The Voynich Ninja

(09-05-2016, 11:54 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Two anthropomorphic bulbs - see Voynich You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
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Hi Marco,

that one is certainly alchemical herb Nr 41: Herba Illiloris.
See the two Latin Paris MSs:

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Rene

(09-05-2016, 04:58 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(09-05-2016, 11:54 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Two anthropomorphic bulbs - see Voynich You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
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Hi Marco,

that one is certainly alchemical herb Nr 41: Herba Illiloris.
See the two Latin Paris MSs:

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Rene

Thank you, Rene!
It's interesting that the "alchemical" illustration was apparently used for a different plant ("alio hursis", You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).


The alchemical plant #41 "Herba Illiris sive Illiloras" appears with other similar plants ("allium" included) in image 129:
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(09-05-2016, 03:31 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.@JKP: thanks JKP, we i know: discussed this by e-mail before a while ago, but what i mean is an old map during years 1400
I made a (current) google map with the interesting stuff and on it and it would be interesting to lay that old map over it.

@ Marco: Also i would like to refer to this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Maps were different then.

Most maps consisted of an actual drawing of the town, often with each building shown (or at least part of the roof showing) and the major landmarks like the portal towers, and there were no cars in those days, so there were usually only 2 to 4 main roads leading into each town.

Except for the very broadview maps (which were created by explorers or by military strategists), it wasn't until towns got too large (and roads too numerous) that they started regularly drawing schematic aerial maps as we know them.

If you look up the Abraham Cresque map from 1375, which is an amazing map for its time, you will get a sense of how primitive the broadview maps were in those days. Cartography was in its infancy.


It is important though, because the borders varied constantly (they were always fighting over the most important mountain passes or strategic points on rivers) and political alliances often determined who gave what to whom (e.g., manuscripts like the VMS).


If you type antique maps into Google, you might be able to find a few broader-view schematic maps. There's one of the Lake Constance area that depicts how it looked around 1500, but I don't have the whole map. Many of the earliest maps are in the hands of private collectors.

We are aware that cars did not exist those days JKP ;-) 

I have in my archive, hundreds of maps from around 1500 from all major cities in Europe. It is quite nice to see cities with only a few houses then and now grew out as big cities.

However, i have no such things / almost nothing on Italian cities and regions. I am in the process of thorough investigation on that.
If anyone has more info her/ himself please notify me. Google has almost nothing, but i will dig.


If anyone wants to know more about maps and the text in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 
i made an intensive study on the images and text about half a year ago.

To answer my own question:

(The Sea Map of Andrea Benincasa, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Borgiano VIII):
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maps from around 1500 compared to later:  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.



1300-1600:  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
and
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Holy Roman Empire c. 1350:



And the same general idea in more detail for 1360:


David, I would have given you this link earlier, but I lost track of where it was and wasn't sure I could find it again. I finally relocated it. This is probably the best in terms of showing detail:

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There are lots of "what ifs" where the VMS is concerned, but let's say it was created at approximately 1425 and let's say whoever did it was around 35 years of age, old enough to have knowledge of the world, young enough to still be alive and to have eyes that could see small details. That means the author may have been born around 1390 and may have been exposed to lingering traces of 14th-century culture and politics. If the VMS was created early in the radiocarbon-dated period (c. 1403), it would push the author's childhood back to the third quarter 14th, and things were quite different then.

I'm afraid the discussion wandered a bit from the subject topic. Why not create a separate thread about maps and medieval European peoples?

Thanks to Anton,
I think it would be the impression of a newcomer that the greatest amount of researchers' attention is paid to Germany, and German manuscripts and images and so on.

As for being 'led by the data' I would agree, but as any statistician will tell you, the data reflects the parameters set for data collection.  If people only look at 15thC Latin manuscripts from (say) Sicily, then they find their 'most like" to be an image in a fifteenth-century manuscript from Sicily.. or wherever.

In investigating the late Menno Knul's assertion that the Vermont 'Tuscany' Herbal was "convincingly like" Beinecke MS 408, I considered its materials, dimensions, palette, attitude to the page, style of imagery, details of imagery and script.  If I could have done, I'd also have considered the binding.

