The Voynich Ninja

(15-01-2025, 08:39 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What should be the default assumption for a medieval work? Most of the imagery comes from somewhere . It's exactly the details that change. Even a hunter's bow becoming a crossbow is considered a change in fashion rather than type.

The default assumption for a manuscript that has been widely known to the public for 100+ years and has been reviewed by numerous scholars with knowledge of medieval works, but has no direct relations to other manuscripts identified so far, is that it has no clear direct relation to other manuscripts. I suppose, this is precisely why you are hunting for parallels, and why finding a clear parallel would be so valuable - because none so far have been found.

(15-01-2025, 08:39 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just compare the two doctor illustrations in the remaining manuscripts of this tradition (Berlin and Karlsruhe). Would they be placed on the same family tree by your standards?

Given the images below (Berlin/Karlsruhe/VMS, if I'm reading the notes in the thread correctly), I wouldn't say Berlin and Karlsruhe are related based on the image of the doctor alone, because the only things that are similar there are the basic shape of the container, clothes and part of the posture. However, if we include the image of the lady with the rosary into the consideration, then it becomes very probable that the images are indeed related: same type of the cane, same grip used on the cane (an unnatural one, by the way) and almost the same way of holding the rosary, similar headgear.

[attachment=9810]

As far as I can see, there is not a single clear unambiguous detail that would perfectly match between the other manuscripts and VMS.

If we want details to match, nothing will work. Apart from the Zodiac series, not a single attribute in the MS has been understood unambiguously. That's why this sequence is so valuable. But if we get hung up on things like the height of the flower or the diameter of the vial's opening, this picture is lost.

The fact that the figure with the vial was not recognized as a doctor before is to blame on the invention of the stethoscope. Before this, urine inspection was the most commonly used way to draw a "generic" physician (i.e. apart from specific procedures).

(16-01-2025, 07:44 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The fact that the figure with the vial was not recognized as a doctor before is to blame on the invention of the stethoscope. Before this, urine inspection was the most commonly used way to draw a "generic" physician (i.e. apart from specific procedures).

Actually, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

It is a very valuable attempt of identifying this sequence. The idea of the figure at 3 o'clock being a doctor is interesting and the explanation is plausible. As I said before, I'm not arguing that it's definitely something else, it's quite possible that the sequence in the VMS is a variation of the other sequences shown in this thread. 

But for me personally to treat this not as a possibility, but as the most likely identification, it would take at least one example that matches some specific attributes of VMS at least in one image (like the lady with the rosary in Berlin/Karlsruhe above) or matches the whole composition well enough.

I'm not trying to diminish the importance of your find, this is potentially a very important discovery. But as I see it, as of now it is still lacking some specific connection between the VMS imagery and the other manuscripts.

(16-01-2025, 08:11 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Actually, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Excellent! I completely forgot about that. This means that the three figures with attributes were already recognized before: VViews posted a person with staff and rosary and Matthias the doctor. I just happened to find them in a sequence. And you showed that the pointing figure may be in the right place as well.

In all likelihood, the sequence in a hypothesized source manuscript was like this:

1. pointing scholar introduces section about seasons etc
   
2. three figures with flowers stand for the first three seasons
   
3. a person with stick and rosary stands for winter
   
4. a doctor with a vial introduces the "humors" section
   

This would mean that the figures with flowers became compressed into one somehow. One explanation would be that the VM artist wanted 4 markedly different figures. Another could be that the source manuscript only had a drawing of one of the flower figures.

(13-01-2025, 09:22 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For what it's worth, another model trained on ink (the results of which I've been planning to add to my site for a while...) shows some ink line on the forehead of "the doctor", suggestive of some headgear.

The line on the forehead of "the doctor" might have been like the one on the forehead of the figure on the right side of the next page (f86v4). Barely visible, like the veil on Mona Lisa's hair.

[attachment=9815][attachment=9816]

[attachment=9817][attachment=9818]

(16-01-2025, 03:30 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(13-01-2025, 09:22 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For what it's worth, another model trained on ink (the results of which I've been planning to add to my site for a while...) shows some ink line on the forehead of "the doctor", suggestive of some headgear.

