The Voynich Ninja

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away - or more precisely, in 2015 on the Cipher Mysteries blog, Nick Pelling made a post about the quire numbers in the VMS and his observation that they have an unusual format has lived in my brain ever since.

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Ever since I read that blog, whenever I browse through a manuscript I take a moment to scan for quire numbers in the hope that I might see a quire-counting system like it, and I have never found a good match. Nick has a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and at the time he suggested that there might be four different scribes who wrote or emended the quire numbers. I am not sure if I agree that 4 different people wrote or emended the quire numbers, but I agree that there is a lot of variation in both the numerals and the grammatical endings and it is worth keeping in mind that these variations exist.

As the quire numbers are believed to have been added after the VMS had been rearranged at least once, the quire numbers probably(?) represent the work of later owners or librarians rather than the work of the original scribes of the VMS, but I was hoping that we could use this thread to share similar quire numbering formats if we ever find any as it might help to identify some of the subsequent owners or users of the manuscript.

Thank you, Arca! I think that identifying individual owners is maybe too ambitious, but these numbers might tell us something about where the ms was a few decades after its creation.

Years ago, Darren Worley pointed out to me a series of 2012 posts by Thomas Sauvaget:

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In the first post, the author discusses numbers (not "quire" numbers) from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Please read his posts for additional details.
The match for 'primus' with the open-top 'p' looks particularly good.
As Sauvaget writes, the ms is dated 1459 and was probably written in St.Gall (where it still is). But the numbers appear in an index that was added by a later hand.

(01-06-2021, 12:23 AM)arca_libraria Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
...but I was hoping that we could use this thread to share similar quire numbering formats if we ever find any as it might help to identify some of the subsequent owners or users of the manuscript.

I have too much info to post here even though quire numbers are hard to find, very hard to find. They get trimmed off, or they get swallowed in the folds, or they were never added in the first place.

I have managed to locate only a few, and my entire collection of ordinals, after looking through more than 20,000 manuscripts is only about 70 samples (I say "about" because I have 75 but 5 are so incomplete I'm reluctant to include them in the count).

Here are some examples. These are not necessarily the best ones in the collection, just a sampling to provide the gist of what there is:

Thank you both so much!

Marco I had never seen that series of blog posts by Thomas Sauvaget, I will save them for tonight’s  reading. Those St Gallen quire numbers have the most similarity with the VMS quire numbers that I think I have ever seen - I don’t even mean the actual glyphs, just the principle of construction for how to represent the ordinal forms of the numbers.

JKP - thank you! You are always so generous with your database samples. I knew there had to be some similar examples out there, even though as you say, quire numbers get damaged and cut off all the time. 

I know that identifying later owners is probably too ambitious, but there are often house/library styles for cataloguing so I think any truly similar examples should be investigated just in case we can localise the manuscript or some of the people who had access to it in its later years.

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Some other Cipher Mysteries links:

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