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• L. Rauwolf

  N._N. > 03-08-2025, 05:48 PM

  Hello everyone and thank you to everyone involved in the talks and organisation today. I would like to take this opportunity to start a topic on Leonhard Rauwolf, as I have some thoughts on his role. This is of course in reference to the research conducted by René Zandbergen (including the presentation today) and Stefan Guzy, who, in my opinion, have made a very convincing case for Widemann as the person who sold the manuscript to Rudolf. However, as a short tl, dr: I am quite skeptical of the theories about Rauwolf's role, and would not consider him a much more likely candidate for a previous owner than any other of Widemann's contacts.
  
  Unfortunately, this opinion is not based on any archival material or other new findings. I hope to have managed to get my hands on most relevant publications including S. Guzy's elusive German-language article, although I could only read it at a library in a break while working on my actual project, so my apologies if there is something I misrepresent. Beyond that, my thoughts here are informed by my own studies on early modern provenance, book acquisitions, history of knowledge etc. which was a core element of my PhD thesis, in which somehow Rauwolf is mentioned exactly once.
  
  The core question I started asking myself regarding the manuscript's history from Widemann to Kircher (which I will treat as a given here, since there is little point in discussing several aspects at once): When and why did knowledge about the previous owner(s) end? Obviously, Widemann himself must have known how he acquired the book. Mnišovský, Barschius and Marci must have had additional knowledge beyond the little that is mentioned in the letters to Kircher. The latter two may have only sent information that they thought would encourage Kircher to take an interest in the matter, but unless they knew the manuscript was a hoax, they probably did not misrepresent their information on purpose. So, why did they convey this exact information to Kircher? Let me structure my assumptions on the matter a bit:
  
  1. It makes sense to not mention all the less relevant people such as Widemann, Geizkofler, Tepenec and whoever might have owned it after them. Kircher would not have known them and they provide little additional value for the understanding of the manuscript. Therefore, there is no insight to be gained from this omission.
  
  2. 'Name-dropping' the emperors, including the price of sale, and Bacon is reasonable to draw Kircher's interest. Mentioning Mnišovský, who, by the way he is described, Marci did Kircher not expect to be familiar with, seems like an attempt of Marci to describe the Bacon-theory without fully owning it. This all is logical as well in my opinion.
  
  3. Regarding Rauwolf the question is: If the Barschius-Marci generation of Voynich scholars was aware of his involvement, would they have mentioned him? I think the answer is almost certainly yes. After Kircher's "success" with hieroglyphs, which Barschius even mentions, it would be strange to omit such a direct connection to an "oriental" origin and rather mention it indirectly like Barschius did. Instead, Marci offers a geographically opposing explanation in the follow-up letter, which I would consider unlikely if they had any solid information on Rauwolf or even just a vague record of the manuscript's "oriental" origin. From my research, Rauwolf was also relatively well known in the 17th and 18th century and respected as a overseas traveller with a scholarly background, which would have been another reason to convey this information to Kircher.
  
  4. It also seems unlikely to me that such potentially relevant information as a previous ownership by Rauwolf was lost in the less than 40 years since the sale to Rudolf, while the exact price was still discussed. Perhaps Rudolf could have only mentioned the value to highlight the generosity of his gift to Tepenec, if that was how the book was transferred between them - there are possible explanations for why Rauwolf was forgotten in that time frame. However, because there seems to have been a significant level of discussion about the cipher manuscript in Prague in the 1600s and several people involved in the transactions, it is hard to imagine a particular point at which the information was lost, be it through death or the deliberate decision to not provide it to others.
  
  5. The most likely candidate to have obscured the manuscript's provenance before Widemann is actually Widemann himself. First, he had the opportunity, in contrast to the later scenarios where a larger number of people had knowledge of relevant events. Second, he had a financial motive: The value of a manuscript depended significantly on its previous owners or author(s), meaning Widemann had an incentive to tell the most enticing story to his potential customer. I think Rauwolf might have been a reasonably convincing (=valuabe) background story, so there would probably be no need to make up another explanation, such as possibly one involving Kelly and England that might have led Mnišovský to his theory. The only somewhat realistic scenario I can come up with where Widemann omits the connection to Rauwolf is one where he obtained the manuscript in a not exactly clean way, i. e. he simply kept it after the Rauwolfs' death and sold it as soon as no heirs claimed it, this would fit the timeline reasonably well. But this is pure conjecture and certainly less plausible than a number of theories of pre-Widemann ownership that do not involve Rauwolf at all.
  
