The Voynich Ninja

I'm trying to decide whether the text in the Recipes folios is a list of bulleted descriptions, each bullet marked by a star. The trouble is that in many cases the stars don't "line up" with the lines of text.

What are the opinions on this - were the stars drawn in, higgledy-piggledy, after the text, with no relation to the text? Or are they indeed like bullet marks?

By my count this is the number of margin stars on each Recipe folio:


StarCounts = {
'103r':19,
'103v':14,
'104r':13,
'104v':13,
'105r':10,
'105v':10,
'106r':16,
'106v':14,
'107r':15,
'107v':15,
'108r':16,
'108v':16,
# missing 109r,109v,110r,110v
'111r':17,
'111v':19,
'112r':12,
'112v':13,
'113r':16,
'113v':15,
'114r':13,
'114v':12,
'115r':13,
'115v':13,
'116r':10
}

The variation in number of stars does suggest that they relate to the text, otherwise wouldn't it be more likely that there are the same number on each folio, if they are simply decoration?

(The average number of stars per folio is 14. Thus there are an estimated 56 stars missing due to the two missing folios f109 and f110. This would bring the original total number of stars in the Recipes to 380, by my count.)

julian,
perhaps you've already seen this but Nick Pelling has made an interesting page about this section, although he takes it in a different direction.
In particular, the following observations may be relevant to your query (edited by me for brevity, see his You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for the full text):
"(1) that the tails on the paragraph stars are probably hiding ‘y’, short for ‘ytem’ or ‘ybidem’;
(2) that the tail-less paragraph stars on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. were added in after the event – that is, that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was originally written unstarred, but that untailed stars were later added in so that this page blended in better with the others (but I don’t know why, or what this means);
(3) that Q20 was originally formed of two distinct gatherings, with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the first page of the first gathering (‘Q20a’) and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the last page of the last gathering (‘Q20b’);
(4) that the last paragraph of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. probably contains some kind of attribution or conclusion;
(5) that even though we currently have between 345 and 347 starred paragraphs and four missing pages (i.e. two missing folios, or rather one missing bifolio), I think – because I’m far from convinced that all the paragraph stars are definitely genuine ‘item’ markers – we have to be very wary about trusting that the number of starred paragraphs we see is an accurate representation of the number of itemized paragraphs in the original."

Also, and this is a personal observation: what to make of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. & v? These folios have an identical structure, with star shaped "bullet points" marking each paragraph. I've wondered if they are connected, or could have originally been adjacent You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

I believe Mary D'Imperio suggested that there may have been 365 stars and 365 sections of text - meaning that this section was a Horoscope or an Almanac entry for each day in the year.

There has been an older discussion of this: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Julian,
There might be a link with the number of days in the year, just as a link between the stars and days of the year, but I'd be wary of assuming the link any more direct. Pelling's distinguishing between use of star-flowers in the calendar's tiers and those in the end-lists seems a fair point to me.

As example only - the end-lists could be the liturgical roster, or the series of which stars rise or set, or a form of the Yemeni star-calendars, or .. any number of other things.

I notice that in Persian texts, too, there is found a custom of separating sentences with flower-like asterisks. Here's the illustration I used last year, from the Kitab al-Diryaq. I don't know if the point had been made before - I did read everything I could find before making that post - but it seemed no-one had noticed this earlier.

So  the end-lists might even be sentences of a single text, separated out.. among the wealth of other possibilities.  

Interesting fact which may be useful: the stars on the bottom of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. have short marks linking them to the start of lines, and the whole bottom half of the page is devoid of one-legged gallows p and f.

(15-10-2016, 08:44 PM)julian Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm trying to decide whether the text in the Recipes folios is a list of bulleted descriptions, each bullet marked by a star. The trouble is that in many cases the stars don't "line up" with the lines of text.

What are the opinions on this - were the stars drawn in, higgledy-piggledy, after the text, with no relation to the text? Or are they indeed like bullet marks?

By my count this is the number of margin stars on each Recipe folio:


StarCounts = {
'103r':19,
[list deleted for brevity]
}

The variation in number of stars does suggest that they relate to the text, otherwise wouldn't it be more likely that there are the same number on each folio, if they are simply decoration?

(The average number of stars per folio is 14. Thus there are an estimated 56 stars missing due to the two missing folios f109 and f110. This would bring the original total number of stars in the Recipes to 380, by my count.)

Julian, FYI it was a custom in central Europe to use flowers (or plant shapes) to mark off paragraphs or noteworthy sections (similar to the way manicules are used but a little lower in the hierarchy than a manicule). They were usually placed in the left margins.

These stemmed flower-points often resemble stars on strings, so if someone were doing a star-themed manuscript it would be a natural substitution to use stars to mark paragraphs in the same way.

Here are some examples (note how the green flower lower right resembles a star):

  

             

JKP
I missed your comment till now about the star-or-floral shapes in medieval manuscripts.  I think it is quite important to have some sort of time-line for cited examples since we need to be clear about lineage, and whether a given instance pre-dates, or post-dates the VMS.

But more to the point, I've found a blog-post which I've also linked at VViews site. 
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The interesting thing is that the usual use for the 'asterisk' (whether or not in the flower-star form) was to mark text that had been omitted from the text, or from the original work copied.

It seems to me that this adds considerable weight to the suggestion in d'Imperio's book (whether her own suggestion or gained from someone else in the Friedman group) that the asterisked list is meant to connect with the calendar's star-flowers.  Captions omitted because there was no room in the diagrams, maybe?

I do wish we had some more objective description than 'recipes folios' because there's no evidence to support the idea that they contain recipes at all. And the habit of supposing they relate to the 'roots and leaves' folio is just a habit.  Like imagining that the plants are medicinal or the roots-and-leaves something to do with pharmaceutical medicine .. etc.  But I guess we're stuck with these descriptions for now.

(19-02-2017, 03:25 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do wish we had some more objective description than 'recipes folios' 

Just call it "quire 20", doesn't get any more objective than that. It's a nice and round number, easy to remember, and some people are using it already.

I call them "dense-text pages" (if they don't have stars) and "starred pages" or "dense-text pages starred".

I'm reluctant to make any references to what they might contain.