The Voynich Ninja

(10-10-2025, 12:11 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[Sorry if this has been noted before, but I scanned all 109 pages of posts on this thread and could not find it.]

There is a huge water stain on 116v, spanning the whole page from top to bottom. It is visible (only?) in the 365 nm UV images of the multispectral scan set, like MB365UV_007_F:



The (A) lines are the stain boundary.  Near thet top of the page the boundary is confusing but the stain may span most of the page's width.

There seems to be another boundary (B) in that area.  Could it be that someone rubbed chemicals over the "michiton" text too?

All the best, --jorge

This is really interesting. Never seen anybody mention that stain before. How can you tell it's water and not some other kind of liquid?

(10-10-2025, 01:28 PM)Yavernoxia Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How can you tell it's water and not some other kind of liquid?

I can't, really... but any other liquid would probably leave a more visible residue. (Except perhaps "acqua vitae", which I gather was one of the Alchemists favorite experiments...) 

Water would just push out any dirt and loose ink from the page to the edges of the stain, but then evaporate without leaving any residue.

Rain is also a likely source for the liquid.  But of course not the only one.  (For instance, there is a set of greenish stains at the top of many folios that may have been caused by the water where the Painter cleaned his brush. And there is the "coffee" stain on f93r.)

All the best, --jorge

Quote:And there is the "coffee" stain on f93r.

Coffee first became popular in Europe in the XVII century, starting first in the big Italian maritime trade cities, so if it is coffee, it can’t have been put there by the original people involved with the MS’s creation and use. Nobody’s going to pay McCrone Associates to test that spot to see if it’s actually coffee (or what it is), because that’s not likely to yield key information to solving the mystery. Although you never know. Sometimes the seemingly smallest and seemingly irrelevant details picked up while solving a mystery, turn out to be bigger pullstrings than anyone would have thought. If the stain is coffee, that raises the possibility that during the VMS’s unaccounted-for time after being bought by Rudolf, it was accessible and was actively accessed at least once, as opposed to sitting in storage somewhere untouched and forgotten.

Was Wilfrid a big coffee drinker, to anyone’s knowledge? I find it hard to believe that a serious antique book collector would risk sullying a prized item (or any item!) he wished to sell by eating and drinking in close proximity to it. But then again his application of a chemical to Jacob à Tepenc’s ex libris on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is also not something I would’ve imagined a serious bookseller who aims to get good money for a piece would do.

(10-10-2025, 02:18 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.it can’t have been put there by the original people involved with the MS’s creation and use

Of course.  But the book has gone through many vicissitudes in the 600 years after that.  It would be amazing if it had not suffered any damage after the original Author completed his mission and went back to Vulcan through the portal depicted in the NW Rosette of f85v2.

All the best, --jorge

(10-10-2025, 02:18 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.during VMS’s unaccounted-for time after being bought by Rudolf, it was accessible and was actively accessed at least once, as opposed to sitting in storage somewhere untouched and forgotten

If the book was ever in Rudolf's hands, that was already 200 years after it was written. So, as a minimum, it must have been through four different owners before Rudolf.  

After Kircher got it, it eventually found its way to the holdings of the Collegio Romano, precursor of the Gregorian University and today's Catholic Universities worldwide.  We don't know whether it was in the Collegio's library or in a more private library accessible only to the faculty.  But the Jesuit professors definitely had access to it, and enough interest on it that they tagged it as "personal property" in 1870 in order to save it from confiscation by the new Italian State. For the next 50 years or so it was at Villa Mondragone, a former Papal palace that had been turned into a upper class high school.  We don't know who had access to it there, but according to one of Voynich's accounts he found it in a chest with dozens of other medieval manuscripts. 

The point is that none of these owners -- except perhaps Rudolf, and the sly dealer who sold him the book -- seems to have thought of it as particularly valuable.  Baresch may have been a bit obsessed with it, and Marci was intrigued enough to try to decipher it, but not much more. Compared to the precious illustrated manuscripts of the time, it is nothing -- ugly, with plain ink drawings, on bad vellum, with crooked lines and diagrams, ... Apart from the Zodiac, there is nothing in it that would connect to alchemy, theology, history, military arts, architecture, or any other European subject or meme of the time.  Even its owners must have been aware that the plants were at least half-fake.

In fact, the only reason we are aware of it today is because of a very unlikely chain of events: Baresch writing to Kircher, Marci inheriting it and sending it to Kircher, and Voynich finding Marci's letter, with Raphael's claim, still attached to it in that chest of moldy books.  If any of those links had failed, the VMS would have been destroyed, or at best would be still be buried in a chest, in some basement, somewhere in Italy...

And the point of the point is that a coffee spill is the least of the disasters that could have happened to it in those 600 years...

All the best, --jorge

There are several reasonable explanations for all kinds of fluid damage, too many really to narrow it down, at least without chemical analysis. Sure, it could be some fluid from alchemical experimentation that might indicate a use in this context. It may just as well be water damage from being stored in an unsuitable environment. For most of the Jesuit period of the manuscript, it probably wasn't a prized possession, but rather one of many books that had to be kept somewhere. The order's suppression certainly did not help the storage conditions either. Since the manuscript were apparently re-bound at that time, there was certainly opportunity to get coffee stains on it at a time where the drink was well established in Europe.
The most reasonable explanation is probably (possibly dirty?) water, as unusual elements in the fluid might have turned up in the recent work that Lisa Fagin Davis referenced in her talk. If I remember correctly, the research of the stains is mostly based on shape, different chemical compositions would have certainly helped.

There was a fire in the building complex including the Collegium Romanum in 1849.
One book acquired by Voynich, a Corvinate that is now in Budapest, has fire damage.

Several items in the Jesuit collection and at least one more acquired by Voynich (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) have visible water damage,
but it is of course not certain that this is related to fire extinction activities from that time...

This is documented in: Pócs, Dániel: Egy corvina története. Battista Spagnolli Mantanovano: Pathenice Mariana (Pontosításokkal a Pierpont Morgan Library M496 és M497 jelzetü corvináinak provenienciájához). In: arshungarica 43 vol.3, 2017, pp.301-354. (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

Here is a somewhat older Google translation of the relevant part:

Quote:Knowing the origin of the Battista Mantovano Code, it is already easy to find out when the manuscript was burned: on the top floor of the Collegium Romanum building on August 7, 1849, at eight o'clock in the morning, a small fire, presumably caused by the French troops arriving there. Even though the firefighters arrested curbed the rapidly spreading flames, the material of the Bibliotheca Maior and the Museo Kircheriano remained essentially intact, but several rooms were burnt out and serious damage was also caused in the Sant'Ignazio church. In this fire, several books and codes have been damaged, and this can be seen in some of the manuscripts in the Vatican Library, as well as archival sources that later emerged from the library material about the damage caused by the books.