The Voynich Ninja

I just read the paper You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. relevant because Rauwolf is one of the names often discussed in reconstruction of the VMS provenance. Quoting some relevant passages:

"The plants he [Rauwolf] collected formed the first two books of his plant collection. Rauwolf graduated in 1562 from the University of Valence, Dauphiné (Dannenfeldt 1968). In 1563, he carried out his "peregrinatio academica" traveling through the Alps to N. Italy. On the way, he collected the plants that formed the third book herbarium. Rauwolf visited Padua, Verona, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, Modena, Piacenza, Parma, Milan, and Como, heading forward through Switzerland to Germany. During this homeward journey, Rauwolf visited Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) in Zurich, accompanied by his friend and classmate from Montpellier, Johann Bauhin (1541–1613) (Durling 1965).
   
According to Legré (1900), that same year, Rauwolf met in Augsburg with Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), to which he presented the plants he had collected in France and Italy, and presumably accepted Clusius’ annotations and corrections of several plant names. Doubting Legré’s argument, Ganzinger (1963) attributed the numerous annotations and corrections found in Rauwolf’s herbaria to Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566), suggesting that Rauwolf, on his way back to Augsburg in 1563, also visited Fuchs, his former teacher in Tübingen.

In 1571, Rauwolf was appointed city physician of Augsburg, a position that he, as a devoted Protestant, lost 17 years later due to religious conflicts.Thereby getting into financial difficulties, he decided to sell his herbaria, which he achieved for a remarkable price, 310 Reichstaler, which had to be paid to Rauwolf by the imperial chamber.The four book herbaria were bought in 1593 by a commissioner of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II..."



I know that Rauwolf -> Widemann-> Rudolf is a likely chain that people often suggest. When reading this paper, though, I was also quite struck by the fact that Rauwolf's "pergrinatio academica" took him directly through the regions where we expect the VMS likely originated- it seems relatively plausible that Rauwolf could have obtained the VMS at some point in 1562 or 1563. I'm curious about whether his colleagues in that region (Clusius and Gessner), both of whom were avid curiosity collectors and who have extant correspondence in libraries, have been investigated as possible Voynich-owners or annotators. The only You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. doesn't seem to mention an exchange of books aside from the one Rauwolf wrote, but I haven't found an online archive of Gessner's letters yet. Fuchs may also be worth looking into!

The Rauwolf connection, i.e. just the possibility that he may have owned the MS, is relatively new.

In principle it is possible that more can be found, but for both Widemann and Rauwolf the number of possible contacts are numerous. Also, most of these people have been studied for many decades, so big surprises would be, well, a surprise.

Possible though.

(16-03-2026, 07:58 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Rauwolf connection, i.e. just the possibility that he may have owned the MS, is relatively new.

In principle it is possible that more can be found, but for both Widemann and Rauwolf the number of possible contacts are numerous. Also, most of these people have been studied for many decades, so big surprises would be, well, a surprise.

Possible though.

Indeed, as we follow the manuscript backwards in time, the certainty of particular individuals having owned it grows less and less. This table from one of my forthcoming Voynich books explains the various points of uncertainty:

In my opinion if botanical experts, like Rauwolf or Gessner, would have seen the voynich ms, they would certainly have written about it somewhere, in correspondences, or books, ...

But no mention. So maybe I think they are not relevant to the history of the ms.

However I think the ms was in private collection during that time, quietly tucked away in some room in some castle of a noble. Until somehow the owner died and the books were sold or given to Mr Barschius.

While I agree that it is likely that the VMS remained in one place for much of its pre-1600 history, you can hardly base this argument on the non-existence of correspondence by certain people. There are just too many possible reasons why no letters survived or why a person chose not to write extensively on the manuscript. Be it due to their own paranoia or WW2 destruction... Only on a larger scale, i. e. over all the years it is unaccounted for without, to my knowledge, any reasonable cases for references, do the probabilities add up against a wider circulation. 

With that being said, digging deeper into known acquaintances of Rauwolf, Widemann etc. seems like an interesting project anyway. Not only for the sake of finding out more about the VMS, but simply because it is an interesting scholarly, political and religious environment to research. Rauwolf has drawn significant attention over the centuries due to his travels, but that's not necessarily true for others named in this thread.

Agreed- my other thought is that as we go earlier and earlier in history, books become rarer, so it becomes more likely that the VMS is either in a known library (e.g. St. Gall Abbey, the Bibliotheca Palatina, etc.) or the personal library of someone who was both wealthy and interested in collecting herbals (e.g. Clusius/Rauwolf/Gessner) during these windows. Obviously this isn't a good way to definitively trace provenance- it could have been forgotten in an attic somewhere for all we know- but understanding who owned similar books, when, and why can help us get a better sense of what kinds of historical trajectories are more or less plausible.

Additionally, there's quite a lot of correspondence from this era that hasn't been translated or explored in-depth for specific mentions of unusual manuscripts. It's not unreasonable to think that perhaps there's a mention of an enciphered herbal tucked away somewhere in a letter that just hasn't been read for a few hundred years.

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Agreed- my other thought is that as we go earlier and earlier in history, books become rarer, so it becomes more likely that the VMS is either in a known library (e.g. St. Gall Abbey, the Bibliotheca Palatina, etc.) or the personal library of someone who was both wealthy and interested in collecting herbals (e.g. Clusius/Rauwolf/Gessner) during these windows. Obviously this isn't a good way to definitively trace provenance- it could have been forgotten in an attic somewhere for all we know- but understanding who owned similar books, when, and why can help us get a better sense of what kinds of historical trajectories are more or less plausible.

To your point about the VMS being tucked away in the castle of some noble- if this is the case, then getting a sense of which nobles would've collected books like the VMS is also useful!

Additionally, there's quite a lot of correspondence from this era that hasn't been translated or explored in-depth for specific mentions of unusual manuscripts. It's not unreasonable to think that perhaps there's a mention of an enciphered herbal tucked away somewhere in a letter that just hasn't been read for a few hundred years.

(16-06-2026, 07:45 PM)stopsquark Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Not necessarily, someone could have written it with his friends as a medieval Dungeons and Dragons game, and kept it in his drawer until his friends came over.

Don't forget that many many games (tabletop and cards) were available at that time and most were completely banned.

The VMS doesn't have to be a serious manuscript about actual herbs.

I see this sentiment expressed a lot online- I appreciate your point, but it doesn't really line up with the historical context or content of the VMS. The MS was expensive (vellum was not cheap), written by several scribes, contains illustrations that are similar in character to those in many popular herbals of the time (the alchemical herbals & Circa Instans in particular) in addition to those in medical texts like De Balneis Puteolanis, etc. 

Tabletop games as we understand them, however, descend from Kriegspiel, which developed in Prussia in the 1800s.  There is no evidence for anything like a 1400s tabletop roleplaying game that I am aware of.

(17-06-2026, 07:47 AM)stopsquark Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I see this sentiment expressed a lot online- I appreciate your point, but it doesn't really line up with the historical context or content of the VMS. The MS was expensive (vellum was not cheap), written by several scribes, contains illustrations that are similar in character to those in many popular herbals of the time (the alchemical herbals & Circa Instans in particular) in addition to those in medical texts like De Balneis Puteolanis, etc. 

Tabletop games as we understand them, however, descend from Kriegspiel, which developed in Prussia in the 1800s.  There is no evidence for anything like a 1400s tabletop roleplaying game that I am aware of.

That is actually not true. The VMS was written on parchment, not vellum. It is a common misconception, one that I learned from a particularly learned user of this forum. 

Parchment is much more cheap than vellum.