  In summary, while what I write here is just a mix of assumptions, probabilities and context clues, in my opinion, nothing really more convincing is available in favor of Rauwolf's ownership. Therefore, it seems more likely that Wiedemann had acquired the manuscript from someone else than that Rauwolf's involvement and the implications in terms of its origin were forgotten by the time Barschius and Marci wrote their letters.
  
  That's it, I hope posts like this one are at least as welcome here as another brilliant theory on which language the cipher is derived from... I would of course gladly discuss this further and plan to be around here a bit in the future, focusing primarily on provenance and history.

• RE: L. Rauwolf

  ReneZ > 04-08-2025, 11:46 AM

  Many thanks for your interest and your feedback!
  
  It will be difficult to weigh the likelihood that Wideman obtained the MS from Rauwolf. 
  I fully agree that this is far from certain, and one can speculate a lot back and forth without really getting anywhere. 
  I do not know what Stefan Guzy may have seen that makes him more confident than I am.
  
  At the same time, Rauwolf remains the best candidate that we know of, due to his interest in herbs and medicine, but the problem is with all the people that we do not know of.
  
  Wideman's library catalogue has been in the process of being published for many years now, by Carlos Gilly, but I am not aware that this edition is available now. Should this be out, it would be very interesting. If it includes indications that Wideman owned other books that trace back to Rauwolf, it makes his case stronger.
  
  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? 
  
  It was not unusual for owners to write their names in books, and it is even possible that there was something about this on the original inside cover. If so, this was lost latest when the Jesuits gave it its present cover. 
  
  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).
  What's more, Marci does not only send the MS to Kircher, but also Barschius' notes. These may just have been translation attempts, but may also have included other information. It is really too bad that these do not seem to have survived.

• RE: L. Rauwolf

  Jorge_Stolfi > 04-08-2025, 05:45 PM

  Great presentation, Rene!  Amazing work!
  
  

  (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...)

• RE: L. Rauwolf

  N._N. > 04-08-2025, 08:24 PM

  Thank you for your reply!
  
  

  (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.

• RE: L. Rauwolf

  ReneZ > 05-08-2025, 12:37 AM

  (04-08-2025, 05:45 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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,

  
  Indeed, there is a remaining chance that Mnisowsky was mistaken about exactly which book had been sold for 600 ducats, but the risk seems small, for several reasons. 
  (In any case, this is one of the reasons why I used the word 'probable' in the title of the talk).
  
  First of all, while both Raphael and Marci are relatively 'no-name' people for almost all of us now, they were both high-ranking and highly educated people with close connections to the court. They could be called 'brilliant' in their days.
  Raphael would not have seen the MS in 1599, I think, but his voluntary statements (unrelated to this MS) about his intimacy with Rudolf's books indicates that he knew what he was talking about. 
  Had this been another 100-Taler book, we could have had more serious doubts, but the price is indeed high enough to stand out.
  Finally, our doubt is one out of general principle. We have no particular reason to suspect that he was wrong.
  But the whole thing remains subjective.
  
  That Marci also sent Barschius' notes is in the Marci letter itself. These notes may have been lost at various points in time.
  
  

  (04-08-2025, 05:45 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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?

  
  Yes, it should be in his biography, for which I sent a link yesterday.
  
  

  (04-08-2025, 05:45 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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?

  
  Rudolf's finance records have a very large number of references to prices and from some of these we can see conversion rates. The majority of acquisitions is in (silver) Taler or in (gold) florins. Around the time of interest, the florin was 60 'Kreuzer' and the Taler was 70 'Kreuzer', according to what I have seen. After the 1620's, the Taler was devaluated very significently, so this no longer holds true.
  
  A small number of acquisitions refer to other gold coins: ducats and crowns ('Kronen'). Presumably, these were the physical coins that were involved. They did not seem to have a fixed exchange ratio, and as far as I can tell they would be a bit more valuable than the florin.
  Here's an interesting puzzle:
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  If you want to try, but can't figure out the German, let me know.

• RE: L. Rauwolf

  ReneZ > 05-08-2025, 01:15 AM

  (04-08-2025, 08:24 PM)N._N. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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. ...

