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Zodiac Imagery: Manuscript Collection/Discussion
- Zodiac Imagery: Manuscript Collection/Discussion
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Zodiac Imagery: Manuscript Collection/Discussion
eggyk > 2 hours ago
Hello all,
As many of the manuscripts being logged for the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. thread include calendars, I have created a sheet to log all of the instances of zodiac imagery within the manuscripts that have been found (zodiacs are often found near calendars). It was becoming more and more difficult to find and remember which entries were interesting as the list grew. My hope is to use this thread as a home base for myself and others who wish to collate, compare and discuss that imagery and their sequencing in general. I hope that with enough sequences, we may be able to start talking statistically about the general dating and location of the sequence based on general trends, similar to what has begun to happen with the month names.
More specifically, this thread is about the generalisation and categorisation of sequences and styles across digitised manuscripts in order to come to a better understanding of what was standard, along with when/where. It is also to permanently catalogue the exact sources along with their context (the whole sequence, the use case, the location, the language, the handwriting, connected works), so that future efforts may be able to analyse them. Hopefully, we will be able to compare those trends and patterns (if they exist) with the sequence found in the VMS, perhaps quantitatively, probably subjectively.
Finding connected works or patterns may also help in locating more examples. For instance, if we know voynichy lions accompany works on bloodletting, searching out bloodletting works may lead us to voynichy lions.
I'm aware that many previous threads discussing various aspects of the VMS zodiacs exist like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and that previous collections of imagery exist. The issue is that many/most of the sources for the imagery in those threads are no longer easily findable, the data sometimes not easily usable (or full of dead links), often with discussions that are now years untouched. This spreadsheet and thread are intended as a continuation of that work, while collecting and archiving the sources in a different way.
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The sheet
Link: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(yes, this is the same spreadsheet I use for the month names.. its easier to work that way)
The sheet 'Imagery Categorisation' contains headers for each zodiac symbol, with colour codes to show which symbols are within each source. There are also headers for 'labours of the months', 'planetary imagery' (normally the planets personified and depicted with zodiac symbols), and a catch all 'other' for other interesting/relevant imagery.
Unlike the month names, this sheet does not set out to score the sequences (yet), only to collect them. If we can work out a way in the future to score the "voynichy-ness" of the sequences, we can use the data collected here to do so.
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This thread can also serve as a place for people to post/cite instances of medieval zodiac imagery, especially in cases where the imagery is not interesting enough on its own to merit a seperate thread. So please feel free to post examples, preferably including the following info so they can be added easily:
-Title + Manuscript reference/number
-Link(s)
-Contents (what is in the source and where)
For searchability, detailed references are better - "Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Ms 34" instead of just "Ms 34".
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Understandably, many of the manuscript examples in this spreadsheet were already seperately found numerous times, and their zodiac imagery posted across those previous threads. If anyone still has repositories of zodiac imagery and are happy for me to try and log them in this way (preferably with the original manuscript source or a potential way to find it), please share! I am happy to go through and do some digging on dates, locations and other info for the manuscripts. And again, I apologise that this will almost certainly cover already covered ground at various points; I appreciate a lot of work has been done already.
As of the writing of this post, there are only ~60 manuscripts containing zodiac imagery logged on the spreadsheet out of the ~350 entries i've gone through so far. There are currently around another 200 for me to go through and check which I will do over the next day or so.