Has anyone found any indirect mentions of the VMS? Possibly someone mentioning a strange book with naked nymphs in it? Its possible someone saw it in the first 200 yrs and wrote about it?
Here's a new VMS documentary in the series "Hidden Relics" on the Travel Channel, with interviews from myself, Claire Bowern, Bill Sherman, and Richard Santacoloma. It turned out well, I think.
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You'll need to sign in with your cable provider to stream it.
Since vetted threads have yet to sprout, perhaps there are things that the VMs artist clearly needed to know in order to draw the illustrations found in the VMs today. What did this person know and see and transcribe in this text?
Feel free to contribute:
I'll lead off with heraldry: Heraldry was significant throughout the golden age of Burgundy. The jousts at Arras were historical. VMs heraldry is limited, subtle and disguised. It can barely be seen on the bathing tubs of VMs Pisces and the two Aries pages. A more specific and conclusive example can be seen through the identification of the nebuly line. The VMs artist's knowledge of the nebuly line is demonstrated by its use in the VMs Cosmos. The nebuly line is a cosmic boundary. It's all part of Social Media 1435 > of the years c. 1435.
Provenance of the Oresme cosmos is to the library of Jean, Duc du Berry (d. 1416). And one of the best examples of a nebuly line as a cosmic boundary in historical images is in the Berry Apocalypse, also belonging to the same duke. Of course, the books survived.
What else might the VMs artist have known? <<And skillfully have misrepresented in these illustrations.>>
You will likely be pleased to hear that the Beinecke launched a new digital repository today with a MUCH improved viewer that easily allows for downloading images or a PDF of a manuscript, sharing images in different shared-canvas viewers like Mirador, mirroring into other viewers using the IIIF manifest, and much more. Here's the new direct link for the VMS:
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I believe the key to translating the Voynich Manuscript. Is within the manuscript itself. If taken that one or two pages are the key to translating the manuscript. Based on written language of the time period. And using certain key pages to translate to those languages. As most times the Manuscript is looked at that the entire of it needs translating. When a translation key may have been in-bedded within the text itself.. Reference Page 114 and 119 of the manuscript may help. Pages 183 to 205 maybe a glossary of sorts for the manuscript. Multiple Ancient written languages symbols are used. Considering that when looking to decipher maybe what is missing.
I remember reading a long time ago (forgotten where and who posted) that the voynich text seems to have 2 shapes at the core of many of its glyphs. These are the slanted i, and the c shape (e in EVA). Basically, quite a few of the other characters can be created by starting from these two shapes, and expanding on them somehow. I can’t remember who posted this, or which website I’d read it on, but for some reason it stuck with me. I had another look into it this week, and made an observation I hadn’t noticed before. Presumably others have noticed this way quicker than me, but I wanted to share my thoughts, and ask the more experienced collective their thoughts. My thoughts are that, not only do a lot of the glyphs start with either a i or a e (referred to as “i” or “c” now for simplification), they seem to also have a twin glyph, which appears to be the exact same shape, apart from having the “i” or “c” as their ‘starting point’. I have made a table to demonstrate what I mean, which is below. As you can see, I have put the “c” glyphs on the left and the “i” glyphs on the right.
At the bottom of the table, I have also included the gallows glyphs. The reason for this is that, while not made from the “c” and “i” shapes like the rest of the glyphs, they still definitely have a distinctive ‘twin’ with which they can be linked. The only difference between the gallows is at the top left of the vertical stick, where on the left hand column the stroke moves backward first, forming a sort of “mini c” , and on the right column, the stroke moves immediately to the right, which could almost be a small “i”… … hang on… Nah… There can’t be anything in that, can there? Anyway, besides that, we still have several shapes which are unaccounted for. O should certainly be a candidate for the “c” column, as should the bridged c’s, I should imagine. But my main point for writing this is the following question, which I wanted to put to everyone. Do you think the person who designed the voynich text deliberately chose shapes (pre-existing latin letters or otherwise) which had a twinned shape? In which case, shouldn’t ALL voynich glyphs have a twin? And if so, how do we group the remaining shapes? There seems to be far too many glyphs with “c” at the root compared with “i” What about the glyphs that DONT have a twin. Are these intermediaries? It would be interesting if the shapes were chosen in this way based on some kind of unknown rules of their alphabet or pronunciation. Perhaps if this is a cypher text (and I’m on the fence about whether it is or not), the twin glyphs had the same value, but one was a negative value (or had to be treated/decoded opposite to its counterpart)? Or when laid out on a wheel, if the “c” glyph was on one side of the perimeter and the twin glyph fell exactly opposite?
NONE of which helps us decipher the text I know. I have a few other ideas which I’m happy to be talked down from. On the diagram I made, on the right of the main column I have grouped some other glyphs and attempted to ‘twin’ these also. The “g” shape and “x” shaped glyphs I grouped together because they are both drawn by adding a roughly vertical line from their upper edge, which falls below the main text line, and slightly to the left. And what about the “a”? Why did I position this as twinned to the “bridged c” glyph in the “i” column? Well, I speculated that perhaps the “a” is made by adding a c shape onto the front of the “i”. In order to create a twin of this shape, the text designer couldn’t have simply put a c on the front of a pre-existing “c”, or it would have looked like two “c” glyphs back to back. So instead, the scribe draws a line over the top of the two, showing that this is to be treated as one glyph. Well, there you have it. That’s my “what if” for the time being. I am very happy for people to say it’s silly, and it certainly has a lot of holes. I haven’t accounted for O and 4 and a few other minor glyphs, simply because I couldn’t decide how to ‘twin’ them. But that’s my idea for the time being. Twins. What does everyone think?
I wonder if the thing in the middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. might allude to physical pins that were used for rotating elements, and thus evoke the idea of a volvelle without actually making one. I thought so after seeing this page:
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Just for fun, I decided to download a photo editing program and attempt to 'clean up' the rosettes page. I carefully airbrushed out the dark lines and damaged caused by the folds in the vellum, and then did my best to redraw in any of the drawings and text which had been lost due to repeated folding of the page.
I'm a beginner at studying Voynich, but I'm even more of a newbie at photo editing so I'm sure most could do better. And I fully recommend people to try it themselves! The reason? By zooming up very close to the document, and carefully removing imperfections, it forced me to scrutinize the page even more closely than I had done before, and I actually noticed a lot of things I hadn't picked up on before.
I've attached a scaled down image to show my attempts. If anyone would like a full-page large size copy of the image, I'm happy to send one across, but with enough time and patience, I'm confident my own attempts could be far surpassed!
PS, as the image is still quite large, the image attached doesn't show up fully in the post.. you have to right-click and go to "show image" to see the full page... sorry!
PPS... is it sacrilegious to mess around with the document images like this?!?
