The Voynich Ninja

The etymology of 'beguine' is unclear, but apparently it ultimately has something to do with a French word for stuttering, stammering. What I didn't know is that the male order (who imitated the original female beguines) deteriorated and quickly got negative associations attached to them. Apparently the English word 'beg' - ask for money - is derived from the male order.

(11-08-2022, 07:58 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are the ring and cross the attributes of Colette of Corbie?

Her standard attributes in Christian iconography are a well and a chicken.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

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Hi, Koen, is it possible that there was a relationship between the Bogomil (Cathari, Patareni) women being persecuted would re-surface as a Catholic religious sect. I studied the Bogomils for an article I wrote a couple of years ago, and I learned that Bogomil women were founding schools and hospitals and lived in comunes. They were originally  iconoclasts and their interpreted the bible symbolically. 
There are several towns and villages in the present day Slovenia called Begunje, one of the main one being near Bled, which in the 15th century was in the possession of the Bishop of Brixen. 
In Slovenian, beg means 'running away from danger'.
One more thing, the medieval spirituality in Slovenia in the 15th century was greatly influenced by Via Moderna and German mysics, such as Nicholas of Cusa and Henry Susa.
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Nicholas of Cusa was Bishop of Brixen. So he was bishop of Bled and other Slovenian areas for a time. There was the opportunity for his influence to be direct and substantial. On this point, I find the cosmology in the Voynich to be well-described as 'Cusean' and so I detect the influence of Nicholas. But his influence was widespread and may have proceeded his appointment to the region.

nablator,

Very interesting, when was the iconography put in place? During her lifetime? Probably not. Probably either with beatification or canonization.

'Attributes' was my word. Technically it appears to be the wrong word. Nevertheless, the ring and the cross are significant items in her biography, and they would function as indicators of her identity for those familiar with the relevant information, prior to the formal iconographic attributes being assigned.

Is there any better, alternative interpretation where a ring and a cross are both relevant?

I recently wrote a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that touches upon this theme a lot. Actually, I don't give an answer to the question of the topic, but express some thoughts about why Quire 13 looks like it is, i. e. depicting nude female figures in liquids. Partly, I already wrote about this, so it is rather a continuation. 
I invite all interested.

(10-08-2022, 09:49 PM)pauls_3d_things Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Has anyone compared the VMS drawings with the texts of Hildegard von Bingen?

More and more I am looking into Hildegard of Bingen, the more I see the connection between Lingua Ignota as a predecessor of the Voynichese. The author might not be her, but somebody who wrote the MS408 in the spirit of Hildegarde (some kind of successor who continued her work).

That would indeed explain the high-german (if so) at the end of the manuscript. Let’s assume a monk, long (200+ years) time after she died, found her scribblings, trying to put those into order. You would not want to translate that into pure latin as some of hers ideas were not orthodox or she put too much effort into hiding it. No, if you understand the text, you would try to continue, invent and try to hide the knowledge even more so only you would understand what a Saint person wrote. The Bingen monastery was destroyed in 1632, so the key could be lost..

The MS408 cosmos would indeed fit into hers, maybe a bit “colored” by somebody who didn’t had a visions like her. Also, she was illiterate like our author could be… 

I am going to write something about that in a matter of weeks. Still trying to clear some connections.

(17-10-2022, 10:40 PM)Ranceps Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(10-08-2022, 09:49 PM)pauls_3d_things Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Has anyone compared the VMS drawings with the texts of Hildegard von Bingen?

More and more I am looking into Hildegard of Bingen, the more I see the connection between Lingua Ignota as a predecessor of the Voynichese. The author might not be her, but somebody who wrote the MS408 in the spirit of Hildegarde (some kind of successor who continued her work).

That would indeed explain the high-german (if so) at the end of the manuscript. Let’s assume a monk, long (200+ years) time after she died, found her scribblings, trying to put those into order. You would not want to translate that into pure latin as some of hers ideas were not orthodox or she put too much effort into hiding it. No, if you understand the text, you would try to continue, invent and try to hide the knowledge even more so only you would understand what a Saint person wrote. The Bingen monastery was destroyed in 1632, so the key could be lost..

