[Conference] Voynich presentation at Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference

[Koen G]

Nick posted about this presentation here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The Thirteenth Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference
Merton College, Oxford
March 31 - April 1, 2017
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

On April 1st, there is a presentation by  Alexandra Marraccini of the University of Chicago: “Asphalt and Bitumen, Sodom and Gomorrah: Placing Yale’s Voynich Manuscript on the Herbal Timeline“.

Yale Beinecke MS 408, colloquially known as the Voynich manuscript, is largely untouched by modern manuscript scholars. Written in an unreadable cipher or language, and of Italianate origin, but also dated to Rudolphine court circles, the manuscript is often treated as a scholarly pariah. This paper attempts to give the Voynich manuscript context for serious iconographic debate using a case study of Salernian and Pseudo- Apuleian herbals and their stemmae. Treating images of the flattened cities of Sodom and Gommorah from Vatican Chig. F VII 158, BL Sloane 4016, and several other exempla from the Bodleian and beyond, this essays situates the Voynich iconography, both in otherwise unidentified foldouts and in the manuscript’s explicitly plant-based portion, within the tradition of Northern Italian herbals of the 14th-15th centuries, which also had strong alchemical and astrological ties. In anchoring the Voynich images to the dateable and traceable herbal manuscript timeline, this paper attempts to re-situate the manuscript as approachable in a truly scholarly context, and to re-characterise it, no longer as an ahistorical artefact, but as an object rooted in a pictorial tradition tied to a particular place and time.

Since Marracinni is a trained art historian, I am quite curious to see what she's got to say on this matter.