The dimensions of the Voynich manuscript's membrane are relatively rare in our collections today, but there is evidence that they may have once been a standard size, many manuscripts having later been re-bound, and trimmed, this obscuring the original congruence.

However, having found un-trimmed paper from the Cairo geniza of those dimensions, and various other examples, including a fourteenth-century manuscript made in the Veneto and a handful of others catalogued as from 'North Italy' by the holding library, it seems appropriate on that score alone (not to mention Touwaide's illuminating comment) to attribute manufacture of our present volume to that region - Italy, like France, Italy and Spain having been very generally neglected by Voynich studies since 2000 save for Nick Pelling's research, which resulted in his attributing the work to Milan.

'Northern Italy' is used by most libraries as a normal description of provenance and as a rule everyone knows what is meant. Rome, I believe, is included in "central Italy" but above it and including Genoa, Milan, Padua, Pordenone (as in 'Odoric of..').. and Venice and Piacenza are 'north..'.

A critical issue, in this case, is page-layout and  relative importance accorded written over pictorial text.  If one is attempting to locate the place where a manuscript was made, then these technical details of manufacture, scribal habits and the way membrane was finished matter more than whether you see a bearded onion or not.  Texts of the Circa instans type travelled the length and breadth of the Latin-speaking world, and a bearded onion might, too.

Codicology is an essential part of provenancing and the Voynich membrane is not finished in German style, the page is not laid out in the way Latin manuscripts from Germany were laid out; the hand which wrote the main text appears not to be German; the pagination is not German.There may be untrimmed German manuscripts with the same dimensions - but now we know that the binding isn't German either.  I often marvel that the 'German' theory ever got off the ground, let alone that it has survived so long.  But others may think the same of Nick's Italian theory..

Diane, it would be easier to discuss this in a professional way if you would make a distinction between German and Germanic.

In the 14th and some of the 15th century, what we now call northern Italy was primarily Germanic. A manuscript can have Germanic influence and a Germanic provenance without being German.

The Lombards, for example, were Germanic, but they were not German.

Ashknz (אשכנז) as you probably know is the Hebrew word for Germany. Much of southern "Germany" was populated by an influential Jewish community in the 14th and earlier 15th century. Since some of them had been in that area for more than 300 years by the time the VMS was created (and continued to live there for another 500+ years and married into local communities), they can, in some ways be considered Germanic, as well. If you look at zodiacs created by this community, many follow Germanic rather than the traditional Jewish illustrative customs.

Salerno was in southern Italy, but it was not primarily Italic, it was Germanic (this is true of some of the Greek islands, as well) for a significant period of time after the Lombards lost political control of southern Italy. This is important because Salerno was the source/influence for many herbal manuscripts.

North Italy is a perfectly ordinary way of describing the region from which a manuscript has come. Look at any catalogue.

Northern Italy is the northern part of Italy.
It excludes Germany, Switzerland, France,  Southern Italy etc.

Since I began the thread, and said that I was in the process of writing a series of posts exploring this issue, it is a little lacking in finesse to say in that thread that one is "looking forward" to having two other people comment on research in progress, and in the process of being published, by the person who began the thread.

I'll say it, just for the record.

Having come across Menno's comment again, I have spent some weeks in researching the points where the Tuscan Herbal does, and doesn't resemble Beinecke MS 408, and then looked at the wider picture, concluding that there is sufficient evidence to assign production of Beinecke 408 to northern Italy.  Unlike Nick Pelling, who believes it made in Milan (which might still prove true), I conclude that it was probably made in the Veneto - in the region between Padua and Udine - and in about 1427/8 or so.

It would be considered appropriate courtesy for other members of this list to hold off duplicating my current topic of research work until it has been published, and then if they wish to add comments, or suggest modifications either by email to me, or by comments to the blog. 

As a quick preview - no, I agree with Silberman that the Tuscan Herbal and the Voynich manuscript share in common things which, in the end, seem to come down to the range of materials available in northern Italy (and elsewhere), and these are attested in extant manuscripts from northern Italy between 1400 and the end of the fifteenth century.

