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One of the fascinating things about the VMs is how much unlike anything else it is. It has been suggested - only half-jokingly that it is of extra-terrestral origin. However, recently - say from 1996 on - we have discovered some hitherto-unknown historical precedents for the VMs. Here I offer a collection of quotations on this. Most, though not all, are postD'Imperio. I think it's important to keep such precedents as we have in mind. Cheers, Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------Historical Precedents for the Voynich Manuscript July 20, 2001 -General European Provenance -Astrology -Alchemy -Balneological (Bath) Drawings -Toresella - Alchemical Herbals -The Script in General --Trandechino - Renaissance Cipher --Cappelli - Gallows Characters --Humanist Hand -Date of Composition of VMs --Humanist Hand --Nymphs' Hairstyles -Locale of Composition of VMs - History from the Author(s) to the Present ********************************************************************* ******************* GENERAL EUROPEAN PROVENIENCE ************** ______________________________________________________________________ The human figures in the VMs are Caucasian; the costumes are in general European; the astrology is generally European, rather than, say, Hindu. The script is derived from medieval Latin abbreviations (see below). ********************************************************************* ******************* ASTROLOGY ****************** ______________________________________________________________________ "Prominent among the drawings are a series of circular drawings apparently clearly related to the months of the year, and each provided with a central medallion showing a zodiac symbol. A recognizable, if oddly-spelled month name has been written in what most students agree is a different and later hand that that of the Voynich script. Figure 10 shows details of these month names. The page for January and February (Aquarius and Capricorn) is missing, having been removed before the manuscript was found by Voynich. The student's first hope of getting anywhere through the known association with months or zodiac signs is soon disappointed, since there is apparently little else in the diagrams that can be remotely associated with conventional astrological diagrams and horoscopes." - D'Imperio, *The VMs: an Elegant Enigma,* , p. 16. From: René Zandbergen To:
[email protected] Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 11:43:53 +0200 Subject: Thoughts and Questions Denis Mardle writes: > The Zodiac months have been split 15:15 for Aries and Taurus ( > dark,light,light,dark when put in order.) Also the stars must surely relate > to longitude degrees, the missing folio is most unlikely to make up to
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365 > days. Even Pisces which has 29 stars with the figures has a thirtieth star in > the centre with the fish ( ? pike ? ) not seen in the other months. Astrological systems giving one sign for each degree were described by Peter of Abano (14C) in his Astrolabium Planum and in the so-called 'Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch' a much later translation and explanation of P. d'Abano's work. I am still pursuing these documents, but first indications are that the short labels near the stars in our zodiac do not match well with the names used in these two documents. These are of a typical descriptive nature 'a man with red hair carrying a sword' and each one occurs several times (more so than we see in the Voynich labels). Main conclusion: whereas the VMs again seems original, it is not entirely original and similar astrological systems do exist. Aries and Taurus do play a special role in some alchemical illustrations, which may be behind this special treatment. A much more down to Earth explanation may be that the vellum size at this point did not allow for the complete circles. Note that here the draftsman was still taking great care with his drawing, but in the later zodiac signs he is getting more and more careless or hasty and he does cramp complete circles in smaller areas.
********************************************************************* ******************* ALCHEMY ****************** ______________________________________________________________________ [EDITOR'S NOTE: Adam McLean is probably the world's greatest expert on alchemy. Therefore, this note is probably the last word on the subject. ] Subject: Re: Your Expert Opinion on the VMs Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 17:36:43 +0000 From: Adam McLean To: Dennis Stallings At 09:40 AM 11/19/98 -0600, you wrote: >Hello, Adam! I know about your extensive knowledge of alchemy. Mary >D'Imperio, in her survey of VMs studies up to 1978, thought that alchemy >might be the key to understanding the VMs. However, current >
[email protected] list members, including myself, see little if any >alchemical content in the VMs. None of us, however, are experts. > >What is your opinion on this. What alchemical imagery can you see in >the VMs? Dear Dennis All I can say is that I have never seen an alchemical manuscript with the same imagery and pictures as are found in the Voynich. The plant drawings in the 'Herbal section' have many forerunners some going back centuries before the Voynich, as has been extensively documented. The drawings in the Astronomical section again seem to have many parallels in known manuscripts. The main 'alchemical' resonance is supposed to be the 'balneological' section, but here I find no parallels with alchemical manuscripts, except in a very general way. If this was an alchemical work one would expect to find some other alchemical manuscript with similar drawings - but I do not know of one. The drawings after all are not in code! I have an open mind on the subject, but have yet to see any real parallels. Perhaps one day I will find a manuscript that I recognise has common features with the Voynich - but not so far. My view is that we can only 'crack' the Voynich when we can put it into some context. The herbal section is probably the most amenable to this approach as there are many early herbals with similar structures.
