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Raymundi Lulli und Folio ...
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116v
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The Voynich Manuscript as...
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Cipher or unknown languag...
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How to prove that the B-l...
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Ms. Plut. 73.16, medicati...
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| Upcoming VMS lecture in NYC |
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Posted by: LisaFaginDavis - 11-01-2020, 03:31 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (42)
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Hi, all,
If you're in or near NYC, you may be interested in a lecture I'm giving on Friday, Jan. 24 at the Annual Meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America, where I'll be presenting the results of my study of VMS scribes. My session starts at 4:30 PM. More info here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. My work will be published this spring in a journal called Manuscript Studies (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and in a collection of essays (Digital Palaeography, ed. by S. Brookes, M. Rehbein and P.A. Stokes (London: Routledge)) [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]that will likely come out in 2021.[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Also - if you live in Europe and get ZDF, tune into Terra X on Jan. 19 for a Voynich piece that will include an interview with me and an appearance by Ray Clemens. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font]
- Lisa
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| "Principal component analysis of characters in the Voynich manuscript |
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Posted by: Torsten - 09-01-2020, 10:16 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (9)
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There is a new paper about the VMS: "Principal component analysis of characters in the Voynich manuscript and their classifications based on comparative analysis of writings in known languages"
The paper by Jonas Alin can be found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The author concludes: Quote:the Voynich language, unlike the known languages, shows proportionally larger separation also along PC2 in its character transition frequencies, showing that the Voynich characters probably abide by more complex co-occurrence rules than characters of typical known languages.
An additional finding is: Quote: The Voynich character’s observation points were generally close together in the plot if the characters looked similar. That is, the more similar the characters look, the more similar would be their pattern of transition probabilities to other characters.
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| Does network complexity help organize Babel’s library? |
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Posted by: Torsten - 09-01-2020, 10:09 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (20)
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There is a paper from 2016 about the VMS: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The preprint version of the paper by Juan Pablo Cárdenas, Iván González, Gerardo Vidal and Miguel Angel Fuentes is available at arxiv.org: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The authors come to the conclusion that the Voynich manuscript contains "a written text which has been ciphered, possibly by a permutation process of its words".
The authors build networks for adjacent words for text samples of different kings. One outcome for the network build for the Voynich manuscript is that it contained the "only analyzed text that does not present a significant difference between assortativities before and after randomization."
They conclude that the "anomalous behaviors with respect to clustering and assortativity between its original and ciphered versions, suggest that the manuscript is a ciphered text, even with a lower disassortativity. We use the term ciphered because the manuscript has a word frequency distribution that follows Zipf’s law, and because the correlation between <C> and <l> also fits the power function of other texts."
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| The crowns of the Zodiac |
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Posted by: Anton - 09-01-2020, 01:08 PM - Forum: Imagery
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In another thread Aga Tentakulus mentioned the "Habsburg" crown in f72v, the folio of Libra/October.
Habsburg or not, an idea came to me that the crown may designate that this is the tax collection month.
What do you think? What was the usual time in middle ages to collect taxes for the crown?
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| The sphere of Burgundy |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 07-01-2020, 11:52 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (6)
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The comparison of the apparent similarity between the VMs critter (f80v) and the fleece-like portion of the medallion of the Order of the Golden Fleece has a long history and potentially multiple sources with few instances of dissent. For those familiar with both images, it is easy to see some general similarities and specific differences. One major difference being the reversal of direction of the head and tail. Naturally there has been discussion about whether and how this comparison might be related to VMs investigation.
The Order of the Golden Fleece was a knightly order instituted in 1430 by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, on the occasion of his marriage (#3) to Isabel of Portugal.
Having recently obtained a good source, I have discovered some interesting information. Richard Vaughan, in his book, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy, says: “The Golden Fleece soon became an important motif in the art and literature of the Burgundian court.” And this source (p. 162) provides much of the information discussed in the two paragraphs below.
The Golden Fleece was borrowed from the Classical myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece. And here there is a problem, not with the Fleece, but with Jason. The story of ‘Jason and Medea’ is a Greek tragedy, in which Jason promised to be eternally faithful to Medea, and later deserted her. It was called perjury by the contemporary French author, Alain Chartier. The problem was having a knightly order tied to a figure involved in betrayal. So, there was a problem of ‘optics’ in modern terms, and there were two attempts to fix it. Both were promulgated by bishops who were promoted by Philip the Good.
The first was by Guillaume Fillastre (the younger), bishop of Verdun, Tour and Tournai. He tried to put a pro-Christian spin on the story of Jason. The second was Jehan Germain, bishop of Nevers and Chalon. He eliminated Jason altogether and replaced him with the biblical Gideon. Both of these men also had held the office of chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece. And in 1448 there is a record of Philip the Good ordering a tapestry based on the theme of the “History of Gideon and the Golden Fleece”. The existence of this tapestry is mentioned in the 1468 marriage of the last of these Burgundian dukes, Charles the Rash, to Margaret of York. So, within the first 18 years, Jason had been replaced by Gideon – a biblical hero had been substituted for a classical betrayer. Compared with an alteration of that magnitude, the slightly ambiguous combination of the Golden Fleece with the Agnus Dei image from the Apocalypse of S. Jean is relatively minor.
