I just read the paper You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. relevant because Rauwolf is one of the names often discussed in reconstruction of the VMS provenance. Quoting some relevant passages:
"The plants he [Rauwolf] collected formed the first two books of his plant collection. Rauwolf graduated in 1562 from the University of Valence, Dauphiné (Dannenfeldt 1968). In 1563, he carried out his "peregrinatio academica" traveling through the Alps to N. Italy. On the way, he collected the plants that formed the third book herbarium. Rauwolf visited Padua, Verona, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, Modena, Piacenza, Parma, Milan, and Como, heading forward through Switzerland to Germany. During this homeward journey, Rauwolf visited Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) in Zurich, accompanied by his friend and classmate from Montpellier, Johann Bauhin (1541–1613) (Durling 1965).
According to Legré (1900), that same year, Rauwolf met in Augsburg with Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), to which he presented the plants he had collected in France and Italy, and presumably accepted Clusius’ annotations and corrections of several plant names. Doubting Legré’s argument, Ganzinger (1963) attributed the numerous annotations and corrections found in Rauwolf’s herbaria to Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566), suggesting that Rauwolf, on his way back to Augsburg in 1563, also visited Fuchs, his former teacher in Tübingen.
In 1571, Rauwolf was appointed city physician of Augsburg, a position that he, as a devoted Protestant, lost 17 years later due to religious conflicts.Thereby getting into financial difficulties, he decided to sell his herbaria, which he achieved for a remarkable price, 310 Reichstaler, which had to be paid to Rauwolf by the imperial chamber.The four book herbaria were bought in 1593 by a commissioner of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II..."
I know that Rauwolf -> Widemann-> Rudolf is a likely chain that people often suggest. When reading this paper, though, I was also quite struck by the fact that Rauwolf's "pergrinatio academica" took him directly through the regions where we expect the VMS likely originated- it seems relatively plausible that Rauwolf could have obtained the VMS at some point in 1562 or 1563. I'm curious about whether his colleagues in that region (Clusius and Gessner), both of whom were avid curiosity collectors and who have extant correspondence in libraries, have been investigated as possible Voynich-owners or annotators. The only You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. doesn't seem to mention an exchange of books aside from the one Rauwolf wrote, but I haven't found an online archive of Gessner's letters yet. Fuchs may also be worth looking into!