04-08-2025, 05:45 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-08-2025, 05:48 PM by Jorge_Stolfi.
Edit Reason: typos
)
Great presentation, Rene! Amazing work!
If I can play the Devil's advocate: we still do not know whether Raphael had actually seen the "600 ducats book" at Rudolf's court, do we?
If he did see it, indeed the VMS should be it.
But if he did not, and only heard of the purchase (which must have left every alchemical book owner in Prague salivating), then his statement would have been just a wild guess, like those of many Voynichologists since then. In this case, my probability of the VMS being that book, or of it ever having ever been in Rudolf's library is very low. (In my reading, Marci is suspending judgement on the whole of Raphael's claim, not just on Bacon's authorship.)
As you know, Kircher was getting a steady stream of interesting news from all over the world and on all sorts of subjects. My guess is that he looked the VMS for a couple of hours at most, and since he could not make heads or tails of it, he told his secretary to file it, and moved on to more rewarding stuff.
I did not know that! When was this discovered?
By the way, back at the first Mondragone conference, I had understood that Rafal Prinke had found that Barschius at some time had some job at the Court, in the Prague Castle. Is that correct?
By another way, I thought you said in the presentation that the currency was not ducats, but florins or thalers. AFAIK the thaler was silver, not gold. Wouldn't it be worth a lot less than those other two?
(This is a thaler that my father used as a keychain fob. Must be a leftorver from when the Veneto belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It weighs ~28 g, so the metal is worth ~30€ now.
But it is from 1780, so I suppose that it is not very likely to have been used by Rudolf to pay for the VMS...)
(04-08-2025, 11:46 AM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.About the point that no other names of earlier owners are given [in Marci's letter], I do not think that this is suspicious at all.
If I can play the Devil's advocate: we still do not know whether Raphael had actually seen the "600 ducats book" at Rudolf's court, do we?
If he did see it, indeed the VMS should be it.
But if he did not, and only heard of the purchase (which must have left every alchemical book owner in Prague salivating), then his statement would have been just a wild guess, like those of many Voynichologists since then. In this case, my probability of the VMS being that book, or of it ever having ever been in Rudolf's library is very low. (In my reading, Marci is suspending judgement on the whole of Raphael's claim, not just on Bacon's authorship.)
Quote:That Marci mentioned Rudolf II to Kircher was certainly due to Rudolf's fame, and to finally get Kircher more interested. (It does not seem to have worked).
As you know, Kircher was getting a steady stream of interesting news from all over the world and on all sorts of subjects. My guess is that he looked the VMS for a couple of hours at most, and since he could not make heads or tails of it, he told his secretary to file it, and moved on to more rewarding stuff.
Quote:What's more, Marci does not only send the MS to Kircher, but also Barschius' notes.
I did not know that! When was this discovered?
By the way, back at the first Mondragone conference, I had understood that Rafal Prinke had found that Barschius at some time had some job at the Court, in the Prague Castle. Is that correct?
By another way, I thought you said in the presentation that the currency was not ducats, but florins or thalers. AFAIK the thaler was silver, not gold. Wouldn't it be worth a lot less than those other two?
(This is a thaler that my father used as a keychain fob. Must be a leftorver from when the Veneto belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It weighs ~28 g, so the metal is worth ~30€ now.
But it is from 1780, so I suppose that it is not very likely to have been used by Rudolf to pay for the VMS...)