  
  For me, following are the arguments that count the most in this question:
  
  - Indeed, Rudolf must have known what he was buying. He may have learnt this from Geizkofler, who lived in Augsburg, and must have seen the book before and heard its story. The other Paracelsus manuscripts would also have been of interest for him but not worth several hundred florins
  - Rudolf had already bought Rauwolf's herbaria in 1593
  - This is not the sort of book Wideman could afford to buy. It was probably given (or left) to him
  - If it was presented to Rudolf as a Bacon book (we don't know), it may still have come from Rauwolf's library
  
  There aren't many candidates (that we know of) who could have given/left this book to Wideman.
  It wasn't material for copying.
  Beside Rauwolf there were the Rosenbergs, as I mentioned in the talk, but there is also his noble sponsor in Padova. From Guzy's paper:
  
  

  Quote:Er immatrikulierte sich – vielleicht auch in Erinnerung des Baderstandes seines Vaters – daher im Mai 1582 in Padua, um dort nach einem Semester Medizin promoviert zu werden, jedoch nicht auf dem üblichen Hochschulweg, sondern etwas zweifelhaft als Doctor bullatis von einem dafür bevollmächtigten Adeligen, in diesem Fall Graf Fernando de Amadis. 242

  
  

  Quote:242: Lucia Rossetti (Hrsg.): Matricula nationis Germanicae artistarum in Gymnasio Patavino (1553–1721) (Acta nationis Germanicae, Bd. 3). Padova 1986, S. 53 (Carolus Widemann Augustanus, nachgetragen: Doctor. In patria praxin agit feliciter); Elda Martellozzo Forin: Acta Graduum Academicorum Gymnasii Patavini. Bd. 4: 1591–1600. Roma 2008, S. 188.

  
  This seems worth following up.

• RE: L. Rauwolf

  N._N. > 05-08-2025, 08:24 PM

  (05-08-2025, 01:15 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- This is not the sort of book Wideman could afford to buy. It was probably given (or left) to him

  
  This is an interesting observation that would certainly limit the number of realistic candidates. I assume this is mostly based on the price that Rudolf paid in this case and others? Your point about the Paracelsus manuscripts seems convincing to me as well. However, Widemann may have marked up the Voynich manuscript significantly. I can see an indecipherable manuscript selling for less than one would expect based on the illustrations etc., which could place it within the price range that Widemann would have been willing and able to pay. It is not at all unusal for early modern scholars to spend disproportionate amounts of money on books and manuscripts compared to their salaries
  
  The book market of the late 16th/early 17th century in the broadest sense, including rare prints, manuscripts etc. as well as all kinds of transfers that are not sales, is something I am really interested in and will research further if I have the time. My understanding is mostly based on the 18th century, where the volume of printed books, the role of libraries and several other factors just different, so while there is certainly a level of continuity, there are also large differences.

• RE: L. Rauwolf

  Koen G > 05-08-2025, 09:03 PM

  Not many people are able to do this kind of research given the language barriers often involved. It would certainly be great if you could eventually shed some more light on the matter.
  
  By the way, Rene, I loved the detail of the book cover in your presentation. Even though it's highly speculative, it's fun to imagine that the VM may have looked like this.

• RE: L. Rauwolf

  Garlonga > 08-08-2025, 06:26 PM

  Hello, about Widemann's library catalogues mentioned by Carlos Gilly in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (in German):
  
  ...(Band 6) "Bei den 13 erhaltenen Verzeichnissen von Handschriften aus dem Besitz des Augsburger Stadtarztes Karl Widemann (11 in Kassel und je eines in Bremen und Wolfenbüttel)...
  
  I've been looking at the 11 lists in Kassel You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (from 113:53r on) for a couple weeks (just one of them has 1000 items listed) but for lack of knowledge and experience I'm missing many cool books, names and references, and can only spot the obvious mentions of Trithemius or Kelley (122:57v items 97 and 108 and other pages), Bacon (124:58v item 128, and other pages), ...Steganographia ad imitatioem trithemiae (excuse my probably wrong spelling)... (127:60r item 34 - 131:62r item 31), something with Astronomy and Imperator Rudolphi II (140:66v item 106), steganographia again (143:68r item 178), long etc...
  
  I'm new here so I hesitated to post this thinking it may be well known (plus I haven't found anything shocking yet), but after watching ReneZ's presentation and reading this thread I thought I'd risk making an ass of myself just in case.

• RE: L. Rauwolf

  N._N. > 08-08-2025, 09:51 PM

  Thanks for linking the digitized version. According to the publisher's homepage (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), the volumes by C. Gilly are supposed to be published starting in 2040 (!), so it might not be a bad idea to explore the scans beforehand... well, probably the date is not correct, but with none of the volumes published yet and the Widemann catalogues being volume 6, it might take some time. 
  Have you tried running it through transcribus or similar software? Due to the sometimes messy handwriting and mix of Latin and German, the results may not be great, but it's worth a try.
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