The line on the forehead of "the doctor" might have been like the one on the forehead of the figure on the right side of the next page (f86v4). Barely visible, like the veil on Mona Lisa's hair.

The character on the right has some kind of optical device tied to his head with a rope. Possibly glasses.

(08-01-2025, 11:32 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Let's see if we can increase that to a 2/10

Let's start with the old woman. I didn't see it either at first, but she is hunched. There's an optical illusion where her elbow and the rosary (?) appear to create an additional part of her dress. I colored the sky in the image below to make it clearer.



The differences are there, but the idea is the same and the execution of the idea is similar enough to say that they likely belong to the same tradition. Differences include:

• The style of the cane. No issue there: attributes are part of fashion and can be updated or adjusted to local familiarity.
  
• The color of the lips. The Rosettes sheet has no access to red paint, and you see them struggle here. They tried blue for the lips here but it looks weird. 
  
• Pose of the elbow and the other arm. That's different indeed. I'm not saying the VM copied from this exact MS. Also, VM and limbs....
  
• The circular attribute is weird in the VM. It's like a bunch of overlapping circles. I suspect that if the actual source is ever found, it will show us how the VM ended up with something like that.
  

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In the text we can read ..."a noble woman dressed for church.."  Thats why it is most likely a rosary.

Hi monisusa, 
We have a rule on the forum that theories for translation should be discussed in a separate thread. If everyone posts their translations in unrelated threads, the forum becomes hard to manage. Please feel free to discuss your method in a separate thread.

(16-01-2025, 09:13 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-01-2025, 08:11 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Actually, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Excellent! I completely forgot about that. This means that the three figures with attributes were already recognized before: VViews posted a person with staff and rosary and Matthias the doctor. I just happened to find them in a sequence. And you showed that the pointing figure may be in the right place as well.

In all likelihood, the sequence in a hypothesized source manuscript was like this:

1. pointing scholar introduces section about seasons etc
   
2. three figures with flowers stand for the first three seasons
   
3. a person with stick and rosary stands for winter
   
4. a doctor with a vial introduces the "humors" section
   

Hi Koen,
I totally agree: the fact that the passage you found validates previous hypotheses is highly significant.

Personally, the Karlsruhe ms you originally posted is still my favourite, because:

    1. The relevant section of the Regimen is complete (this is the main reason). Of the illustrated copies, it's the one stylistically closer to the Voynich ms, but this is almost irrelevant.
    2. I prefer Karlsruhe over Augusburg because it's a manuscript, it's a few decades earlier and it's a hausbuch (as you said in Post #1): in addition to the Regimen, it includes other texts. As we often discussed about other hausbuchs, these different sections could be comparable with the Voynich manuscript. E.g. there's the fascinating You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you mentioned before, a page with a couple of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (stars with tails, stelle cum caudis), treaties about astrological medicine (Iatromathematisches Corpus).
     
I agree that the different copies of Laufenberg's Regimen make it possible to get a reasonable idea of the lost original, but a single well-preserved source is more valuable to me. Any reconstruction is debatable and uncertain, in particular if it is partially based on the ideas of amateurs like myself.

I would also like to make clear my personal point of view about the value of the Karlsruhe passage. To me, it is vital that the parallel is a single sequence from a well-preserved source. The four pages you pointed out (90r-91v) match a number of ideas that were discussed in the past, sometimes for decades:

    • The passage discusses the four seasons, describing and illustrating them as the four ages of life. Both themes are regarded as relevant for Voynich f85r2 at least since D'Imperio, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 1978. The four ages were also proposed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (2019) and in the comments to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1998, by Stolfi and Zandbergen, I think); in 2014, I discussed the four seasons on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.; but I am sure these ideas were mentioned, sometimes independently, by several other researchers.
    • The passage opens with a figure pointing left, representing Spring (the pointing gesture of the Voynich North figure is very common; I guess it has been noted by more or less everybody who looked at the image).
    • It then shows Summer as another figure holding a flower (voynich.nu identifies the attribute of the West figure as a flower).
    • It then shows Autumn as a figure who leans forward (D'Imperio describes the South figure as "bent forward") holding a cane or staff (identified by D'Imperio and voynich.nu for the South figure) and a rosary. The looped object in the left hand of South is puzzling. voynich.nu describes it as a chain, but I am not aware of similar medieval illustrations of chains. The object has an uneven contour that must be explained. I think You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was an attempt in this direction. Of course, until now, we did not know that a bent forward figure with cane and rosary was documented as a personification of old age.
    • After the single illustration for Winter, there's a figure wearing a skullcap (as identified in voynich.nu for East) and holding a container: a physician performing You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for the East figure in 2017.

