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The "Recipe" section
- The "Recipe" section
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The "Recipe" section
Anton > 08-01-2016, 04:34 PM
I have no time for a blog post and actually there are no decisive results in there, just an interesting discussion maybe. So let it be a forum post (telegraph style) and serve as a teaser of our forum - along with certain other threads already created.
Following the discussion in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I further thought the problem of sequential repetitions over, and listed two other options, besides them being a natural information flow:
- shuffling of text within the same page
- shuffling of text between different pages
In the second case, to keep it ordered and decipherable, the "missing" vords of a given page should be contained elsewhere, from where they are extracted at the moment of decipherment and filled into the page in question (e.g in between the vords thereof or in some other, more complex, manner), - to make the page thereafter decipherable via some second-layer rule (e.g. transposition).
This option, hypothetically, could explain weird statistical properties of the VMS text as analyzed on the sequential basis.
So where might that elsewhere be? Again, to keep the stuff ordered and decipherable, the author could have placed it into a separate section of the manuscript. Of all sections, the so-called Recipe section has many attractive peculiarities as to this hypothesis.
- It is situated in the very end of the VMS
- In sharp contrast to any other section, it contains absolutely no drawings (except for the star markers, we'll come to that below)
- It is comprised of many small paragraphs, each of which is marked with a star, so as to clearly distinguish it from the others
- It occupies a dedicated quire
All in all, looks like a reference book.
For the reader to not become very excited, let's honestly note one serious counter-argument at once. All Recipe section folios are in Currier B. So the things are definitely not as simple as the scribe writing part of the text in folio xx and part thereof - in the Recipe section; obviously we would have had the Recipe section alternately in Currier A and B in that case.
However, nothing prevents us from considering some observations and stats.
In the first place, each paragraph in the Recipe secton has a star. In some cases, paragraphs seem to have more than one star, like e.g. in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where the third star from the top seems to be associated with the same paragraph that the second star is. However, probably there is just a one-line paragraph associated with this star, and the preceding paragraph (associated with the second star) just has its last line full-length (thus masking out the paragraph break).
That the star markers are not illustrations or simply idle embellishments is best illustrated by f108v, where several stars in the lower half of the page are expressly linked to certain lines. A curious way of linking is observed in f103v, where the sixth star is linked to the line before the fifth star - like if the scribe forgot to put the star in place and returned to this afterwards.
Next, the stars are not all similar. There are unpainted stars (like the eighth star in f103r), and there are dark painted stars (like the first star in f103r). There are also stars only the centre of which is dark-painted (like the first star of f103v). The full dark-painted stars cease to exist already after f108r, so I consider them to be the same as partly dark-painted stars, the latter being pure simplifications. This might or might not be the case, but for the further discussion I consider them the same.
There are also stars the centre of which is light-painted (like the seventh star in f103r). The light character of painting makes them hard to distinguish from the stars unpainted. A question arises whether the light-painted stars are the same as unpainted. The answer to all probability is: NO, because if they were the same, then there would have been no reason to apply light paint at all.
The sequential painting scheme seems to be as follows:
- dark-painted star
- one or more light-painted stars (if any)
- one or more unpainted stars (if any)
Likewise, star tails are probably markers. Pelling once suggested them to represent letter "y" in a hidden fashion, but I don't consider this a plausible explanation. Usually tails look downwards, but there is at least one tail looking upwards (last star in f103r).
Hereinafter I don't account for differences between light-painted and unpainted stars, neither for the dedicated significance (if any) of stars with centre dots or with tails.
To complete this review, there are a couple of "weird" elements - a small (dark-painted) star in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and elision marks leftwards to the star in f107r. Hereinafter, the small star is treated like a regular dark-painted star.
The painting regularity observed above suggests some kind of repeating "cycle". To all appearance, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has ever been the true beginning of quire 20. Since it begins with a dark-painted star, the cycle is marked by dark-painted stars and, as shown above, may contain one or more stars.
I at once suspected that stars might represent paragraphs, with dark-painted stars representing first paragraphs of folios. Of course this hypothesis implies that only pages that have distinct paragraphs (called "formatted pages" hereinafter) are referred to. Pages containing no paragraphs but only labels or circular inscriptions (such as Zodiac folios, for example) do not, according to this hypothesis, require additional information blocks from the Recipe section for their decipherment, and thus may be deciphered in themselves. This may or may not sound plausible, but it is the logical outcome of the hypothesis brought forward.
I then performed some basic stats to validate this hypothesis.
There is an offhand argument against this "paragraph" hypothesis: the overwhelming majority of the cycles are two-star long - which implies two-paragraph pages. However, two-paragraph pages are far not as frequent as opposed to others in the VMS.
Nevertheless, this noted, let's go on and do some counts.
I counted 324 stars in total in 23 Recipe section pages. However, 2 folios (=4 pages) are lost, so we must count for that. The mean star count per folio would be 324/23 = 14,09, so the estimation of the total count in the Recipe section would be 14,09*(23+4) = 380 stars.
How many paragraphs are there in the formatted pages of the VMS (the Recipe section itself being excluded, of course)? I counted 203 pages (some of them actually have paragraphs spreading over two folios, like e.g. f101r, and thus were counted as one page here). Of those, 21 pages are not formatted, leaving us with 203-21=182 formatted pages. There are 433 paragraphs in there. Not everywhere it was easy to count the exact number of paragraphs, so there is some uncertainty expressed as 433 (+7/-11). In other words, the figure is somewhere in between 422 and 440 paragraphs.
