that is far from being national in today's sense. At least as far as the HRE is concerned. The term "nation" was adopted into German around 1400. Before that there was not even a term for it.