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It really needs someone to make a study of the semiotics of herbals, and see if any of these features can be recognised as patterns in the Voynich text. Such things as repetitions of phrases, maybe things like "collect the fruits in the month of" or "this plant is for the lungs". If the Voynich section is a herbal then it should share some of such phrases, and one might be able to find repetitive elements that give us a clue to the way in which the Vonichese is structured and written. I don't think I could find any way at present to use alchemical manuscripts or ideas to throw light on the 'Balneological section. It may be that it will be someone with a background in semiotics rather than cryptography that will first read the Voynich MS. I don't think it will be a scholar of alchemy. Best wishes, Adam McLean ---------------------Web site: http://www.levity.com/alchemy/home.html
To: René Zandbergen (R. Zandbergen x2236 A128 logica/fcsd/oad) Cc:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Sunflower revisited (longish) Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 14:29:22 +0100 From: Michael Roe Rene Zandbergen writes: > As for more cartoon flowers, take a look at woodcut 17 of the Rosarium > Philosophorum: > http://www.levity.com/alchemy/mylros17.html > The first time I saw this illustration (the flower in the right-hand > woodcut) was on the cover of a book about G.Bruno which I had been chasing. > When I pulled it from the shelf I thought I had a fit :-). Besides the sunflower, the VMS contains many images that also occur in other alcehmenical works: *
On folio 79v the dew (or divine radiance) falls down onto the recumbent female figure. (My guess is that is also an allegory for the chemical process of fractional distillation)
* f68r1 and f68r show the Sun over the Moon and then the Moon over the Sun (Solar dominant over Lunar and Lunar dominant over Solar) * f66r is the first ``alchemical'' folio after the simple ``herbal'' material at the beginning of the MS. This folio shows a recumbent female figure. By itself, this could mean almost anything. But the following folios have alchemical images, so it is tempting to also interpret this as an alchemical image, the female/lunar principle about to be transformed by the process which is described in the following folios. * A four-fold division of the cosmos is a recurring theme in the VMS, and also in alchemical texts. See for example f67v2 and f85-86r2. * Plants with faces occur in alchemical MSS (e.g. the Rosarium Philosphorum refered to by Rene), and also in the VMS. *
f82v shows what appears to be a rainbow (It's a pity that I havn't got a color reproduction of this ---- it would be useful to check the colours!)
Then there's the dragon (f25v), the serpents (f49r) ... There are probably many others that I've left out. The image that should be there (if the alchemical interpretation is correct), but which seems to be missing is the union of the male and female principle. So maybe it all means something completly different. Mike
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Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 05:36:48 -0700 (PDT) From: R. Brzustowicz To: Dennis Stallings Cc: Michael Roe, René Zandbergen,
[email protected] Subject: Re: Sunflower revisited (longish) On Sat, 13 Jul 1996, Dennis Stallings wrote: > I tried to learn something about alchemy and threw up my hands up > in frustration. I'm a chemical engineer, and yet I often cannot figure > out exactly what chemical reaction an alchemical text is talking about. This may be old hat to you, but you may find Richard Newman's recent _Gehennical Fire_ useful (and also of course its bibliography as a pointer to other works on the same line). R Brzustowicz Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 16:46:33 -0500 (EST) From: Karl Kluge To:
[email protected] In-Reply-To: (René Zandbergen) Subject: Re: Levitov, heretics, catholics My previously announced silly idea: in the centre circle of the mega-foldout on ff.85-86 there are some objects (reportedly six but they are too vague to make out) that could be pharmaceutical jars like the ones in the pharma pages, but to me they look quite like the images of minarets in old Arabic manuscripts. The centre circle could represent the Arab world, or Mecca. The other circles could represent other parts of the world or the Universe in a more abstract sense (Earth, Fire, the lot). In fact I like Greece or Italy for the top right circle. If has a castle not unlike Rhodos or Patmos, but a tower that more resembles the Veneto style. Some Greek(?) houses, a volcano (when was Santorini first identified as a remnant of an eruption? I have a feeling that it was much later). Maybe this represents..... Atlantis :-) No, strike that last one. Good eye, and I think close but not quite. *My* previously announced idea is that this represents the old alchemic notion of how the four elements earth, air, fire, and water are created from the qualities wet, dry, hot, and cold. The circle in the upper right with the T-O map and little castle would be earth. The structure is then something like this: dry fire O -- O -- O earth |\ | /| | \ | / | | \ | / | hot O--- O -- O cold | / | \ | | / | \ | |/ | \| air O -- O -- O water wet From: Brian Smith To: Jorge Stolfi,
