The cross and the presence or lack of Christian influences

[MarcoP]

Marco, that's a good point about those crosses in the marginalia. It's strange though... We have a manuscript with an unusual lack of clear christian imagery. Even if the cross held by the q13 nymph is a Cross, then one must still admit that its context is rather unusual.

Hi Koen, the very limited presence of Christian imagery is not unusual in scientific works. The VMS has many peculiarities, but in this respect it is not exceptional.

Think for instance of:

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Arderne NL Sweden X 188

So in the manuscript's contents we have a disconnect from christian tradition, and, in my opinion, various scenes which would need some explaining if they came under the priest's eyes, as a matter of speech.

I agree on the ms not looking like an illuminated bible. As I said, the opinions of those that judge it a medical work (from Barschius to Touwaide) seem well-grounded to me.

I would be curious to know if your allusion to the scenes being unacceptable to the clergy of the time is somehow documented. This would be an interesting subject for a new thread. I am not an expert, but I don't think a learned priest would have been scandalized by the ms: I don't think Kircher was, and the XVII Century was not exactly more open-minded than the XV Century. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the VMS turned out to have been written by friars or under their supervision (like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).


The illustrations You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. prove that in the XIV century there was considerable tolerance for weird images.

The “flying penis” he posted decorates a text of Canon Law (the legal corpus of the Roman Catholic Church).


In the other manuscript, nuns are picking penises from trees.


Maybe things were much stricter in the early XV Century, but I would appreciate some evidence.

Then why, suddenly, in the marginalia, does the scribe feel the need to Christianize his phrase by adding crosses?

Ahahah this really makes it sound funny: the guy running to his desk with an unstoppable urge to Christianize his ms!  
Personally, I see no evidence of anything happening suddenly nor of a Christianizing urge. I just see some annotations that are partly similar to the rest of the book and partly different. I don't think this is unusual for marginal annotations. If the crosses mark a spell, they are not much of a Christianization: it's more popular superstition than the doctrine of the church. Also, images of Jesus and Mary would have been more effective than a naked woman and a goat.

The person who wrote this marginalia clearly had a normal, common reflex which points directly and unambiguously to the medieval christian tradition.

I see two options:
1) The person who wrote the marginal text with the crosses was in fact not involved in creating the manuscript.
2) The person was involved, but as a scribe or copyist, not as a creative mind behind the contents.

I say so because this one marginal note shows a cultural reflex which is largely missing from the rest of the manuscript.

In my opinion, the most striking feature of the marginal annotations (in 17r, 66r, 116v) is that they use the Latin alphabet. Since some of the Latin characters used are similar to those of Voynichese, and in two out of three cases also Voynichese words appear together with those written in the Latin alphabet, I tend to think of them as written by the author but, as I said above, the matter is uncertain.

My opinion (an idea I got from Stephen Bax's paper from which I first came to know of the VMS) is that the author came from a different culture. My personal speculation is that writing the ms could have taken several years and during that period the author came in touch with linguistic and cultural traits that are reflected in the (later) marginal annotations. On the other hand, the color annotations (which are integral to the text) also use the Latin alphabet: its usage is not something that only appears at a second time. As always, many possibilities are open.

As I wrote You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the cross in 79v seems to me something like the Christian symbols in Picatrix: a peripheral element with respect to the main subject of the work.
The crosses in 116v look even more peripheral, since they appear after the main body of text and in a different alphabet.