The Voynich Ninja

(20-06-2021, 09:21 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This reminds me of a passage from Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias:

"Of living souls the heavenly edifice is built of living stones. Like a vast city it embraces the great multitude of nations, and like a wide net an immense multitude of fish." (Sc II,3)

Yes, that's a very good example. In this quote you also see how well these metaphors layer. A heavenly edifice reminds of Heavenly Jerusalem. Souls build it like stones. But she is then talking about the world because it embraces the nations. And then throw in a fishing metaphor for good measure.

This kind of switching between the heavenly and the earthly, naming both in the same breath, a strong sense of both realms coinciding... That is exactly the sort of thought about the Church we believe underlies the Rosettes.

I concur with esteemed image-collector JKP the winepress is a provocative touchstone, and I personally think eminently reasonable, especially given the geography of examples which situate well with the Voynich evidence. Separately, Hildegard (invoked here and in other comments) is a worthy precedent to consider, in terms of chaine operatoire, to understand one cultural context and process for the generation of such a work. On my side of the Pyrenees, Beatus of Liebana is another, though the visual translation flowered well after the textual. In all there is as much a "singing out" as a flowing out, and it's long been my hope the text may prove to be incantative, if meaningful in whatever tongue, accounting for some of the legato repetitiveness, as recently observed independently by another friend. 

Your visual discourse also highlights well the confluence of (popularly) disparate zones of influence that actually commingle in the literate medieval mind (and material trade), including the Byzantine and the European. Those pursuing an intersection rather than an isolate are in my opinion more likely to forge further ahead. It could be fruitful to recall that even some of the most apparently inward mystic journeys (Hildegard, Beatus, the Sufis) were encouraged by institutions as adventures or tools of contact and dissemination, rather than of isolation or idiosyncrasy. (The Northern Spanish kingdoms were in some cases and times exempted from crusading due to their own peninsular goals, and as such encountered their own Jerusalem through different channels, changing the visual lexicon there).

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Quote:In an oval in the middle of the famous tympanum sits[/font][font=Vollkorn, serif] Christ.

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Here, though, I think more reading on the mandorla / vesica will help, including Seidel's "Legends in Limestone." There are other well-explored precedents for this enclosure in sculpture and illumination, earlier and with a different frame of mind than the Wound, though I don't discount the Wound may be present in the Voynich and mind of its author(s), or more to the point its scribes and illustrator(s).

Thank you Matthew. I wish I had your vocabulary when writing in English 

You are right that the mandorla should be considered, for example on the rosettes foldout. An indication towards this may be its radiant nature.

If it is a simple mandorla though, as opposed to the side wound, the fact that it is empty seems almost like a provocation. Or at least an extreme dedication to keep the surface metaphor free of all too obvious Christian images.

Edit: this is different in the large plants, where solutions have been found for the vacant mandorla. In this context I would especially point to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and compare it to the tympanum of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in Conques, France. Here, Christ sits as the Sun among the other planets, all represented by flowers, within a mandorla surrounded by multiple layers of "petals".

To be honest, I just don't see how the "grape" interpretation will change the previous suggestions about the souls and "aqua vita" conception. In fact, those details can be stones or grapes, or even just droplets, as all of them can represent Christ or his blood. Christ was frequently mentioned as a stone, grape, vine, a fish, etc. So, if they are just drops (of blood or water), it won't change the rest of your interpretation. If the left upper rosette shows Christ's Wound that pattern also can be just drops. 
I think your interpretation would make a great sense if the VMs would contain exclusively a religious context.  Of course, almost all medieval and late medieval treatises with different context were connected to religion, including astrological, alchemical and medical ones, as medieval society in general was very religious, but I really don't see the VMs as a merely religious text, as it is not proven visually, it doesn't look as such.

Searcher, you raise a good point: in a time and place where ubiquitous and explicitly Christian artistic themes were the norm, a work that is Christian in theme but tries not to show it explicitly, demands an explanation.

I can’t recall who first said it (René Z, maybe?), but for every promising Voynich theory, there’s always at least one puzzle piece that just doesn’t fit. The oddness of a crypto-Christian book made in medieval Europe is Koen and Cary’s piece that doesn’t fit. This doesn’t damn their theory, but it certainly merits an explanation.