In the VMs illustration, the representation of the ‘critter’ does not stand in isolation. There are two other patterns associated with it. They might be said to vaguely resemble clouds and rain. But while their identity is unknown, it is unclear what they represent. Now it is understood that the meandering line is a nebuly line. And that a nebuly line is a potential cosmic boundary. And that a nebuly line was used as a cosmic boundary in the VMs cosmos. The combination of fleece-sheep-lamb-type critter and a cosmic boundary, once the combination is recognized, leads quite naturally to the examination of the available examples of religious illustrations of the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei), in which there is also a cosmic boundary. There are several ways to represent cosmic boundaries and there are a variety of images produced in a relevant time period. However, it is only with the discovery of the Agnus Dei image in the Apocalypse of S. Jean that the proper interpretation of the third part is verified. The potential droplets in the VMs representation are droplets of blood in the Agnus Dei illustration. And these two representations share a common structure of three parts in sequence: lamb, cosmic boundary, droplets. So far, these two are the only examples of this structure.
The Apocalypse of S. Jean was produced in Liège in 1313 by Colin Chadelve. So how does it tie in with the Order of the Golden Fleece started in 1430? Liège was a possession of the Dukes of Burgundy and it was not a pleasant relationship. Liège was defeated by John the Fearless in 1408, by his son, Philip the Good, in 1430, and sacked by his son, Charles the Rash, in 1465, and that was the end – of the Dukes of Burgundy in 1477. More important, however, is the historical notation that the Apocalypse of S. Jean was in the library of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (r. 1419-1467) and there were multiple opportunities for that to occur.
Both elements, the motif of the Golden Fleece and the illustration of the 1313 version of the Agnus Dei structure existed together within the sphere of Burgundy starting in 1430. And this is a date that falls within the primary statistical range of the Carbon-14 dates for the VMs parchment.
Furthermore, this use of combined images exists elsewhere in the VMs. The VMs cosmos is a combination of the Oresme (BNF Fr. 565 fol. 23) Diagram and the Shirakatsi ‘Eight Phases of the Moon’ Diagram, with certain alterations to diminish the visual similarities.
It’s like this. If someone were to combine images of Marilyn Monroe and Groucho Marx, most of us would recognize what had been done, unless that is now too old for some. In the VMs, the situation has been one where no one could identify either image. That may be starting to change.
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| Transcription problem - f68v3 and Rosettes foldout |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 02-01-2020, 06:30 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (99)
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At the centre of f68v3 there is a T/O map. In the top right corner of the Rosettes foldout page there is a T/O map.
From my experience all or almost all T/O maps from that period represent the 3 continents Africa, Europe and Asia, with Asia represented as a half circle and the other two continents as quarters.
Sometimes there are other locations highlighted with the T/O map, sometimes not, sometimes just a list of other locations.
So on the rosettes folio I think EVA-asal is "asia".
I have been looking at the text in the top right quarter of the T/O map on f68v3 and the equivalent text in the bottom left quarter of the T/O map on the rosettes folio. This is the text that would correspond to "Europa". The text on the rosettes folio looks to me like an abbreviated version of the text on f68v3. However determining visually whether this is correct is very hard. So I would welcome opinions on this and arguments as to how can determine this.
I think we have in this case what Nick Pelling would term a block paradigm, albeit a small one. However this would be both an internal and external block paradigm.
Also, when I search on voynichese.com there are no examples of words starting EVA-opee so I wonder if this is due to transcription errors or whether words starting this way are very rare.
To me this indicates that we would really benefit from even higher resolution scans.
(I think the list in the half circle on f68v3 is likely to be a list of locations in asia.)
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| Is the VM an autograph or copy? |
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Posted by: Stephen Carlson - 20-12-2019, 01:41 AM - Forum: Provenance & history
- Replies (63)
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I can't seem to find a thread devoted to this topic, though it has been briefly broached recently, but here it is: Is the VM an autograph or a copy?
By "autograph" I mean that the VM embodied the first, finished instantiation of a literary work (or whatever it is). (It is of course possible that it was composed on some scratch medium and transferred to the codex.) By "copy" I mean that some earlier MS instantiates the work and what we have is a scribal copy of it.
I'm curious what evidence exists for determining whether it's an autograph or a copy?
Brainstorming, I would suggest that possible evidence for it being a autograph / against it being a copy are:
- No known exemplar of the work
- No known exemplar(s) of the drawings
- No known exemplar of the text
- No known exemplar of the script
- Various page-layout (formatting) effects at end of lines, at beginning of lines, at first lines of "paragraphs," similar "words" in the vertical direction, more? (These suggest that the text was made to fit the medium.)
Possible evidence against autograph / for copy:
- Scribal corrections
- Script / vord-structure seems well planned and sophisticated
Am I missing anything, beside an ability to play devil's advocate?
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