The Rosettes Page - March 2024

[pjburkshire]

What do you think the Rosettes page (the large fold-out with nine circles at the end of Quire 14) represents?


- I think the Rosettes page represents Heavenly Jerusalem.

- I think the Rosettes page represents a general form of Heaven.

- I think the Rosettes page represents a real place on Earth.

- I have a different idea about the meaning of the Rosettes page.

- I don't know what the Rosettes page represents.


This message board is supposed to be about people sharing ideas. I want to encourage people to share their ideas. I want to know what people believe about the illustrations in the Voynich Manuscript and I want to know why they believe what they believe.

[Mark Knowles]

I have posted about this and I have a very detailed analysis of this page. I think it represents a map of a journey from the Abbey of Saints Nazzaro and Celso to the Council of Basel and back. Which would date this page to after the Council of Basel was declared in 1430. So this page must have been written in the 1430s. Whilst it is technically possible given this dating that the other pages pre-date 1430 it seems most likely to me that the manuscript as a whole dates from the 1430s.

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[RobGea]

I think the Rosettes page represents a kind of "Universe" or "Cosmos" . because there is a T-O map on the top left.

[Koen G]

I think its structure is based off of the biblical description of Heavenly Jerusalem, but it also contains other information, kind of like a diagram.

Which kind of "general heaven" are you talking about? Is there a text we can read to get a better understanding of what this general heaven would have looked like to someone in the 15th century?

[bi3mw]

VM408 folio86v ‘The Rosette Map’: Elements of a Mappa mundi and a map of the Elements
Juergen Wastl1 and Danielle Feger

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[nablator]

I like Koen's ideas, but it can't be a coincidence that so little makes perfect sense. Nearly everything depends on interpretation. It must have been designed that way, to titillate the imagination without giving enough information to make a solid identification of anything. There is probably nothing to identify.

[Mark Knowles]

To me the idea that someone paid for a particularly large piece of vellum for the purpose of producing an essentially meaningless drawing seems to make no sense given the practical purpose that most of the manuscript seems to have. Why couldn't the author have used a normal sized page for the drawing if the details weren't important? There are a lot of specific details on the page and I suggest that they have a meaning. Many people either don't notice those specific details or choose to ignore them.

[pjburkshire]

I think its structure is based off of the biblical description of Heavenly Jerusalem, but it also contains other information, kind of like a diagram.

Which kind of "general heaven" are you talking about? Is there a text we can read to get a better understanding of what this general heaven would have looked like to someone in the 15th century?

I can be flexible. It can mean whatever people want it to mean. I'm not worried about little details right now. I'm just trying to get a general feel for where people are on this issue.

I see we still have a lot of very different ideas on just the Rosettes page. I don't think the Rosettes page is going to be the key to solving the bigger mystery of the overall meaning of the manuscript. Not if we still don't have agreement on if it is a real place on Earth or not a real place on Earth.

I agree if they went to the trouble of making the page so large that it was very important to them. We just don't know what it was that they thought was so important.

[Koen G]

Again though, I'd like to learn more about which sources you base your views on.

[R. Sale]

The reason for various interpretations can sometimes be found in the intentional use of ambiguity.

In addition to the possibilities above, it makes another good place to sequester several circular bands of text with their markers.