The Voynich Ninja

Wars, fires, floods, warm/humid environments do not care about the value (true or perceived) of manuscripts...

(02-01-2025, 11:06 AM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As Lisa says in that post, VMS is a heroic and surprising survivor, as it defies the logic of social-, artistic- and scientific value, at least.
Was the survival of our hero planned and intentional - choosing parchment, building a network of sponsors, owners and supporters through the history, or just a coincidence.

Our whole discussion presupposes the existence of the Voynich manuscript and therefore it must have survived or we wouldn't be talking about it. So, its survival may be a complete fluke. Who knows what other interesting historical artifacts have been lost without a trace.

(02-01-2025, 12:37 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Wars, fires, floods, warm/humid environments do not care about the value (true or perceived) of manuscripts...

But some manuscripts may have been simply discarded by their owners or not cared for and left to rot.

The 1447 fire in the Milan castle and the 1483 fire in the Doge's palace in Venice seem to be big reasons why so few records of early 15th century Italian ciphers survive.

(02-01-2025, 08:23 AM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is estimated that scientific manuscripts like herbals, medicine, and other natural sciences, but also alchemy, had a moderate chance of surviving. They were valuable for learning and passed around among scholars and healers. Their survival rate is better than letters, manuals and stories.but less than religious matter. So while 10% is general estimate, class survival rates can differ quite a bit.

Sound plausible!  IIRC, part of John Dee's reports of conversations with "angels" (through a crystal ball, mediated by Edward Kelley) were used by the finder's cook to start the fire in the stove.

I once stumbled upon an essay on a medieval book by mathematician Nicole Oresme, of which at least 7 copies survived and are now in premier libraries: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Some of the copies have straight lines, even and clear handwriting, ornate capitals, etc; I suppose they were made for rich customers or for sale.  But the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is interesting because it was apparently made or paid by a scholar or student for their personal use.  Like the VMS, the lines are tilted and crooked, the writing is uneven and sometimes unreadable, etc. -- yet the scribe marked out the first line of each paragraph by using a larger and distinctive "font" for the entire line.

Also, when sight-seeing in Prague I made a brief visit to the Strahov monastery.  Tourists could only You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  I was told that most of the bools there were still not cataloged.  A catalog of the library had been in the workd for years, but it got only a small fraction per year...

Also, I learned from the net that the Vatican Library had an absurd number of books, and the shelves were measured in kilometers.  IIRC, most was still not cataloged.

Also, I learned that the Sapienza university in Rome has a large collection of old books and manuscripts, but its not cataloged and there seems to be no catalog in the works.  That library was open to visiting scholars only a few hours a week.  I tried to contact the Prof in charge of it, but got no reply.  I fancy that Georg Bareš's grade reports may be in there somewhere...

And finally, I wonder sometimes that more books  may have been written before the printing press than after it.  Because someone who needed a book would often borrow it and copy it himself, or hire some scribe just for that copy; and then he would often skip parts that he did not need, change some parts he did not agree with, interpolate material from other sources, etc.  And many people chose to create their own book of observations or elucubrations -- rather than buy someone else's as we do today.  Whatever the VMS is, if its Author lived today, he probably would not have bothered to write that book...

Lost lovers and heroes: 90% of medieval manuscripts have not survived

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It is probably necessary to differentiate between medieval manuscript genres and the according percentage.

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(02-01-2025, 12:42 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(02-01-2025, 11:06 AM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As Lisa says in that post, VMS is a heroic and surprising survivor, as it defies the logic of social-, artistic- and scientific value, at least.
Was the survival of our hero planned and intentional - choosing parchment, building a network of sponsors, owners and supporters through the history, or just a coincidence.

Our whole discussion presupposes the existence of the Voynich manuscript and therefore it must have survived or we wouldn't be talking about it. So, its survival may be a complete fluke. Who knows what other interesting historical artifacts have been lost without a trace.

Consider the Antikythera mechanism. It's highly unlikely it was the first or only device of its kind -- it's just the only one that survived (albeit in highly corroded pieces, and ironically thanks to it being on a ship that sank).

Here in East Asia and in China, there are very precise records for book collections sponsored and compiled by royal courts from different dynasties, and they had known dates and index pages and that showed how many were lost.

One of the first "類書" collections of books in different categories (類) from the Ming Dynasty is "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view." compiled in 1408 (although translated as Encyclopedia, but they are actually not, since they were collections/copies from sources as a whole, not reedited, and in their original format as a collection in the "royal library" they would contain 底本 the source materials). And out of the original 10k+ volumes, less than 400 survived (less than 3.5%) to this day.

We even know how many were lost in different eras. The next royal book collection You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. started in the next dynasty, Qing Dynasty, in 1773 (finished in 1782), they actually did a survey for the previous collection from 1408, and found that at the time (after 370 years), more than 10% of the collection was lost, and nearly 80% of the source materials (底本) associated with them were lost. 

As for the 1782 collection, just over 100+ years later in 1893, they did another survey and found more than 2/3 or the original materials were lost already. Forward another 100+ years to today, more than 2/3 of the remaining 1/3 were lost again. (like only about 10% remained in 250 years)
I seriously believe we've lost a lot more than we thought.