If you are in or near Toronto, you may be interested in this lecture I'll be giving at the University of Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies on Friday 26 September: You are not allowed to view links.
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I'll be presenting new evidence for the original sequence of bifolia in the VM. I'm told the lecture will be streamed and recorded.
Hello, Lisa,
welcome to Toronto. I am looking forward to meeting you in person and hopefully be able to briefly share with how my multidisciplinary research on Voynich Manuscript relates to your work.
Cvetka
Just adding, for anyone who hasn't noticed yet, that you can register to attend via Zoom.
Hi, everyone,
Don't forget to register for my upcoming hybrid lecture on Friday, Sept. 26, at 2:30 PM Eastern! Colin Layfield and I have been working on new data analytics for nearly a year, and the results are quite interesting. Trust me...I have important and new results about the original structure of the manuscript that you are going to want to hear!
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- Lisa
Will a video of the lecture be available?
(23-09-2025, 10:49 AM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Will a video of the lecture be available?
Yes, it will be recorded and posted by the University of Toronto. I'll post the link here when it's available.
Great lecture, thanks! The argument that the manuscript is basically a loose collection of papers that somehow ended up in traditional binding seems convincing to me. However, I am not quite sure what to make of the West African analogy and the theory of a teaching environment using this kind of setup.
On one hand, if this had been an established teaching method in Europe, would we not have some evidence of it, such as other manuscripts? Would the materials be used in such an environment? Without clear evidence for a connection to teaching, use of single sheets could also reasonably be explained by a medicinal or alchemical context where one wants to be able to take out the one sheet that is relevant to the task at hand.
On the other hand, a teaching background works well as a possible explanation for some of the manuscript's other features such as the different hands compiling it and maybe even the non-identifiable plants, because the contents may not have mattered too much if the purpose is an exercise or examination in a language/cipher/code.
Thanks for coming! For those who weren't there - Colin Layfield and I are making a strong case that the VM wasn't intended to be bound at all, but was originally a pile of stacked bifolia, not nested. The argument is supported by data and material evidence, and resolves the problem of illustrations crossing gutters and also the problem of quires in which scribal work varies by bifolia. I won't repeat the argument here, but I'll post the link to the lecture once it's available. The West African example is just to show that such objects exist(ed). In fact, a manuscript that was just a loose pile of bifolia would be very unlikely to survive...I would expect such survivals to be quite small in number. We should all be grateful that someone (likely in the late 15th century) decided to nest the bifolia and bind them in quires between wooden boards, or the VMS probably wouldn't have survived!
I can also tell you all that Yale recently conducted x-ray flourescence analysis on f.1r, and the results suggest 1) that the reagent Voynich used to reveal the Tinapius signature was likely "liver of sulfur," a very common early 20th-c. compound used for this purpose, and 2) the Marci annotations in the outer margin are zinc-gall, not oak-gall (no iron signature), which is perfectly consistent with the 17th-c. date of those notes. The Yale team is working on a formal report about their results, which will made public as soon as it's available (I don't know when that will be).
I'd rather not answer questions here from those of you who didn't watch the lecture - please hold onto your questions until the recording is available. Colin and I have a lengthy article on our analytics currently under peer review, but that, too, will explain all! Once it's published, we will also make our data and code available in a GitHub respository for all to use.
A wonderful talk, Lisa. If anything, you didn't hype it up enough
I found myself nodding in agreement most of the time. The idea that the Voynich is more "bifolio based" than it should be is one several people have voiced before, including myself. But to actually argue with evidence that they were never intended to be nested in the first place, that's paradigm shifting. I like it. It also explains why they were so nonchalant with differently sized sheets.
It's interesting to imagine that at some point, someone must have gathered all the Voynichese content available in that environment and decided to put it together in a codex that was, perhaps, never meant to be.
One counterargument I can think of is that the pages, apart from the foldouts, are still layed out as of they should go in a codex, with 4 pages per bifolio. I guess it's more convenient to fold bifolia in half, even when they are loose leaflets.
Ok, people, here's my Univ. of Toronto Medieval Studies lecture! I've got BIG NEWS to report about the potential original structure of the manuscript. Check it out! (new material starts around minute 14) You are not allowed to view links.
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