Hildegard wrote the first of her vision-books, known as the Scivias , around 1151. Until WWII, one copy (Rupertsberg) survived which was made shortly after her death, and certainly under the immediate influence of her surroundings. This MS was lost to the war, but fortunately it was copied in the early 20th century. Most Scivias images you have seen are from this modern copy (Eibingen).
The following fragment is from the Eibingen copy. We can assume that this is more or less how Hildegard herself had envisioned it. The six days of Creation
Illustrations of Hildegard's work could give rise to comparison with Voynich images. The style isn't standard medieval and the compositions deviate from stock scenes. There are cosmological elements and many naked figures (souls in Hildegard, "nymphs" in the VM).
Now upon closer inspection I'd say that the earliest Hildegard MSS are in style much more like the Spanish Beatus MSS of a century before, and don't share much with the VM apart from some degree of strangeness.
Now, to get to the point, what made me open this thread is the 6-days-scene from the 12th century You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
The overall style of the images is still quite different from the VM, and the same is true for the contents (an explosion of angels and Jesuses). But especially in the cosmological elements there is a departure from Hildegard's style towards things we are more used to, especially from the rosettes foldout. Note the eye-shape in the first day (top left), the blob representing the Earth with its waters, human heads in Sun and Moon, the green wave pattern under the dragon bottom left. Note certainly the "wavy starfish" bottom middle, which here represents the four rivers of paradise. Also androgynous human nudes, but that's not too exceptional in such works.
So, any thoughts? Has anyone studied this MS before?
Posted by: Anton - 30-07-2018, 09:04 PM - Forum: Marginalia
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After Wladimir discovered You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I began to investigate (on ad-hoc basis) other botanical folios on the subject of potential marginalia.
The idea, which may be very rewarding if it ultimately turns out to hold true, is that the guy had plant names marginalia put down (like to have some reminders of what the plant is, or of what plant should be depicted in the folio), but afterwards erased them out of caution. Interestingly, in some botanical folios certain areas of "erosion" are found, and these may be places where marginalia once were.
Such is f38v. There are three symbols, the first two are barely legible ("t" and "a" ?), the third one is either r rotunda or that Latin abbreviation which looks like Voynichese k (don't remember its meaning). If anything follows that, it's badly smeared.
There are other suspect-folios, but nothing well discernable at the moment.
(30-07-2018, 08:04 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the middle ages, manuscripts were typically bound by the owner, not the people who created it. It was a two-step process.
What about the creator being the owner at the same time?
It would be highly unusual for the manuscript to be bound before it was done.
In the middle ages, manuscripts were typically bound by the owner, not the people who created it. It was a two-step process. It's like buying a painting. The buyer purchases a painting and then takes it to a frame shop and picks out the colors and style of the frame.
A manuscript that was already bound was considered "second-hand" in those days.
That's not to say it couldn't happen, but it would be outside the norm.
This is what looks a very interesting matter, although there's no clear picture at the moment.
I was thinking over Nick's post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about tails of n having been written in a separate pass.
Indeed, in many places (not only 38v specifically) it looks like the tails of n were added in a separate pass. What betrays that in particular is that if we consider n as the combination of i and the tail, then those i-components which have a tail appended usually have a more or less prominent "hook" (to which the tail is then appended). The concept is illustrated by the figure (38v, line 7) below which shows the hook in blue and the tail in red.
They may have hooks less prominent than the vord-final hook (see fig. 1 above), which is, I guess, the most frequent case.
They may also have hooks as prominent as the vord-final hook. In this example of 38v, line 3, the hook of the next-to-last glyph is the same as that of the last glyph, the latter being not very prominent per se.
Hooks of non-vord-final glyphs may be considered as natural connectors of several strokes of one glyph (e.g. like in Latin three "i" form an "m"). However, e.g. in this example (38v line 6), first two i shapes do have hooks (let's say, "connector hooks") and the fourth one also has a hook (let's say "terminal hook"), however the third one clearly does not have a hook:
Of course, this just may designate that the sequence shall be read as "m" plus "n" (due to no "connector" between the two).