[email protected] Subject: Wenceslaus in the bath (was RE: Just imagine...) Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 12:05:46 -0800
While on the subject of precedents, I might as well report on another book I have read: Title:
The book of secrets of Albertus Magnus of the virtues of herbs, stones and certain beasts, also A book of the marvels of the
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world. Edited by Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman. Pub. Info.: Oxford [Eng.] Clarendon Press, 1973. Thorndike, in his long discussion of the work in volume 2, chapter lxiii refers to this as "The Experiments of Albert" or "Liber aggregationis." It was a best-seller in the middle ages and renaissance. While out of print right now, it is not too hard to find. It is divided into four sections: 1) herbal, 2) recipes involving stones, 3) strange habits and recipes involving various animals, 4) astrology. The recipes are very similar in length to the paragraphs in the final section of the VMS, for example: If thou wilt that a man suffer no pain, nor be tormented. Take the stone which is called Memphites, of the city which is called Memphis, and it is a stone of such virtue as Aaron and Hermes say: if it be broken, and mixed with water, and given to him to drink, which should be burned, or suffer any torments, that drink induceth so great unableness to feel, that he that suffereth, feeleth neither pain nor tormenting. This is probably the work that Robert Babcock was thinking about in this old email: > > > > > > > > >
From reeds Wed Jul 13 22:53 EDT 1994 To:
[email protected] Subject: Voynich MS exists I talked a bit with the head of research, Robert Babcock... ...He thinks that if deciphered we would not learn very much: the plain text is probably something already known (he used the example of Albertus Magnus). He implored me to decipher it, then Yale would stop being bothered by silly visitors.
The Book of Secrets is not the VMS (it is too short and missing a balneological section) but it provides an interesting whole-work precedent for a mish-mash of different kinds of medicinal information published as one work. It is mostly made up of unattributed sections from other works which were combined and given the stamp of wisdom and secrecy by the false attribution to Albertus. Based on its popularity, the clever person who compiled the Book of Secrets clearly understood the book market of his time. But maybe not as clever as a competitor who had the idea of re-writing similar stolen material using mysterious symbols. From - Wed Mar 11 20:02:32 1998 From: René Zandbergen To:
[email protected] Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 09:37:59 +0100 Subject: Re: Wenceslaus in the bath
Re: Albertus Magnus I would just like to restate (probably superfluously) that not much weight should be given to Voynich's statement that 'only two 13th C scientists could have written the VMs'. I know that you know, and that you did not imply anything related to that :-) But having gone through some of the older literature about the VMs again, it is disturbing to see how much Voynich's words are repeated by everybody. The statement that the Ms collection he found belonged to some ruling houses of Parma, Ferrara and Modena, and that they had been hidden since the start of the 19C or even the 18C is repeated by all and we now know that this is wrong. (This includes such otherwise reliable sources as Sci.Am., Manly and Tiltman. Not their fault, and surely, some Mss did belong to these families for some time...) Cheers, Rene ********************************************************************* ******************* BALNEOLOGICAL (BATH) DRAWINGS ****************** ______________________________________________________________________
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Subject: Someone in the balneis Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 10:06:14 +0100 From: René Zandbergen To:
[email protected] Further to previous: > Brian: did the reproduction of the 15C Balneis Puteolanis > indicate whether more copies exist? I'm thinking of > independent ones done between the original and the mid 15th > C. Is the original still extant? Ooops! There is an excellent web site. It's Italian, with English dispersed throughout.