12 folios (which presumably equals to 24 pages) have been lost, and we must account for that. In estimation of the actual number of formatted pages, we should mind that not all lost pages are formatted. Two lost Zodiac pages were, most probably, unformatted. All other lost pages are likely to have been formatted. Hence 182 +(24-2) = 204 is our estimation of the total number of formatted pages in the VMS (Recipes excluded). The long-range average, as calculated from the figures above, is [433 (+7/-11)]/182 = 2,319...2,418 paragraphs per formatted page. So the estimation of the total number of paragraphs in the VMS (Recipes excluded) would be (2,319...2,418)*204 = 473...493 paragraphs.
This is much more than the number of stars in the Recipes. So our paragraph hypothesis fails for the second time.
Let's see if cycles (= dark-painted stars) might stand for formatted pages though. I counted 164 dark-painted stars, which, adjusted to the missing Recipes folios, results in 164/23*27= 193 dark-painted stars. 193 as compared to 204 is a 5,4% difference. From the engineering/statistical viewpoint - not too big to dismiss the assumption immediately, but, I'd say, not too small to adopt it without reservation.
***
So:
- Stars in the Recipe section do NOT stand for paragraphs elsewhere in the VMS.
- The estimated number of cycles (dark-painted stars) in the Recipe section is quite close to the estimated number of formatted pages in the rest of the VMS.
- Only dark-painted versus all others cyclic pattern has been considered. One needs to investigate whether tails or centre dots exhibit any cyclic behaviour.
- The fact that the entire Recipe section is in Currier B is a serious counter-argument to the developed discourse.
If one could find some cyclic pattern other than paragraphs in the VMS formatted pages, and that with the predominance of the cycle period of two, - that would be a truly interesting development of this discussion. - dark-painted star
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RE: The "Recipe" section
david > 10-01-2016, 10:29 AM
Very interesting Anton.
I have a half written blog post theorising that this section is simply a florilegium.
In medieval documents, a florilegium was simply a collection of aphorisms, saying and wisdoms that were collected for future reference. Mary Carruthers explains them as memory notes, brief extracts that were designed to be memorised which would in turn provide a memory link to the main topic or text.
(It later developed into a flower book when the term was reused in later Renaissance times).
The stars, I have always thought, are probably content indicators indicating the subject of each line, hence permitting rapid visual or memory access to the subject matter desired. -
RE: The "Recipe" section
Anton > 10-01-2016, 05:57 PM
(10-01-2016, 10:29 AM)David Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The stars, I have always thought, are probably content indicators indicating the subject of each line, hence permitting rapid visual or memory access to the subject matter desired.
In that case the subjects would be not too many. Maybe some broad categories. And if so, then why information of the same category is not grouped, but is disjointed and presented in cyclic fashion?
voynich.nu says that someone in the past suggested the Recipe stars to represent days of the year. But as per my calculation above, there are too many stars for a year (at least for a solar one). -
RE: The "Recipe" section
juergenw > 11-01-2016, 11:23 PM
Dear Anton
I thought about that section also a bit... One weird idea I once had was that the stars could represent people having a conversation: I thought of classical examples like (some of) Plato's dialogues where the number of different stars could represent eg. Socrates and Timaeus - not the long monologue , obviously, and I didn't do the maths on exact numbers. So, could be a copy of a classical text. There were some other philosophical dialogues around - or even Greek plays.
Another idea I toyed with in that area I have to dig out a reference again. Will post once I found it again -
RE: The "Recipe" section
Wladimir D > 29-01-2016, 04:52 PM
Hello Anton. You know from of personal contact, I attached "groups of recipes" on a different principle. In particular, the group with double star 106r I refer to page 40v. Only on this page shown single plant in adulthood and how young shoots grows from of overwintered tubers.
ГРУППЫ последнего раздела.doc (Size: 25.5 KB / Downloads: 229)
I find it difficult to translate the following file by using the Google translator. Therefore, I attach it in Russian. -
RE: The "Recipe" section
-JKP- > 29-01-2016, 11:30 PM
(08-01-2016, 04:34 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
One thing that I don't think very likely is that the Recipe section has anything to do with recipes or that sort of stuff. The absence of illustrations (which is a sharp contrast to the main body of the VMS) and the complex (at least three-layer: paints, dots and tails) marker appearance of the stars suggest some sort of a reference-list.
...
It was uncommon for medieval and renaissance pharmaceutical recipes to have illustrations. Many of them are text only. Occasionally there are manicles in the margins to call attention to a specific section or recipe, but most don't have images. The same is true of healing charms, which are often mixed in with pharmaceutical recipes. They rarely include illustrations.
When there are illustrations of the plants, they are often in a different section, a pictorial section, and include nothing more than the name of the plant. Even manuscripts that include information about the plant on the same page as the drawing often do not include the recipes for use in the same section. The drawing sometimes lists only common names for the plant and whether the plant is considered "hot" or "cold", how it is used (in general terms, e.g., "good for snake bite"), and where it originates. If they are present, the recipes (whether culinary or pharmaceutical) are often in another section.