Let's put the issue of "connector hooks" aside for now and consider terminal hooks, and tails thereto appended. Some of the terminal hooks are very prominent, some are not. Clearly, they are not "connector hooks" in any case (because no i-shape ever follows). So there must be another explanation for the nature of terminal hooks. The simplest explanation would be that they are kind of embellishment, the result of the sweepy movement of the pen at a vord's ending. There are apparently no very many vords ending with i, if any at all, so this assumption is not very easy to check. The problem with hooks and tails within the n shapes, however, is that the vord is ending with the tail, it is not ending with the hook. So two questions manifest themselves:
1) Why two passes? Why not put the n shape in a single pass?
2) Why the need for the hook within n?
The simplest answer to the first question is that inscribing the n shape in a single pass is impossible from the writing technique perspective - the pen must be lifted from the surface in the midpoint. However, this is disproved by the existence of shapes such as b - which are clearly written in one pass.
The simplest answer to the second question is that the terminal hook is an "intermediary embellishment". The i with an "embellishing" hook is put down, and then the tail is just appended in the second pass. However, there are r glyphs also - which do have prominent hooks in much fewer cases. It is true that r sometimes has a prominent hook (see example below, 38v line 7), which sometimes makes it look even more like s, but it seems that on the whole, prominent terminal hooks in r are far less common than in n. I also have a suspicion that joining tail to the i not exactly at the top of i but slightly lower serves the purpose of distinguishing r (with their potential confusing hooks) from s.
This direction of discourse leads one to suspicion that the terminal hook is placed as an indicator for to be used in the second pass - specifically, indicating that, by appending a tail, the shape is to be turned into n, not r. This is far not certain though, since, once again, r with hooks are there - albeit less frequent, they are quite numerous. So this is rather vague at the moment.
However, be it so or not, it is still not clear why bother with such "reminders" if the tail (be that for r or for n) can be appended in the first pass? You are placing a vord-final glyph. If you know that it should be r, place the r at once. If you know it should be n, place n at once. There is one evident explanation of this strange need for the second pass - that you do not know in advance whether it needs be r or n (or, say, l etc.). r , l and m clearly have the need to be written in two strokes, so they look just natural (in fact, many r's look like there are even three components within them, but that's another thread), but only n - that does not have that need - betrays these two strokes as two passes.
But there is something more which may either substitute this explanation of two passes - or even complement it. That's the "tail coverage", which is introduced by analogy with the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Indeed, one may notice that the tail of n (we'll come to other tails later) sometimes covers more than its own i, but also one or more preceding strokes (be they just i's or full EVA glyphs). Consider Fig. 4 above, where the tail covers four strokes, three of which do not belong to the n glyph. This occurrence is much like those in which the gallows coverage is manifested as something more that just pure embellishment. In here, there is little room between the lines for a sweepy curve with its natural radius to fit in - so the radius is made deliberately infinite, with the curve going horizontally - that is, in parallel with the baseline, in order to fit the "covering" tail in.
Sometimes the tip of the tail stops in between two preceding strokes so that it is not easy to determine the extent of the coverage (this is the case with some gallows also). There may have been some convention to resolve such ambiguities.
Can the tail of n cover anything beside just i shapes? Yes, it can - at least the glyph a . For that see e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 7 or line 9 (at this point I'm tired preparing inline illustrations, sorry! ). Interestingly, sometimes the tail covers the whole a, while sometimes it covers only the i component of the a (see e.g. f42r, next-to-last line).
What about tails of other glyphs? Although seemingly not as often, the tail of r can also exhibit coverage - see e.g. f42r, line 2. So does the tail of s. The tail of s is very interesting in this respect. Exactly like r or n are commonly preceded by i or i-containing shapes, s is commonly preceded by e. Thus the tail of s likes to cover one or more e shapes - see e.g. f42r, last line. I have seen (don't remember where) the tail of s covering l - which means that there is no curve-to-curve (neither, presumably, line-to line, in terms of Cham's CLS) rule for the tail coverage. In other words, tails of curve-based glyphs can cover line-based glyphs and (presumably) vice versa.
The b, which also visually derives from e , can exhibit coverage as well - see e.g. f42v, line 10, where it covers two preceding instrances of e.