See:
http://www.balnea.net/museum/index.html Cheers, Rene From: Jim Reeds Date: Tue, 7 Mar 95 22:11 EST To:
[email protected] Subject: Voynich similarity Hi! While browsing through Jean Seznec's "Survival of the Pagan Gods" (various editions; mine is Princeton, 1972) I saw a picture which reminded me of the VMS pictures. It is figure 32 on page 107, taken from a ms. of the "Fungentius metaforalis", Vatican, Palat. lat. 1726. It is labeled "Venus-Luxuria", and shows the goddess swimming in a pool with some fish. She looks to me very like the VMS ladies, but maybe I'm misled by the natatorial subject matter. Jim Reeds From: Jim Reeds Date: Fri, 16 Feb 96 21:31 EST To: Subject: Weird King Wenceslaus While browsing thru' my wife's Thorndyke (History of Magic and Experimental Science, 1923-1958, Columbia U. Press, in a zillion volumes) vol III, page 590, I saw this passage: That Wenceslaus or Wenzel, Holy Roman emperor from 1378 to 1400, and king of Bohemia until 1419, was among the number of rulers devoted to astrology is indicated by a finely illustrated manuscript preserved in the national library at Vienna.[ Vienna 2351 (Philos. 201), 14th century.] It bears the dates, 1392 and 1393; has an illuminated initial W with a man in stocks in it; and the pictures of tubs and bathing girls which characterize Wenzel's Bible and other manuscripts. It was accordingly described as adorned with pictures commemorating the imprisonment of Wenzel and his liberation by aid of the bath keeper Susanna, but this... Tubs and bathing girls, h'm? Does anyone know what these Wenceslausian balneological illustrations actually look like? Are there modern reproductions of (say) Wenzel's Bible? Did Vienna 2351 survive the war? Jim Reeds Date: Mon, 19 Feb 96 10:11:17 EWT From: Rene Zandbergen Subject: Re: Weird King Wenceslaus To: Voynich list If I read Jim's note correctly, this Ms. Vienna 2351
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is not the same as the Wenceslaus Bible, but BOTH have tubs and bathing girls. It even says .. which characterize Wenzel's Bible and other manuscripts.. so there are even more. I am assuming here that these other manuscript are still Wenzel's (which is ambiguous above). I did what I usually do in a case like this: search the Web. (I guess I am not the only one :-)) So there seems to be a picture in Princeton, but access to it is not allowed. It can be found via http://www.princeton.edu/~medieval/mappamundi/med201/med201syl.html under section 3. Some access for outsiders: http://www.princeton.edu/~medieval/mappamundi/ Anybody from Princeton in our group? Anybody know anybody? Jim, your friend Sergio Toresella (sp?) mentioned that he had seen similarities to the 'balneological section' in Italian manuscripts. Maybe this is not so uncommon after all?
From: Jim Reeds Date: Mon, 19 Feb 96 20:35 EST To: <@proxy.research.att.com:
[email protected]> Subject: Voynich discourse (long & weighty) Rene Zandbergen writes (about Reeds on Thorndyke on Wenzel): > > > > > > > >
If I read Jim's note correctly, this Ms. Vienna 2351 is not the same as the Wenceslaus Bible, but BOTH have tubs and bathing girls. It even says .. which characterize Wenzel's Bible and other manuscripts.. so there are even more. I am assuming here that these other manuscript are still Wenzel's (which is ambiguous above).
Yes. That's how I read it, too. Wenzel was keen on astrology and nutty about bathtubs, it seems. I know someone at Princeton, & will ask her if she can get a copy of the Wenzel bible pictures that Rene mentioned. > Jim, your friend Sergio Toresella (sp?) mentioned that he had > seen similarities to the 'balneological section' in Italian > manuscripts. Maybe this is not so uncommon after all? Toresella is thinking of some late 1400's books describing the public thermal baths of Italy. This sub-genre of topographical book has, typically, sections describing the special medicinal properties of the waters in each of several towns. Each section might have an illustration showing what the baths were like. The page layout and the architecture is similar to what we see in the VMS.
From: Brian Smith To: Jorge Stolfi,
[email protected] Subject: Wenceslaus in the bath (was RE: Just imagine...) Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 12:05:46 -0800 I sent mail about the Wenceslaus manuscripts a while ago. From: Jim Reeds Date: Mon, 19 Feb 96 20:35 EST To: <@proxy.research.att.com:
[email protected]> Subject: Voynich discourse (long & weighty)
> > > > >
Rene Zandbergen writes (about Reeds on Thorndyke on Wenzel):
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> > > > > > > > > > > > >
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... > Jim, your friend Sergio Toresella (sp?) mentioned that he had > seen similarities to the 'balneological section' in Italian > manuscripts. Maybe this is not so uncommon after all? Toresella is thinking of some late 1400's books describing the public thermal baths of Italy. This sub-genre of topographical book has, typically, sections describing the special medicinal properties of the waters in each of several towns. Each section might have an illustration showing what the baths were like. The page layout and the architecture is similar to what we see in the VMS.
