The Voynich Ninja

Are there any extant catalogues for his museum out there?

I found the following writing about the "Musaeum Kircherianum":

Musaeum Kircherianum sive Musaeum a p. Athanasio Kirchero in Collegio Romano Societatis Jesu jam pridem incoeptum nuper restitutum, auctum, descriptum, & iconibus illustratum ... a p. Philippo Bonanni Societatis Jesu

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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it is described as "The Rare Catalogue of the Great Kircher Museum".

(15-01-2023, 02:34 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are there any extant catalogues for his museum out there?

Quite a few. The one mentioned by bi3mw is the best known, and made during Kircher's lifetime, but it is relatively short. You may find some further information here:
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(13-01-2023, 02:28 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.* The most likely candidate acquisition he found was one for 600 florins, which would have been if I understand correctly about 333 ducats. This purchase was for a barrel of rare books:

Yes, but I believe that the information that was transmitted orally was 600 gold coins, which a misunderstanding of florin and ducats a couple of generations later.

Quote:Note on Guzy's translation: "a couple of" in English has the connotation of a small amount. I am not sure if this is present in the German "allerlai", which to me feels more like "all manner of", implying a large variety. 

German is my mother tongue and I am quite familiar with the early modern German, as I edited a book on a 16th century's manuscript. 'Allerlei" (in difference to "alle" (all) as written today means just a small variety of things, with a focus on the uncertainty of the number. My estimate for the "small barrel" would be roughly 10 codices.

Quote:Either the details from the Marci letter are correct, and the emperor really spent three times the Imperial library's annual acquisition budget on a single manuscript. In this case, records of this highly unusual purchase have not yet been found.

The acquisition budget of the library was pretty small compared to other art acquisitions Rudolf made, e.g. gemstones, for which he easily paid up tenthousands of florins. 

As the number of pages of the study was strictly limited I couldn't add my appendix of all book acquisitions I've found, but yes, 600 fl. would be just too much for a single manuscript. But for a small lot of precious books it seems reasonable.

(13-01-2023, 06:23 PM)degaskell Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Various nations (including the HRE) issued ducats containing ~3.5g of gold, but the exchange rate of silver to gold fluctuated over time, so doing the actual conversion from thaler to gulden to ducats is not straightforward. (I'll defer to Guzy's expertise here.)

Yes, conversion rates varied A LOT in the 16th century, but the intriguing thing was my discovery of some kind of several payment information where Carl Widemann was mentioned to have received the 500 thaler for the books in florin, in this case 600.

Due to limitations of space I wasn't able to include a picture of one of the account books in my paper, but here it is:

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(16-01-2023, 08:44 AM)stegu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.600 fl. would be just too much for a single manuscript. But for a small lot of precious books it seems reasonable.

Thank you for the clarification. 
Might we even say that "600 gold coins" is too much for a single manuscript, regardless of the exact type of coin they intended?

These questions are relevant because they impact the way we imagine the Rudolf transaction taking place. Right now, there was this image of an enigmatic person offering the manuscript to Rudolf as a separate artefact. The emperor was then so impressed by the manuscript, that he spent much more on it than in any other of his manuscript purchases you were able to find. This includes single manuscripts, as wel as per-manuscript prices for batch purchases. And even for a set of books, 600 ducats would have been a lot. So if we take Marci's letter literally, it would mean that the Voynich was Rudolf's most expensive manuscript by far, but it was not recorded nor generally known.

If we want to stick to the relatively specific "600" amount, the alternative you found is that it was part of a batch. This changes the way we perceive the transaction. For all we know it was at the bottom of the barrel and Rudolf never even saw it, and it eventually ended up in the periphery of the court.


Regarding "allerlai", my point is that this word itself does not indicate whether it is a small or large amount. It just indicates variation, but it might be ten things or ten thousand things. The English "a couple" does suggest a small amount.

"A couple" is too small in English to cover ten books.

To come back to this.
Basically the translations for "allerlai" are correct. Important is also the word "zeltsam" = strange / strange not rare.
One could also write " most diverse books of strange kind."
They are not normal books, they are just strange.
How many did he find? I do not think that there were many.

That's weird, in Dutch "zeldzaam" does mean rare, without the notion of strange.

Of course these two meanings are interconnected, because for something to be strange it must be relatively uncommon, and something that is uncommon is also more likely to be considered strange. In Dutch, "raar" means weird, while in English "rare" means uncommon.

In modern German, seltsam means weird. But it used to have the meaning of "Selten" : You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Just like in the English cognate "seldom", there used to be a component of infrequency. .

Since manuscripts in this context are more likely to be described as rare, I think the translation is correct. The translation of "allerlai" as a couple is wrong though, since a couple in English is understood as two or three or four.. while he estimates the number at around ten. More importantly, allerlei implies diversity, not amount.

(21-01-2023, 11:07 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.a couple in English is understood as two or three or four..

In English a couple means two. However it is often used loosely to include three or four. Anything more than four I would have thought stretches the word beyond its limits.