The Voynich Ninja

Interesting indeed, but I think if you have the freedom to flip characters, you can probably compare a lot of different Manuscripts.. to my mind it's just a further localisation of southern Germany..

(5 hours ago)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Look at this! Loopy characters!

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I guess those three could be "etc etc etc"

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(4 hours ago)DG97EEB Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Interesting indeed, but I think if you have the freedom to flip characters, you can probably compare a lot of different Manuscripts.. to my mind it's just a further localisation of southern Germany..

Excuse my ignorance, but what manuscripts exactly? I've been going through hundreds of e-codices and digital-sammlungen manuscripts page by page for the past months, and never have I seen such a match.

Of course, this could all be a coincidence. I'm well aware of that. But if there are others, which you can flip and produce EVA gallows, I'll be happy to look at them.

(Yesterday, 10:02 PM)DG97EEB Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't think this Manuscript has been discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

It's Augsburg, early 15th Century herbal and bestiary. .. I have looked at my own archive and Google and it hasn't turned up... It was owned by a prominent Artz/apothecary family whose work later appeared in a Hartlieb..

c. 1403–1409: Produced in southern Germany on paper; some later additions use paper dated 1428–1436.
1407: A note records a visit by Anzinus, son of Jörg Tömlinger, a Munich apothecary, placing the manuscript in a Munich pharmaceutical milieu.
Contains extensive medical, pharmaceutical and herbal material, including more than 200 plant images, followed by an illustrated bestiary of about 73 animal species.
By the 15th century it belonged to the Benedictine abbey of St Mang at Füssen, confirmed by an ownership inscription.
After the abbey was secularised in 1803, its library passed to the Oettingen-Wallerstein collection.
In 1980 Bavaria acquired that library; the manuscript is now Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg, Cod. II.1.2° 109.

I can't find any information about who created it...

For anyone interested, i'm pretty sure i've seen a WAY older version (1270-1275AD) of this bestiary work: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

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From GPT, it seems there is even another one...

"The earlier witness is the Salvatorburg (Salvatorberg) Bestiary, now Wormsley Library MS BM 3731, formerly Phillipps 10850. It is a German, late-14th-century Second-Family bestiary, usually dated c.1375–1400, on vellum."

More importantly, Patricia Stewart does not merely call it a loose parallel. She writes that the Augsburg bestiary “appears to be a copy” of the Salvatorburg bestiary, based on a series of shared illustration motifs; the Augsburg drawings are cruder and not exact copies. She lists, among others, the peculiar panther, ibex scene, club-bearing satyr, crocodile biting a man's arm, paired fox composition, wolf/sheepfold and dragon beneath the Peridexion tree. 

She explicitly considers the alternative that both derive from a common source, but says this seems unlikely because the two German manuscripts are much more iconographically similar to each other than to other Second-Family manuscripts. "

There's no link to it that I can find unfortunately...

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(3 hours ago)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(4 hours ago)DG97EEB Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Interesting indeed, but I think if you have the freedom to flip characters, you can probably compare a lot of different Manuscripts.. to my mind it's just a further localisation of southern Germany..

Excuse my ignorance, but what manuscripts exactly? I've been going through hundreds of e-codices and digital-sammlungen manuscripts page by page for the past months, and never have I seen such a match.

Of course, this could all be a coincidence. I'm well aware of that. But if there are others, which you can flip and produce EVA gallows, I'll be happy to look at them.

I didn't have one in mind, but the principle that absence of evidence isn't evidence for absence holds here.  You may be correct that this is the only one.. there's certainly enough here including the back story and link to the Munich apothecary family to make this interesting for a lot of reasons.. my wider point is that flipping characters starts to get in to "degrees of freedom" realms, and there's enough liberties taken with Voynich research as it is, but that's often the worst... Still, let's see what the community can figure out..

P.s. given JoJo's REVA experiment, maybe that's exactly what's going on here..

Thread split.

I only had a quick glance so far, but my impression is:

* Interesting? Very.
* Relevant? Likely.
* Direct source for VM? Probably not this very MS.

I agree with Ed's post above: there is some nice stuff in there, but a lot is quite different, like the animals. The mermaid with two fish is a well-established type which the VM clearly does not follow, its "mermaid" is someone in side profile stepping out of the fish mouth. Well spotted on the leg split though!

The plants are, at first glance, recognizable and often almost naturalistic. Very well-behaved.

For the VM crossbowman, I would most likely expect him to come from an astrological series, since the VM artist clearly had access to examples of the whole Zodiac. Like this guy here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . I agree that the fashion is quite similar, which we owe in part to this MS being from the early 15th century.

Fashion during the international gothic period was not as region-bound as people often think. Have a look around on the earliest of the Devonshire Hunting tapestries, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. No bows here, unfortunately - the preferred method of killing these creatures was to use a long pike with a crossbar right beneath the point - lots of stopping power. Lots of "pleated skirts" though, as well as (better) bagpipe sleeves and hats with long tails.

Thank you very much for this @KoenG.

With this MS, it kind of feels that we have taken a step. In which direction, I'm not sure. But a step, is a step.

It would be interesting to read the input from @Stolfi and @Rene.

The text of the herbal is at least in part from Pseudo-Apuleius.
E.g. check Centaurea Minor f.81r with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or the text posted by Nablator You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (plant #35). The illustration could be about a different plant, I am not sure.

Titles of the recipes:
Ad uiperae morsum.
Ad oculorum uitia.
Ad auriginem.
...

It's interesting that f.82r features a human-headed root, apparently not from Pseudo-Apuleius (Altea / Concordia).

EDIT: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (plant #38 in the transcription) following Centaurea Minor after a few plants. But the illustration looks quite different.

I don't quite understand how the text was supposed to work, most pages have two plant illustrations (sometimes only the labels), but the text seems to be about only one of the two. Also, there sometimes are horizontal plants at the bottom, also without any text in most cases.
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