Returning to s, it sometimes demonstrates behaviour not very fitting into the described model of tail coverage. First, s is often seen as vord-beginning character, and in such cases it is not rare that it covers the space preceding the vord. I can't imagine any plausible need for that. Worse than that, s is sometimes seen as line-initial character, and in such cases it sometimes has a deliberately long tail of large radius - exactly as if it should have covered a string of characters - but there are no characters. Refer to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 10 for an illustration. Unless the long tail of s as vord-initial character has some special significance, this strange behaviour is something that jeopardises the whole concept of tail coverage. So, while I don't have a shade of doubt that gallows coverage exists, I'll leave room for doubt in the case of tail coverage.
What could be the significance of tail coverage? One thing that it would not be is marking covered i's as strokes of a single glyph. That's because coverage is observed over e's as well - and e shapes are clearly standalone, not combinable into a single glyph. Other than that, I can imagine some operator over the preceding glyphs as operands. What it is exactly - I can't tell, same as for the gallows coverage.
I have not researched the peculiarities outlined above systematically and limited myself (for the moment) to only several folios. Bottomline at the moment looks to me as follows:
a) terminal hooks - not clear if they have any special significance. May serve as markers for converting i to n, but that's not very likely due to abundance of examples to the contrary. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 8 is a vivid example of how i with a prominent tail hook was converted to m, not to n. Most probably they are sort of embellishment (or, rather, outcome of a particular writing technique) for the vord-ending i-strokes before the tail of any sort is appended. What is important is that the presence of terminal hooks in n shapes betrays the two-pass nature of creating the flow of script.
b) connector hooks - not sure if they are really meant to combine i-strokes into a single glyph or not. Really an open question. More consideration needed.
c) tail coverage - more chances that it does have special significance versus simple embellishment. If so, it does not serve to mark stroke combinations as single glyphs. Might be some operator.
d) two-pass process - reflection upon why it is needed in the first place might be the clue to understanding Voynichese. A two-pass process is a paradigm fundamentally different from the simple (or not-so-simple) substitution (which is usually the heavy focus of Voynich-deciphering attempts). The two-pass paradigm also largely negates the idea of decomposition of Voynich glyphs as "base-shape+tail" constructs (as discussed in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
The very division of the process in two passes means either one of the two following things, or both at the same time:
a) the scribe does not know in advance which exactly tail is to be appended
b) the scribe does not know in advance the extent of coverage to be introduced
Either of these means that the scribe does not know in advance the final look of the vord he is putting down.
Wow, this has been a long post. Thx for your patience.
Hi everyone,
looking through the astronomy section lately I was struck by what appear to be traces of erased lines under the main drawing on f68v1:
You can see them peeking through between the stars in the two sections at roughly 12:00 and most prominently at about 4:00.
The lines don't seem to be bleedthrough from the other side, nor could they be explained by transfer from the other foldout pages.
I wonder if they are remnants from a former design idea for the page, or if we might, after all, have to reconsider the palimpsest possibility.
When I saw the image below it gave me an immediate sense of recognition. Architecturally it strongly resembles You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and there is also some resemblance to the kind of patterns on the "tubs" or "barrels".
The scene in question is a baptism, though this sacrament appears to be absent from Q13. A quick look at the wiki for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. reveals that several types of earlier structures were repurposed for baptisms. So I don't know whether this bassin was specifically constructed for baptizing or if it used to be, for example, a bath house. Any thoughts?
I want to offer an hypothesis concerning the origin of Sh. It's not strictly an explanation but a possible insight. I'm not sure it's true so I would like the opinions of others.
I guess we all agree that the lower part of Sh is the same as ch? And that the only difference is the 'plume', 'hat', topstroke, whatever you want to call it?
I think that when writing Sh the scribe wrote ch first and added the topstroke last. Would others agree?
If so, how long after the ch was the topstroke written? Can we show that it was written immediately after or that (at least in some cases) other glyphs were written between the ch and the addition of the topstroke? Would the lightness/darkness of the topstroke provide evidence?
Although I'm very uncertain about this hypothesis, I think it could serve to make an important point: whether ch and Sh are different glyphs, or the same glyph with different environments. The topstroke could be indicating that a later glyph/sound/part was omitted or altered.