It is a reproduction of a 15c copy of "De Balneis Puteolanis" which was written by a Petrus de Ebulo c. 1200. The content was very reminiscent of an herbal -- a picture of the bath and a page of text describing it physically and its healing properties. The pictures generally showed a large tub surrounded by pillars or other building elements. Some of the tubs were shown being fed by streams flowing down from mountains in the background or from pipes. A few naked figures stood in each tub, usually men but sometimes women. All of the tubs were single-sex. The style of the illustrations was unlike the VMS but I came away feeling fairly confident that the "balneological" section of the VMS is, in fact, balneological. "De Balneis Puteolanis" would not be at all out of place in a work otherwise about herbs and astrology and the VMS pages showing large tubs stretching across the width of the page would not be out of place in "De Balneis" (if drawn by a more skilled artist). Subject: Re: Historical Precedents I Missed Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 10:47:43 +0200 From: René Zandbergen To: Dennis Stallings Most important was the astronomical diagram in Vat. Gr. 1291, a 9th Century Byzantine MS which has nude nymphs in a circle. While they are artistically done, their postures are very much like in the VMs. I lost part of the pictures in a web site crash but will rescan. Check http://www.voynich.nu/vatg1291.html Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 22:20:07 +0200 From: René Zandbergen (Rene Zandbergen) Reply-To: René Zandbergen To: Dennis Stallings
3) In my opinion the most exciting possible identification, but highly contestable and not really a clear precedent: I think that when the VMs artist drew f77v (Fig.2 in the Aesculapius article) he had in front of him (either physically or mentally) the text of one of the pages of the 'Balneis Puteolanis' which describes the baths of Pozzuoli near Naples and which was written some time in the 15th Century. This MS was brought to our attention by Brian Smith. The text describes, one by one, the pictures on the VMs page. http://www.balnea.net/museum/terme/gallerie/pietro/pietro5.html BALNEUM PETRAE, [...] Si chiama così perchè frange i calcoli; [...] apre la vescica, libera i reni dalla renella, lava gli intestini. Vidi molti calcolosi che, bevutane l'acqua calda, ebbero l'urina pietrosa. (Called like this since it breaks chalk /kidney stones I think/. opens the bladder, relieves the kidneys of , washes the intestines. You will see many 'with stones' who, after drinking the water, have urine with grains)
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You really _must_ look at the VMs page and read the text to get the full impact. Or maybe I'm just imagining things - I'd like to hear your honest opinion. The original text (presumably Latin) would constitute a great 'known plaintext' sample.
********************************************************************* ******************* TORESELLA - ALCHEMICAL HERBALS ****************** ______________________________________________________________________ From: Jim Reeds Date: Sun, 10 Dec 95 18:10 EST To: "@proxy.research.att.com":
[email protected] Subject: Voynich observations I just spent a couple of hours with my friend Sergio Toresella, an expert on manuscript herbals visiting this country from Italy. He has been making a tour of American libraries and while at the Beinecke spent a little time with the VMS. He knows about my interest, and about our group. Here is a sketch of some of his comments about the VMS: The VMS is, with certainty, authentic; not a fake. It was manufactured in the period 1450-1460. It was in France for a while: the month names on the zodiac diagrams are in French in a French handwriting. The book itself comes from Italy; the mysterious writing is done in a round humanistic style found only in Italy in the second half of the 1400's. There are similarities between the organization of the VMS (including the balneological section!) and that of other Italian herbals of the 1400s. (He has a lot more to say on this account.) The author of the VMS was a madman, obsessed by sex. He plans to write up his observations in a paper, possibly with help from me. Jim Reeds From: Jim Reeds Date: Mon, 19 Feb 96 20:35 EST To: <@proxy.research.att.com:
[email protected]> Subject: Voynich discourse (long & weighty) Rene Zandbergen writes > Something else: I have seen my first herbal this weekend. It > is from after 1600 and printed. Quite different from the VMs > (very nice drawings). It is an enormous volume by Dodoens ... > Some pictures were less detailed, and I got the impression the > writer had not seen the plant himself. .... I refer you to Karen Reeds, *Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities*, Garland Press, 1991, for a discussion of exactly this point! As with most 16th century herbals, the pictures are not a sure guide to the author's knowledge of the plants themselves. That's because the publishers copied or borrowed or stole the woodcuts of plants in other herbals. In Dodoneus's case at least some of the cuts were copied from illustrations in Leonhard Fuchs's herbals. You have to read the text carefully in conjunction with the illustrations to judge how well the author knew the plants. > > > >
...it may be possible to find classes or groups of plants in other herbals which are definitely not in the VMs. That could tell us something too. Has this been done (and documented) already? ...