Koen, you mention in your blog post that the theme of Christ’s oval or spindle-shaped wound has been largely neglected by modern art historians. You speculate that its resemblance to the female genitalia makes it an awkward subject, that most scholars would rather avoid. (Correct me if I’m misinterpreting what you wrote.) It strikes me that depictions of Christ’s wound were very intentionally ionic, because this symbolized the rebirth of the world through Christ’s death. Does this accord with your research? In any case, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s anachronistic to equate all phallic and ionic symbols in historical artwork with erotica, and it’s a shame modern scholars have to tread so lightly on this topic to avoid offending people’s sensibilities.

There's actually quite a lot of work in recent years on the imagery of Christ's wounds that does not shy away from Freudian interpretation. Start with the bibliography in Sarah Noonan's 2010 dissertation: 

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You'll also find this kind of work in studies of female mystics like Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Hildegard, et al.

On the lack of Christian imagery, I'm not sure if it is that exceptional. Again, bestiaries are Christian works, but they don't show it in their images (I know overtly Christian images can be added to bestiaries, but the series of beasts appears as an encyclopedia). Similarly, if I showed you just the images of an Ovide Moralisé and told you "this is a deeply Christian work", you would probably call me crazy.

There is a difference between such works and the VM, which is that beasts and ancient tales are lifted up by imposing Christian meaning on them, while the field of medicine is already respectable to begin with. So I can imagine that the VM is about how much these two fields are alike. Still, even Baresch still called medicine subordinate to the salvation of souls, so despite my intuition it may still be the case that the VM tries to elevate medicine by linking it to Christian morale, just like the bestiary tries to elevate beasts' imagined behavior to a reflection of God's plan.

The question remains why the VM is so extreme in obscuring Christian symbolism. Not only does it lack any sign of devotion, it hardly seems to acknowledge the existence of medieval Europe's dominant culture. So is this not a question for everyone, not matter what their theory is? There are three categories of answers I can think of:

1) The nymphs are people of flesh and blood doing real, practical things related to a trade. (See Livre de Chasse, books about warfare, or those books of trades). In my opinion, this is impossible to defend given the symbolic appearance of the figures.
2) The manuscript is "foreign" and thus unaware of or indifferent towards the dominant culture in Europe. I used to be convinced of this, but I have found it increasingly hard to defend. On the one hand, there are indications of awareness of the dominant culture (Zodiac figures etc) and on the other hand, perhaps especially, there are no strong indications of another culture. The MS seems to dodge cultural giveaways rather than adopt a certain set.
3) This is what I believe now: the absence of overt Christian symbols is intentional, it's part of the game. We are, after all, dealing with a cipher manuscript, so there may have been some intellectual satisfaction derived from the act of obscuring. If you want to create a visual metaphor of "the cleansing and salvation of the body" for "the cleansing and salvation of the soul", then I can imaging this metaphor is extra successful if it uses only imagery from the field of medicine.

In my enthusiasm to address the first point, I forgot about the second. As Lisa says, the scholarship is recent, and it is in these recent works that I read about how (before) the subject was avoided. But now there is a lot to read about.  (Though I would advise some caution with some of the less reputable sources). I would see the wound as the origin especially of Ecclesia, who is actually being delivered with God as the midwife. The logical consequence is that the wound is like female genitals.

Part of medieval religious symbolism.

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Just like droplets can be used as symbols - the nebuly line and all the rest of it.

The point is well taken, that a book about religion (or whatever) should clearly be about religion. Not one where religious content is nearly absent and difficult to discover. That being said, investigation has found additional examples, other potentially religious interpretations.

The VMs uses heraldry, but it is not about heraldry. The VMs uses medieval science - botany, astronomy. The VMs uses Classical mythology. The VMs uses history and tradition. All this through various illustrations and their interpretations, but what is it about? 

If there is a unifying purpose to the VMs, that requires language. However, nothing has yet provided access to VMs linguistics. Is it possible for the illustrated, pictorial part of the VMs to inform the investigation of language?

The Genoese Gambit poses the question: Does the reader know the historical and heraldic details in the origin of the tradition of the cardinal's red galero? Do the relevant figures of White Aries demonstrate and validate a specific text connection? It is clear that there are paired markers in the text bands.

With regards to the winds as trumpets comparison, it is worth noticing that the design of "pipes above star fields" appears again in the 28 pipes around a circle on  f69v, at the beginning of the astrological section. They aren't in groups of 5, however.
But a number of the labels in both cases are very similar.