The Voynich Ninja

Full Version: German medicinal charm recipe metastudy
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I think we should collect all German medicinal manuscripts containing instructions for remedies involving charms here and rate them. In equivalence to the month names, it would be interesting if we can pinpoint a certain area or date range.

Provinzialbibliothek Amberg Ms. 77 - Varia opuscula medica scripta (Arzneilehre, Kräuterbuch, Amberger Malerbüchlein)
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Unfortunately the age is only given as 'Mittelalter', and no location.
Provenience: from the Cistercian abbey of Waldsassen in Oberpfalz, Bavaria. In the Holy Roman Empire it was an Imperial Abbey.

Contains german recipe, latin charm, crosses, so nim, gaissmilch, large line-end 'o'. Letter 'g' contains a rightward horizontal stroke.
Having looked at an awful lot of German and Swiss manuscripts in recent months, the handwriting is consistent with the first half of the 15th century (I lean 1400–1430 or so). Late 14th-century German manuscripts tend to have a double-story "a," not the single-story "a" observed here, while later 15th-century German manuscripts don't loop their "b" and "l" letters as consistently as this manuscript does.

To give you a rough sense of what I mean, here's a manuscript written in Freiburg in 1413–1415. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

And here's a German psalter written in 1421. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Note that there are several hands in that book. A date (1492) is written on the first page (scan 3), in the margin of what is already a messy flyleaf. This is not in the main hand. There are more hands involved in the later part of the book, which is where I first came across the interesting bits (last page and the one with the square charm drawing).

The parts that contain .O. go from ca. scan 439 to scan 449. They are part of a (sub)section starting You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. The page starts with some obligatory religious stuff, after which the true contents begin. I am not good enough at deciphering this kind of Latin, but JoeyB helped me out a bit through LLM text recognition, and we think the section is a treasure seeker's guide. (Take this with a grain of salt until confirmed!) 

Each paragraph is something like "go to this or that mountain, look for the statue of a lion, take five steps east and you will find [treasure]". For example, on scan 438 linked above, the one but last paragraph describes looking for certain statues and you will have "inestimable sun and moon". We suspect "sun" is used in its sense of "gold" here, and that later paragraphs substitute this with the circle .O.. Normally the symbol for Sun is a circle with a dot inside, but this is the best I've got so far. So current hypothesis: it stands for gold.