Not as far as I know, not precisely. It is tremendously difficult to learn anything from the pictures in medieval herbals. There is debate among the herbalologists about the actual utility of the pictures. John Riddle, Sergio Toresella, and my wife (whom I take to be the heavy hitters in the field) all have somewhat different takes. My impression is that you sometimes have to regard the whole thing as a specialized
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kind of iconography: just as we can study the relationship between different pictures of St Jerome (say) in medieval painting, and can form an impression of what he looks like (large square forehead, balding, red hat, accompanied by a pet lion) while knowing that the actual person might have looked completely different, so we study the plant pictures in herbals, noting similarities between the pictures (which sometimes agree with the written text, and sometimes not) even though the actual plant might look quite different. My wife thinks the plants are phantasmagorical. Karen had the idea that the sequence of pictures in the VMS might be related to the sequence of pictures in some ordinary herbal, which we might be able to identify. This struck us both as a thin reed. When I confronted her just now with the contradiction between these 2 ideas she said, "Show me another list of phantasmagorical plants and ..."
--------------------------------------------------------------84.Toresella, Sergio. ``Gli erbari degli alchimisti.'' In Arte farmaceuticae e piante medicinali --erbari, vasi, strumenti e testi dalle raccolte liguri, Liana Saginati, ed. Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1996, pp.31-70. [Profusely illustrated. Fits the VMS into an ``alchemical herbal'' tradition.] ------------------------------------------------------------------------Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 14:02:18 GMT From: René Zandbergen To: Dennis Stallings Subject: Re: Plant drawings Cc:
[email protected] Hi! Dennis Stallings writes: > > > > > >
D'Imperio pointed out that medieval herbalists did not draw plants from real life, but copied manuscripts of herbals by classical authors that had already been recopied for hundreds of years. In the process, the drawings degenerated to the point that they no longer represented anything real. She also speculated that the (putatively unreal) plant drawings in the VMs might have symbolic meaning.
Indeed. She also pointed out that the VMs plants are not like anything in any of those herbals either. I must admit that the few copies of drawings I have seen from M.E. herbals are mostly very representative of the plant in question. These may have been from a somewhat later date though. There is a hand-written note on f17r referring to the herbal of Mattioli. From this I have a copy of one plant drawing which is a nice clear drawing of an existing plant. This may not be a representative sample :-). Brumbaugh apparently has looked through Mattioli's herbal and claims that one half of one plant in the entire VMs is also a copy of one in Mattioli (if my memory is correct). I was somewhat disappointed that the Hessische Landesbibliothek does not seem to have a copy of it (at least it is not in the catalogue). The herbal was first printed in Frankfurt (a stone's throw away from here and definitely in Hessen)! > In this connection, I was very much intrigued by a post Jim Reeds > made a while back (also because I think, as did D'Imperio, that alchemy > may be important in understanding the VMs): > > (Ref. to S.Toresella's article, with minor typos preserved :-) ) > > Perhaps Jim could give us a synopsis? My 'contact' in one of Italy's premier unversities (Padova) did not find it in their library, and I am also quite eager to read the article. Would Jim mind if we contact Sergio Toresella directly? Cheers, Rene
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From: Jim Reeds Date: Wed, 17 Jul 96 08:26 EDT To: Subject: Voynich interjections Dear All,
I passed a copy of a recent post by Rene Zandbergen to my wife the historian of Renaissance botany. She will ask Toresella if he minds letting his address out, & comment on such topics as quality of pictures in medieval herbals, on Mattiolus, etc. Let me just comment a little bit on these matters, too: all of D'Imperio's knowledge of herbals probably comes from Agnes Arber's book. You can form your own impression of the accuracy of the plant illustrations in manuscript herbals by looking at Raphael and Blunt. My wife's thesis has a long discussion of the illustrations of Schlangenwurzel aka Dracontea in early printed herbals, which has since become a topos in the historiography of scientific illustration (see J. Murdoch's picture book for an example). My Italian is the evanescent ghost of a quantity which was never there, so I cannot really summarize Toresella's long article on "Alchemical Herbals". The 2 plates in Raphael & Blunt (on pp 94 & 95 in my edition, of Bayersche Staatsbib. Munich, Cod.icon.