04-08-2025, 08:24 PM
Thank you for your reply!
This is basically my point: I agree that this is not suspicious for most transfers of the manuscript or most previous owners. Kircher would not have cared which scholar in Prague owned it before Barschius when earlier information is available.
However, for the sale to Rudolf, it was important to Widemann to give a convincing backstory, particularly for a manuscript that does not offer much information on its own. Both a collector who buys based on factors such as rarity or general appeal and someone interested in the contents behind the cipher would want to know as much as possible before committing to a transaction. I am quite certain that a manuscript where Widemann claims that Rauwolf brought back from his travels would have sold for more than one where all Widemann offers in terms of backstory is that he bought it from some random manuscript dealer without additional information. Mentioning Bacon as the possible creator would have had a similar effect as the Rauwolf angle. But why lie when the truth or half-truth works as well if Rauwolf was indeed the previous owner?
Since Barschius mentioned theories of an 'oriental' origin to Kircher, Barschius would have been interested in Rauwolf as well. Since Mnišovský and Marci do not seem to favor this theory, there was almost certainly no definitive knowledge about Rauwolf left at that point. As I said, I think its relatively unlikely that this information was lost in Prague where a significant number of people seem to have been interested in the manuscript and had overlaping life spans into the late 1500s. Since we only have assumptions and probabilities for all scenarios here, this logic reduces the chances of Rauwolf's ownership to a degree that I no longer consider him a particularly convincing candidate.
(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, I do not think that this is suspicious at all.
While we may be quite interested in this, this would not have been the case at that time at all.
Who would care who owned a certain book before?
This is basically my point: I agree that this is not suspicious for most transfers of the manuscript or most previous owners. Kircher would not have cared which scholar in Prague owned it before Barschius when earlier information is available.
However, for the sale to Rudolf, it was important to Widemann to give a convincing backstory, particularly for a manuscript that does not offer much information on its own. Both a collector who buys based on factors such as rarity or general appeal and someone interested in the contents behind the cipher would want to know as much as possible before committing to a transaction. I am quite certain that a manuscript where Widemann claims that Rauwolf brought back from his travels would have sold for more than one where all Widemann offers in terms of backstory is that he bought it from some random manuscript dealer without additional information. Mentioning Bacon as the possible creator would have had a similar effect as the Rauwolf angle. But why lie when the truth or half-truth works as well if Rauwolf was indeed the previous owner?
Since Barschius mentioned theories of an 'oriental' origin to Kircher, Barschius would have been interested in Rauwolf as well. Since Mnišovský and Marci do not seem to favor this theory, there was almost certainly no definitive knowledge about Rauwolf left at that point. As I said, I think its relatively unlikely that this information was lost in Prague where a significant number of people seem to have been interested in the manuscript and had overlaping life spans into the late 1500s. Since we only have assumptions and probabilities for all scenarios here, this logic reduces the chances of Rauwolf's ownership to a degree that I no longer consider him a particularly convincing candidate.