Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

[Jorge_Stolfi]

First, my current working hypothesis: The VMS is a compendium of midwifery knowledge compiled during the turmoils within and around the Knights Hospitaller and the rise of the Aragonese, and written in a specifically for this purpose designed and constructed script - on Malta, in the first decades of the 15th. century.  Please note, that I honestly doubt this is the ultimate solution - but I assume it's a good pivot point for further investigations.

So now, challenge me, roast me. As sooner I know where my false assumptions are, the sooner I can adopt my approach.

Well, one objection is that the VMS consists of at least five separate sections, with no visible link between them other than the script and language and the style of writing and drawing:

• Herbal + Pharmaceutical
  
• Astronomical + Cosmological
  
• Astrological (the Zodiac)
  
• Biological (or Anatomical, Balneological, etc.)
  
• Starred Paragraphs (or Recipes)
  

Only the Biological section has elements that could be considered related to midwifery.  But even in that case the interpretation seems to be rather stretched.  The top image on f77v has been claimed to represent the uterus with ovaries and Fallopian tubes; but the position of the latter is wrong, and what should we make of the bifurcated tubes at the very top, or of the three pendants at the bottom of the  "uterus"?  Could that illustration instead be a sorry attempt to illustrate the kidneys and bladder?

None of the other images in that section seem to be about pregnancy or delivery.  There is not a single baby in that section. 

The Herbal and Pharmaceutical sections seem to be what they seem to be, lists of plants and their medical properties.  But the sheer number of plants argues against them being related to midwifery.  Those sections look more like other herbals of the time: that is, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for every kind of condition and use (including bleaching hair, making one invisible, hardening iron, ...)

I gather that medical books of the time often connected medicine to astrology, so the Zodiac section could be part of that.  But, again, I don't see anything in that section that suggests a connection to medicine, much less midwifery; and I don't see anything in the other sections (besides Astro+Cosmo) that suggests a connection to astrology. 

Moreover, I imagine that midwives at the time (and for many centuries before and after) were generally practical people with no formal studies and no inclination to them.   "Ordinary Jane Does" as you write.  So I would expect that a manual of midwifery would be down-to-earth, packed with practical advice and scarce on theoretical digressions (like astrological influences).

My own theory is that the VMS is a collection of several independent treatises, written by distinct authors in separate times and places, that were copied/translated/summarized/adapted by the VMS Author, with no attempt to connect or harmonize them.  In that case, your theory at best would apply to the Biological section only.

No secret society behind it, no cryptography, no deeper metaphorical setup constructing deeper enlighment only to share with the rulers who are worth to know in the sight of God.

I happen to agree with this part...

And not necessarily funded in far-away countries.

Well, Malta is not quite Europe's backyard...

if you see a bathing female nude, I assume that Occam's razor surely suggest a bathing nude in first place and not some half-divine figure from forthcoming apocalypses, the power of Qi or similar.  Let's keep it simple.

Makes sense...  but, by the same argument: if gestation, delivery, and babies are not depicted anywhere, we should assume that the book is not about those things...

Mulieres Sti. Johannis and their staff (mostly local woman)  were active [in Malta], too, and as far historians tell us, scientifically leading.

 
Can you elaborate on that "scientifically leading" aspect? 

4. Beside the work on further evidences that this might have been the key to the alphabet and maybe additional estimations there, I'm working on a second corpus lingustic topic, and this is to analyze, whether it is at least not totally unlikely the VMS was written (or better dictated) in a semitic language. I adopted a method here from pattern recognition and I named it "fake lemmata". This includes the setup of word lists (including lists for hapax and dislegomena) and calculate entropy and collocations. Whenever an observed pattern turns out to be significant (fake lemma) it is replaced in a derivated corpus (shadow corpus) as a dedicated token. This is done iteratively. For semitic languages it is expected, that the collocations would rise in distinctiveness and the distribution will be more stable. This comes with several stages of root lexica, word lengthes, TTR, change of Zipf curves, entropy and more Information to analyse. This is, of course, not only done for VMS but also for Maltese, Siculo-arabian, classic Arabian, Hebrew and several addional comparison corpora.  The amount of operations is then the measure to compare, like, but not the same as the Levenshtein distance.

Oops, this technical word salad sounds suspiciously like output of a lalamo...

All the best, --stolfi