(bot.)26, a few pages after B&R's VMS pages) seem to be from an example of such herbals. The illustrations Toresella gives do show "punning" or "rebus" plant pictures (with dragons, lions, etc, incorporated into pictures of plants like Dracontea or Dandelion, etc) but neither the usual symbolic alchemical images (green lions, androgynes, pelicans, etc) nor "operative" alchemical images (furnaces, retorts, etc.) In fact, I do not really know why he calls this distinct sub genre of manuscript herbals "alchemical", but it is clear that there is a stylistic unity among such MSS. Sergio says that the fashion died out by about 1500, and soon became inexplicable. Jim Reeds Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 08:46:29 -0700 From: Dennis Stallings To: VOYNICH-L Subject: Toresella on the VMs Rene and I have translated Toresella's remarks on the VMs in his paper on alchemical herbals: Toresella, Sergio. ``Gli erbari degli alchimisti. [Alchemical herbals.]'' In Arte farmaceutica e piante medicinali -- erbari, vasi, strumenti e testi dalle raccolte liguri [Pharmaceutical art and medicinal plants -- herbals, jars, instruments and texts of the Ligurian collections], Liana Saginati, ed. Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1996, pp.31-70. [Profusely illustrated. Fits the VMS into an ``alchemical herbal'' tradition.] ------------------------------------------------------------"Among the alchemical herbals we must include the one contained in the Voynich codex [45]. "It is the strangest, most mysterious, and enigmatic herbal known, because it is written in an enciphered language that has resisted the attacks of the most powerful American electronic computers [46]. It is almost eighty years that the best cryptographers, paleographers, and specialists in the most obscure languages have tirelessly tried to penetrate the mystery of this herbal, but in vain. "Rudolph II of Habsburg, king of Bohemia, who constructed the 'alchemists' quarter' in Prague, paid for this codex attributed to Francis [sic] Bacon (1214-1292), the fantastic sum of 600 gold ducats: remember, in comparison, that the Juliana Anicia herbal [the Vienna Codex of Dioscorides] was bought for only 100 ducats. "Some have seen on these parchments, on which dozens of plants similar to those of the alchemists' herbals are drawn, but which do
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not belong to that iconographic tradition (fig. 25, 26), some fantastic discoveries: the sunflower and the pepper represented centuries [sic] prior to the discovery of America; drawings of parts of the cell seen through the microscope; the Andromeda nebula [sic] in the astrological part of the codex, and others still. Even so the mystery of these plants remains unfathomable. "Personally I think that the person who drew and wrote this herbal was profoundly impressed by the exhibition of some charlatan at the market place and thought that he had discovered the secret of the world; a secret to entrust to a language and a cryptic script such as is often found in certain forms of insanity [47]. "One really has to wonder about the strong fascination contained in this message from the past where Master Ghino [who commissioned an alchemical herbal that Toresella discusses] would have us believe that someone was held prisoner of a spell by the herb 'ghalias retiuola': 'Whoever has anointed his hands with the lotion of this herb, then touched whomever he wanted, would obtain from that person any favour that he might like. 'And in that way he would obtain much friendship. 'And he would cause peace and concord between enemies. 'And he who would wash himself with it would drive away the thief from within himself.'" ------------------------------------"Fig. 25, 26: Drawings from the Voynich herbal [f41v, f42r, f65v]. The codex is difficult to date but the greater part of its students think that it dates to the years 1460-1480. These fantastic plants have no relation with those of the usual alchemical herbals; some botanists think they have recognized the pepper and even the sunflower; some believe they have discovered marvels even more surprising. As you will have noticed, the writing is very clear and regular, but totally incomprehensible. The best American experts have searched and are still searching to crack the code with an apparatus of truly impressive electronic computers. Every now and then it happens that someone believes he has solved the mystery and reads in the book some further wonders; only later to find out that some objection renders the decryption improbable. New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book Library, MS 408, c. 41v-42r, c. 65v." --------------------------------------------------NOTES: "45. Currently kept in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University (Conn.), USA, as MS 408. "46. The best exposition of the research on the Voynich codex is in M. E. D'Imperio, *The Voynich Manuscript. An elegant enigma, Laguna Hills (Ca.) 1976. A good summary, also easily available in Italy, may be found in D. Kahn, *The Codebreakers.