As far as the imagery is concerned, there is no Latin manuscript (herbal or otherwise) which closely approaches the way in which the larger botanical images in Beinecke 408 have been constructed, but by considering a range of those manuscripts, it is possible to posit where and when the content (not the form) was introduced into northern Italy, where our present manuscript was made.

The research is not an effort to force the manuscript into stemma of the Latin herbal texts.  It is about locating and properly attributing form, content and manufacture as three separate aspects of the work's history. I look at the scripts in passing, and at certain stylistic habits, offer a possible insight into Aldrovandi's reason for collecting those "plants of the alchemists" books, and so forth.

A lot of work.  But if Marco and JKP decide to follow Rene's suggestion and produce their own version, I shall save it for the second volume of published essays. No problem.


It also seems somewhat unnecessary rudeness to express i comment to say that one is interested in work not yet done by persons other than the one who started this thread.

---

JKP - sorry. I wrote before reading your post.

You say

Quote:Diane, it would be easier to discuss this in a professional way if you would make a distinction between German and Germanic.

(1) In the 14th and some of the 15th century, what we now call northern Italy was primarily Germanic. A manuscript can have Germanic influence and a Germanic provenance without being German.

(2) The Lombards, for example, were Germanic, but they were not German.

(3) Ashknz (אשכנז) as you probably know is the Hebrew word for Germany. Much of southern "Germany" was populated by an influential Jewish community in the 14th and earlier 15th century. Since some of them had been in that area for more than 300 years by the time the VMS was created (and continued to live there for another 500+ years and married into local communities), they can, in some ways be considered Germanic, as well. If you look at zodiacs created by this community, many follow Germanic rather than the traditional Jewish illustrative customs.

(4)Salerno was in southern Italy, but it was not primarily Italic, it was Germanic (this is true of some of the Greek islands, as well) for a significant period of time after the Lombards lost political control of southern Italy. This is important because Salerno was the source/influence for many herbal manuscripts.

Sorry to be brief. Not intended to be terse, but I literally have one minute free, now.

First - I am totally indifferent to efforts to describe the manuscript as being, in any sense whatever, 'German'. 

I understand that in an effort to shift an old theory into the present and very obvious boundaries (i.e. Italy), the emphasis is now on some imagined racial class (blue eyed, blonde haired? Or able to speak German? Or having supposedly 'german blood' in their veins? )

I really don't see the point of this 'Germanic' theory.  A person with blue eyes, blonde hair and a native speaker of German isn't restricted to books written by people having the same background and character; nor is he locked into any 'Germanic' culture.  He may forget German, live in Spain, and copy a poem first composed in tenth-century Paris.

(2) Lombards of what period?

(3) Irrelevant.  As Panofsky said, the manuscript presents as a Jewish work from "Spain or somewhere southern".  That equates to Sephardi, and it is Sephardi cursive (of the Jewish scripts I've seen) which most nearly resembles the Voynich script. I'm not playing palaeographer, but talking about one reason among the many for Panofsky to have said so.

(4) Salerno, Germanic?!!  You really have to be joking.

You assume that the Voynich botanical folios are related to the Latin European herbal genre. Perfectly understandable; the question as to what they represent was never asked, let alone investigated.  Everyone just assumed so, and most still do.  I don't, exactly. Having looked at the way the images are constructed, the system used to classify them, the fact (and I agree with Tiltman on the point) that they are composite images, not 'plant portraits' all require another origin and a very different mind-set from the Dioscoridan approach to plant-pictures, though it is that one which permeates the Latin, Arabic and Greek herbal genre.  Quite an interesting problem, I found.


As you know, I do not consider the primary purpose of those roundels to relate to astrology; I think it self evident that the central emblems, read as a series, do not constitute the zodiac series as it was depicted in Latin works between the 9thC AD and AD 1438.  It is not a zodiac in my opinion. The month-names allow us to describe it as some form of calendar.  For a great many reasons, including the fact that it includes only ten months, now, I consider the calendar related to the sailing season. (which of course, was also the pilgrimage season and trading season).

Sorry, must be off. I've made myself late.