Ninja Member, escape: Alchemy Post f77r

[stellar]

I believe escape is correct in ascertaining the correct meaning for alchemy in the Voynich text.  The welsh numerology cipher I use verifies his findings.  It is amazing that he did it with out a cipher!

[stellar]

Wales and the connection to the VMS can be traced back to Edward Kelly who was received in the Court of Rudolf the II. Edward Kelly had his ears cutoff for forgery by the Tudor Dynasty and soon after fled to Wales.  While in Wales Edward Kelly found a book, “The Book of Dunstan”, known to deal with alchemy or was it the VMS.  The fact that Edward Kelly was an alchemist and dabbled with the transmutation of gold; as the elixir of the Philosophers Stone helped him to be received into the Court of Rudolf the II. In fact it is known that the VMS was sold to Rudolf for 600 ducats.  Also Edward Kelly was purported to be fluent in Latin and some Greek. Nick Pelling, a prominent researcher of the Voynich Manuscript, has theorized that the, “Book of Dunstan” is the VMS.

Hi everyone,
Not long ago, I mentioned having read a passage from C.A.Burland's "The Arts of the Alchemists", which mentioned that: "it was revealed to [Kelly] that [the red powder] had been hidden by Saint Dunstan & so had remained intact for some six centuries before Kelly's discovery".
In other sources, it is mentioned that a mysterious book and two ivory spheres of powder had been found (or perhaps just sold on?) together - so this book is surely the "Boke of Dunstan" that was being referred to.
Put them all together, and it is clear that Kelly needed to have had the source of the discovery revealed to him in order to know where they had come from - that is, the manuscript/book would have arrived unattributed, and without any other evidence of authorship in the text itself.
I would be extremely surprised if the other surviving manuscripts attributed to Dunstan fail to bear his name prominently - attribution was a key part of medieval thought and belief.
Of course, I take this to imply that Kelly's "Boke of Dunstan" probably bore no relation to any other manuscript attributed to Dunstan. This supports the view that this was in fact the VMS.
The only logical objection remaining would be to the question of "how would Kelly have taken notes from the VMS"?
Bearing in mind that we have missing quires and missing pages (that were lost post-foliation) (which I think is Kelly's handwriting, with Dee's handwriting on the quire-numbers), and that Kelly had a life-or-death need to understand the alchemical section of the Book of Dunstan (he'd run out of powder, and didn't know how to make any more), my inference is that many of the missing pages may have had more specifically alchemical content - perhaps pictures of stills etc.
This would be consistent with the overall structure of the VMS being essentially a compilation of notes from whatever sources relevant to the owner's lab/workshop/practice.
Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

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