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Why would Ethel Voynich say the MS-408 was found in a Castle?
- Why would Ethel Voynich say the MS-408 was found in a Castle?
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Why would Ethel Voynich say the MS-408 was found in a Castle?
MV_IO > Yesterday, 01:09 AM
I purchased the book, "THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT"
Edited by Raymond Clemens ~ With an Introduction by Deborah Harkness
Dear Readers,
I was wondering why would Ethel Voynich state in a letter from within the book that the MS-408 was found in a castle near Frascati?
Wilfrid Voynich stated the MS-408 was found in a Castle in Southern Europe. Other info locates it at "Villa Mondragone". What were they hiding? Or better yet why the mix up?
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RE: Why would Ethel Voynich say the MS-408 was found in a Castle?
oshfdk > Yesterday, 08:32 AM
As far as I understand it, the purchase could be considered illegal or problematic at the time, because the government of Italy was attempting to confiscate all Jesuit archives and all books that had been parts of it or something like that. So it wasn't about hiding the place, it was about hiding who it was bought from exactly and part of which collection it was originally. Maybe it was requested by the seller that the origin of the books remains a secret. I didn't study this in detail, but I think the following page has more on this: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -
RE: Why would Ethel Voynich say the MS-408 was found in a Castle?
Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 11:30 AM
(Yesterday, 01:09 AM)MV_IO Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I was wondering why would Ethel Voynich state in a letter from within the book that the MS-408 was found in a castle near Frascati?
The Official Provenance story says that the VMS was part of a stash of several hundred books from the Pontifical University and other sources that were hidden by the Jesuits in some place near Rome, in ~1860, to save them from confiscation by the new Italian state. Some 300 of those books were sold by the Jesuits to the Vatican Library around 1911. Some 30 of those ~300 books were apparently diverted before they got to the Vatican, and ended up in Wilfrid's possession. Among them there is an undescribed "XV century manuscript" that is supposed to be the VMS.
Wilfrid repeatedly lied about the provenance of the book -- "Castle in Southern Europe", "Villa Mondragone", etc. Perhaps to help the Jesuits keep the existence of that stash secret. Perhaps to protect his Jesuit friends from legal and political trouble. The Italian State viewed those books as its property (even if it was not aware of their existence), so their sale to a foreign dealer would probably have been a serious crime. It was only 1929 that, through a treaty between Mussolini and the Pope, the Italian State renounced the confiscation and let the Church keep any books it still had.
I believe that Wilfrid convinced the Jesuits to undertake the transaction only for the sake of the VMS, which he believed to be a Bacon original because of Marci's letter. Buying a couple dozen books at a fixed rather low price per book was the standard modus operandi of book traders: the trick prevented the seller from realizing that the real goal was one specific highly valuable book that "by chance" would be included in the sale.
Indeed it occurred to me now that the sale to the 300 books Vatican Library itself may have been arranged only to disguise the sale of the 30 books to Wilfrid, hiding the latter both from the State and from other people inside the Church -- including from other Jesuits who were aware of the secret stash. The coincidence of the dates is suspicious.
The idea would be that it would be a while before the Library noticed that 30 of the 300 books that were supposedly shipped to it were missing, and a while longer still before they seriously investigated the matter. On the other hand, the custodians of the secret stash would not miss those 30 books because they thought that they had been sent to the Vatican.
Unlike the sale to Wilfrid, in the eyes of the Italian State the sale to the Vatican would be just a bookkeeping event internal to the Church. If the State ever got to know about it, the Jesuits could still argue that they were not stealing State property, they were just a bit slow in handing it over, and besides those books should have been exempted from confiscation because because, etc.
This theory may be too much of a "conspiracy theory", granted. But conspiracies do happen... The conspirators in this case would not need to be more than Wilfrid and one or two of the Jesuits who were aware of the secret stash. This theory would explain why Wilfrid kept lying about the VMS provenance even after 1929...
All the best, --stolfi