The Voynich Ninja

Thank you so much for finding this reference Marco P!

I had a closer look at MS Sloane 1975.
I am now increasingly leaning towards this Voynich image depicting a medical consultation.

See 14v, which depicts a doctor and patient during a consultation for the treatment of rabies:



Also, there are several more instances in Sloane 1975 of patients being represented wearing this sort of sarong thing, either belted or more often rolled at the waist.

Eg: 91v and 92r-

 

Vviews - again very interesting images. This could explain the pose and the garb, but some important questions remain:

- Why is the doctor naked?
- Why is the patient standing in a body of water?
- Why is the patient holding a medical instrument?

Koen Gh:
Well, if this is supposedly taking place in a bathhouse or thermal spring or balneological establishment of some sort, water is to be expected.
Medical treatments such as cupping and others could be administered in such places.

As for the depiction of a nude doctor or practitioner, its more rare, but not unheard of: here's one from the influential 10th century surgical treatise, Codex Nicetas (Ms Laur Plut 74.7 c f° 198 v), showing two doctors fixing a patient's dislocated jaw. The whole MS is filled with similar nude consultations:


And here's another medieval depiction of the dogbite/rabies treatment featuring a naked doctor, although sadly I don't have a source (pinterest, tried google search as MarcoP suggested but didn't turn anything up):


As for the instrument, I am less sure of the identification: to me it could still be a compass, surgical implement, tongs, or other...
The fact that the patient is holding it could be an indication of the patient's profession, or a heraldic symbol of her family/region, or even related to the ailment from which she suffers (maybe she injured herself with it?), as is the dog in the rabies patient illustration.
But this remains speculation until a better match to the full features of this image is found.

Vviews, I'm amazed at the illustrations you manage to find. So there are naked doctors...

I agree that it still wouldn't explain everything though. So a woman pokes herself in the eye with compasses while doing some geometry and rushes to the local bathhouse for a nude consultation?

(26-03-2016, 09:53 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And here's another medieval depiction of the dogbite/rabies treatment featuring a naked doctor, although sadly I don't have a source (pinterest, tried google search as MarcoP suggested but didn't turn anything up):

Hello VViews,
this image is from Florence You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., a manuscript that was previously mentioned You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
I feel rather sure that the doctor is the dressed guy on left, curing the left leg of the naked patient that was bitten by the hydrophobic dog.

With respect to the ritual purification idea I intend to explore in this thread, parallels in medical images such as those you are proposing have the great advantage of fitting into an overall interpretation for the whole manuscript: also plants and astrology are of obvious relevance for medieval medicine. Occam is with you.

I find it helpful when considering imagery of a given time, to try and see the images, as far as possible, as if I too lived then, and knew the same sort of things the artist knew and thus used to communicate to his intended audience - presumably people of his own time. 

Language is an important consideration.  To people of medieval Europe, whose formal education was all in Latin before the western cultural revolution (as it were), the object held by that figure would surely suggest the Latin term 'chelae'.

These days we use it chiefly to describe the claws of a real crab, other crustacean or insect, though a medieval Latin might have used that term to describe a couple of the instruments which have been pictured in this thread. (i I'd have to check a fairly comprehensive dictionary of medieval Latin terms to be sure, though).

By default, "chelae' would mean the claws of a crab, and most commonly those of the astronomical crab, or the scorpion.  The medieval textbook, de Astronomia, thus reads in a recent translation:  

Huius humeros et pectus a reliquo corpore dividit circulus, qui per utrosque polos transiens tangit Arietem et Chelas. Hic quod cum Tauro et Geminis orientibus et Cancro et Leone occidit, ideo sero occidere dicitur. Qui magis erectus a pedibus pervenit ad terram, at plagius ex-oriens citius quam Chelae videtur.
 

(Marco may be kind enough to translate that into natural English)

The use of green for this salt water is an interesting cultural difference found between the eastern and the western Mediterranean.  As late as the fifteenth century, the most famous poet of Persia could still write of the "green seas of heaven" and in documentary sources, we see the distinction between blue for fresh water and green for salt water goes back to *before* the dynastic period in Egypt - so its use in the Vms is a very nice little "tell".

But anyway, in the Latin environment, the woman with that object would surely evoke reference to the astronomical chelae, or some other item known to them by the same term - medical or otherwise.

The latin quotation I gave above can be read in a paper published in 2011. It is by Wolfgang Metzger of the Wurtembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, and is entitled, 'Stars, Manuscripts and Astrolabes - the stellar constellations in a group of medieval manuscripts between Latin manuscripts and a new science of the stars'.

You can read it, print  it off, or download it as a pdf from the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) site if you like.
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Bibliocode is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 
that link takes you staight to it.

Cheers

So you think it's all about the interaction between constellations, and their position compared to the water's surface? 

By the way, "green sea" reminds me of something I read about it actually referring to particular seas - ones of specific interest to the Voynich areas. Let me find the quote.

It's from The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space by Alexis Wick. In discussing the etymology of the Red Sea, he mentions both Ancient and Arab sources:


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Koen,

Koen, yes, I collected a heap of similar references when I was researching the question of why some waters in the Vms are painted blue, but most green. I was aware of the habit's prevalence in the eastern Mediterranean, and its antiquity in Egypt, but I wasn't then sure of any connection between the Vms and those areas, or earlier times - except for that bearded sun which was an immediate indicator, as was the form for 'Leo'.

However - it seemed to me a logical first premise to suppose that if the ladies were similarly drawn in the calendar's tiers as in the 'bathy-' section, and pretty obviously deliberately made unbeautiful, even deformed in the face (though still with nice bellies, backs and armpits) then they were personifications - abstractions like the figure of 'Justice' - not meant literally. And since those in the calendar section were evidently meant for stars, then why wouldn't the same apply elsewhere? 

Since medieval Europe, like the old Egyptians, used a formal custom of denoting identity and character by providing figures each with a particular token (these are known as emblemata), so what would happen if I checked if each of the figure's little tokens had some counterpart that made sense in terms of astronomical lore - without bias towards any one tradition, neither Greek nor Latin, nor Persian, nor Indian etc. 

Well, it proved slightly less simple than that, but in general that seemed to be the idea, and with a bit more work I was able to get a pretty clear idea of the system, even if some of the details' explanation appears impossible now to retrieve: lost to history.

But I don't want to be soap-boxy about this. I've written about it elsewhere anyway, and I might also be mistaken.

I'm surprised nobody has yet suggested that the object, held in the hand of the nymph who gets her head or eye "treated", could be her diadem.

(27-03-2016, 07:44 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm surprised nobody has yet suggested that the object, held in the hand of the nymph who gets her head or eye "treated", could be her diadem.

Hello Rene,
I had not though of it, but that would be a very simple explanation!

Another possibility could maybe be that she is holding a round cup (like this from Brussels Bibliothèque Royale, Ms.5) partially submerged in the water? (the Brussels scene is a baptism, but interpreting the object as a cup obviously suggests something different: just bathing)