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+--- Thread: [split] Commissioned or not? (/thread-2446.html)
RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - -JKP- - 02-08-2018
I think it's possible it was a family project.
Maybe dad designed it and the children assisted. It might account for the scribbles and at least one painter who was too young or too sloppy to do a good job.
RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - DONJCH - 02-08-2018
JKP, yes that seems the simplest explanation to me also.
RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - Koen G - 02-08-2018
(02-08-2018, 05:46 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I guess, if one were to argue that the Voynich was commissioned, one would have to hunt for evidence that supported that claim. I don't see any.But manuscripts were often commissioned, and we know that some weren't only because of author's signatures and the like. So why is it okay to claim "not commissioned" as default position that needn't be demonstrated? As far as I can see we must be agnostic about the matter and can only put forward arguments in favor or against (which can be a valuable exercise even when no position gets proven).
RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - DONJCH - 02-08-2018
Koen, I guess because the VMS is so amateurish in so many ways?
"Provincial" is the official description I think.
RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - -JKP- - 02-08-2018
The Carthusians are a good example of manuscript production that could be quite amateurish (with a certain charm, note the smiling skeletons and rambling text) and yet some of their scribes produced high quality manuscripts for their time. It depended partly on location.
Do a search on Google images and you can see some examples. Some of them have drawings along the side somewhat reminiscent of the VMS:
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RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - Emma May Smith - 02-08-2018
I think the issue of whether the manuscript was commissioned or not is interesting. I hadn't previously thought about it.
One question from me would be whether commissioned manuscripts are more likely to be original or copies/adaptions. I could imagine somebody commissioning the translation of a work (if that's what we have in the VMS) but less rarely something substantially new. Maybe there's a difference here between commissioning a work and commissioning a manuscript?
RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - -JKP- - 02-08-2018
It was not uncommon for nobility to commission the copying of works to build their libraries.
RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - VViews - 03-08-2018
(02-08-2018, 07:56 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But manuscripts were often commissioned, and we know that some weren't only because of author's signatures and the like. So why is it okay to claim "not commissioned" as default position that needn't be demonstrated? As far as I can see we must be agnostic about the matter and can only put forward arguments in favor or against (which can be a valuable exercise even when no position gets proven).
"Often" is only relative.
Based on the Voynich Manuscript's illustrations, we have sections: herbal/botanical, pharmaceutical, balneological/medical, and astronomical/astrological, calendar, recipes.
All of this suggests that the Voynich falls into the scientific, rather than say, religious, category of manuscripts.
So when we look for a likely context of creation, within 15thC manuscript production, we should probably be more specific than what was "often" done for manuscripts in general and look for what was done in the context of production of scientific manuscripts.
We are already, therefore, looking at a small subset of total manuscript production. And here the statistics are quite different from what they would be for other types of manuscripts. Furthermore, even among this subset, we can remove those that were lavishly illustrated for nobility: clearly, the "ugly duckling" Voynich is not one of these luxurious works.
Visiting students would copy scientific texts from libraries in the universities they visited to bring back to their home towns or from their own university's library for their personal, ulterior use. These manuscripts formed a large portion of what was written in this category, but most of them did not survive to reach us because they didn't look nice enough to hold on to. So our ability to compare is even more limited due to this loss, but we can try.
Herbals: they fall into two categories: The expensive "picture book" style, commissioned by the wealthy, and the more "economical" ones, made for reference and teaching. We can easily see which of these two the Voynich belongs to, but unfortunately, that doesn't help much. As Collins (2000) explains, the inexpensive ones have often not survived. And for those that have, it is hard to say what their context of production was: "Copies of herbals were made for erudite scholars who were not medical men, and others were produced by and for specialists in medical or herbal knowledge" (p.310).
So the Herbal category alone might not help, but thanks to the other sections in the Voynich, we can form a better idea.
Medical books were frequently created by the practitioner himself. Arderne's works were, as far as I know, almost all copied by the practitioners who would use the books. These are the type of works that resemble Q20 most closely, with stars in the margins, and tailed paragraph markers.
Balneological works such as De Balneis Puteolanis: as with the herbals, there were richly illustrated copies made for the wealthy, and again, we can clearly see that the Voynich just isn't on par with those. Copies of the De Balneis poem and other works on bathing were also made for reference use by and for practitioners, especially as, in the later middle ages, balneotherapy went from being a freely available popular practice to being a rather lucrative specialization for doctors.
Astrological/astronomical: Strikingly similar illustrations to those in the Voynich are found in the Hausbuchs, and these "common books" were made by and for the scribes themselves, copying works that interested them into a single manuscript.
The likelihood of self-production is also considerable in medieval Jewish scientific works. The proportion of non-commissioned 13th-15thC Jewish scientific manuscripts is actually known: 68% (M. Beit Arie, in Freudenthal, 2011, p.110).
Alchemical works... I won't even get into that, but I think it's close to 100% self-production before it became fashionable in the 16thC (and that partly explains why the illustrative tradition in alchemy begins so late).
RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - DONJCH - 03-08-2018
JKP, the VMS has no religious imagery so the Carthusians would be a red herring.
RE: [split] Commissioned or not? - -JKP- - 03-08-2018
Quote:DONJCH: JKP, the VMS has no religious imagery so the Carthusians would be a red herring.
I wasn't referring to content, I was referring to layout. I thought that was clear from my post.
As I mentioned, some of the Carthusian manuscripts were very professional, while others were very humble, with rambling text (not prelined) and many marginal drawings (but not small ones like one sees in Bibles, larger ones like one sees in the VMS). The humble ones were below professional quality and yet had a sort of charm. It's difficult to find manuscripts with the same layout qualities as the VMS and yet quite a few of the more humble Carthusian manuscripts have the same look-and-feel.
Now, if you look at the geographical origins of the Carthusian manuscripts, it appears that some of the more professional ones come from the Slavic areas, which were nearer to larger centers like Vienna and Prague, seats of government, while a number of the more "humble" ones come from geographically distant locations such as North Yorkshire.
Perhaps there's a common theme here. The VMS is "different" in a number of ways and the Carthusian manuscripts from the more remote areas (for the time) were also "different" in some of the same ways.