The Karlsruhe manuscript (like other copies) clearly mentions a 1429 original. The Voynich parchment was carbon dated to 1404-1438.

I will add that, in my 2014 post on Stephen's site, I proposed to read the seasons like this:

Marco 2014 Wrote:Spring at the top, with Summer, Autumn and Winter following counter-clock wise.

This matches the seasons in the Karlsruhe manuscript. Once you recognize that the illustration is related with the Seasons, the figure with the flower is either Spring or Summer and the figure with walking stick is either Autumn or Winter, there are only two possible combinations (assuming the sequence is arranged sequentially along the circle):

• counter-clockwise: North/Pointing: Spring; West/Flower: Summer; South/Staff: Autumn; East/globular object: Winter (the ordering I assumed in 2014);
  
• clockwise: West/Flower: Spring; North/Pointing: Summer; East/globular object: Autumn; South/Staff: Winter (the ordering you mention in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
  

So, the "seasons" interpretation allowed to correctly predict the arrangement you now found in the Karlsruhe ms. This may not be a big deal, but possibly it is not irrelevant. Anyway, the Berlin and Augsburg copies of the Regimen have the figure with the rosary as Winter, so I don't think we can entirely dismiss the clockwise ordering.

In that 2014 post, I wrote that West holds a wheat spike, which is sometimes seen as an attribute of Summer. Based on Laufenberg, I now think that voynich.nu is correct and the attribute was meant to represent a flower. Let's say the figure holds a plant attribute.

I was puzzled about the looped-object of South:

Marco 2014 Wrote:The figure at the bottom should be Autumn (but his/her attributes, a staff and a rope? are not clear to me)

The totally unexpected rosary is a perfect answer to my curiosity.

For East, I went for an idea that now I consider far-fetched (but who knows?):

Marco 2014 Wrote:The figure on the right (holding a spherical artifact) is Winter, holding a spherical hand warmer.

The Karlsruhe sequence tells us how a figure holding a globular object could be appended to illustrations of the seasons/ages. But the Voynich object is different, it's "topped by a short spike" (voynich.nu), so in this case there is still a puzzle. Does the figure represent a physician (why was the container altered?), or was it merely inspired by the physician? Does the figure correspond to Winter (how does the allegory work here?), or was Laufenberg's sequence re-used for something different? It's clear that the Voynich illustration is unique; its meaning could also be unique and possibly we will only fully understand it if and when we can read the text.

[attachment=9822]

Pointing or holding a flower are common poses in medieval manuscripts. "Holding a globular object" is less frequent (though this occurs in many variants, with various objects). Leaning forward with cane and "looped object" is decidedly rare. I believe that so many parallels from a single four-pages passage are highly significant. Fish, sheep, cattle and a couple of people are all frequent subjects, but when they appear consecutively in a single source they have a different meaning than when they are scattered across a set of random pages possibly from different manuscripts.

Carbon dating aside, the ideas mentioned above may well be wrong (and other options have been proposed, for at least some of them): it's not a flower but an ear of wheat (this actually wouldn't make much difference), it's not a rosary but a chain, it's not a cane but a ?, there is no skullcap, the container is different hence East cannot be derived from uroscopy, the diagram is unrelated with the ages of man or the seasons but illustrates (say) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Everything is possible. Obviously, everyone evaluates the different options and the available evidence and decides what makes the most sense for them. Personally, I am convinced by how the sequence “clicks” with previous theories and how it sheds light on some details we couldn’t understand before.