The MS408 cosmos would indeed fit into hers, maybe a bit “colored” by somebody who didn’t had a visions like her. Also, she was illiterate like our author could be… 

I am going to write something about that in a matter of weeks. Still trying to clear some connections.

I have a scenario, Ranceps, in which the manuscript concerns the Ladin herbal tradition in the Dolomites, specifically the Val Badia, which region and people were overseen by Benedictine sisters of the Hildegard tradition. I have given some time to considering that context and Voynichese having Hildegard's language as the precedent. I blogged about it You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

So I can provide a context for that possibility. My further thought is that Hildegard's language was essentially grammarless and just a lexicon. On some analysis, this might also characterise Voynichese. Yet the Voynich language seems systematic and 'entangled' in a way that Hildegard's language is not. But, in general, the Benedictine tradition leaves open the possibility of invented or 'inspired' tongues.

A nice find on the topic of female scribes in general :

Quote:The Medieval Magazine, Number 36, October 5, 2015

[attachment=7397]

A female scribe and male artist present their book to the Virgin Mary in this medieval manuscript, called the Guta-Sintram Codex (c. 1154). The Codex supports Fiona Griffiths’ finding that men and women collaborated during this period of history.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , folio 3v

It is hard to say whether such obvious collaboration also took place in the 15th century.

Quote:Women and Reform in the Central Middle Ages
Fiona J. Griffiths
The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe
Edited by Judith Bennett and Ruth Karras
Print Publication Date: Aug 2013
Online Publication Date: Mar 2013

.... As Alison Beach [1] has shown, female scribes and artists were active in the production of books, sometimes alongside male collaborators, and extant catalogues record the richness of women’s library holdings; as we have seen, some women were also active in the composition of their own texts, producing visionary texts, biographies, letters, commentaries, and even sermons.....

[1] Beach, Alison I.. Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria, Series: Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology, vol. 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 198.

Saw the new post today on this older thread and it piqued my interest because one of the questions I hope to eventually answer is whether or not the VM might have been written by a woman. I'm at the very beginning of my hobbyist research into the origin and history of the VM but one of my current leanings is that it was written by a Late Medieval or Early Renaissance polymath or alchemist or apothecary.

One possible female alchemist worth noting, if not considering as a possible VM source, is Catarina Sforza, 1463-1509, whose Gli Expermenti contained 454 recipes, mostly medicinal, some cosmetic and some alchemical. She bequeathed this manuscript to her son, Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, who allowed Lucantonio Cuppano, in 1525, to copy the recipes from the manuscript. This transcription was purchased by Pier Desiderio Pasolini in 1887, who in turn had it transcribed and 102 copies published in 3 volumes. Cuppano's transcription contained encrypted passages for which he also provided a key, though it is not known whether Catarina or Cuppano authored the encryption.

Nick Pelling, who has been quoted in threads on this site, wrote a paper in 2003 proposing a connection between Catarina Sforza and the VM: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Another interesting paper, though it just covers the Gli Experimenti, not in connection with the VM, is Anna Palmieri's 2016/2017 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., written while she was studying at the University of Bologna. Possibly also of interest, Meredith K. Ray, an Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Delaware and author of Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (2015), gave a lecture on Catarina Sforza's alchemy experiments at New York University in 2015 (click You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for an article that includes a YouTube of the lecture).

While my current leanings are the VM was written by a Germanic person, probably male, and closer to the carbon dating range 1404-1438, I believe the very existence of Catarina and the Gli Experimenti point to the possibility of a female author.

Hope this is helpful, or at least interesting.

There were many universities in medicine where women were involved and even more monasteries. I don't think they were all just knitting.
Maybe women had to be careful in public, but not behind monastery walls.
The church never supported the theory of witches, but didn't do anything about it either. They were mostly religious fanatics without a mandate from the church.
I just saw an article on Terra x about witches in Europe.