* There also exists an Internet site dedicated to this issue on which about forty students from all over the world communicate their discoveries. "47. The phenomenon of invented languages is very widespread and represents a fundamental aspect of some mental pathologies. For an approach to the problem see: S. ARIETE, *Creativita`. La Sintesi magica*, Roma 1986. A. BAUSANI, *Le Lingue inventate. Linguaggi artificiali -linguaggi segreti- linguaggi universali*, Roma, 1974. And the recent B. BUONARROTI & P. ALBANI, *Aga Mage'ra Difura. Dizionario delle lingue immaginarie*, Bologna 1994." [The US Library of Congress catalog has: Arieti, Silvano. Creativity : the magic synthesis / New York : Basic Books, c1976. xv, 448 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. LC CALL NUMBER: BF408 .A64 The LOC has the Italian version of Buonarroti & Albani but doesn't
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have Bausani. ] Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 08:06:43 -0700 From: Dennis Stallings To: VOYNICH-L Subject: Toresella on Alchemical Herbals Here is a summary of what Toresella says about alchemical herbals in his paper: Toresella, Sergio. ``Gli erbari degli alchimisti. [Alchemical herbals.]'' In Arte farmaceutica e piante medicinali -- erbari, vasi, strumenti e testi dalle raccolte liguri [Pharmaceutical art and medicinal plants -- herbals, jars, instruments and texts of the Ligurian collections], Liana Saginati, ed. Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1996, pp.31-70. [Profusely illustrated. Fits the VMS into an ``alchemical herbal'' tradition.] 1) "Alchemical herbals" is really a misnomer, since these herbals contain little or no alchemical imagery. A Bolognese naturalist, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) collected some of these herbals and labeled them "plants of the alchemists". Toresella calls these "alchemical herbals" for lack of anything better. (44-7) 2) Some pictures in the alchemical herbals can be traced to pseudo-Apuleius and the *Circa Instans* of the Salerno Medical School. However, the alchemical herbal is an autonomous tradition that may have begun in the XIII century. No existing specimens predate the middle of the XIV century, their heyday was the XV century, and they disappeared at the middle of the XVI century. (52) "They all seem strictly Italian because, except for two cases, all the alchemical herbals, about seventy, were produced in Italy, in prevalence in northern Italy, in the Veneto area." (51) 3) They only contain plant images, along with a few human images. The images are of known plants rendered in a fantastic fashion and labeled with incomprehensible names. They contain from 10 to 200 images; there are some imagess found in all alchemical herbals. (p. 49) 4) There are visual puns (human figures for a mandrake root(fig 7), a root like a fish for luccia maggiore (fig 14), a hat for a teodora plant (fig. 15), a root like a wolf (with goat horns!) for luparina (17), and a man's head in a testatoris. Geometric figures (circles, ellipses, quadralaterals) are also common. Indeed visual puns are more common than in the VMs. 5) The text varied according to the educational level of the person for whom the alchemical herbal was made. Often the texts and pictures were intended for public display and reading. "The recipes found in the alchemical herbals are often absurb and irrational: spells to become invisible or to find hidden treasures and are accompanied by incantations and invocations for the most part pious, but also including some to evil spirits, including the famous magical quatrain Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas or the more modest Abracadabra." (p. 57) 6) Although Toresella expresses his opinion that the author of the Voynich Manuscript suffered from insanity, that does not necessarily mean that the text has no meaning. Indeed, his statement that the author "thought that he had discovered the secret of the world; a secret to entrust to a language and a cryptic script" would seem to indicate that the text is meaningful. There are a range of possible levels of meaningfulness. 7) Those who used the alchemical herbals practiced "traveling medicine." (p. 47) These healers practiced "demotic medicine, the offspring of a very ancient medical culture, mostly transmitted orally, and distinguished from official medicine especially by its lack of an organic theory of illness." (P. 48) Thus saying that they were to impress the ignorant misses the point. These various types of practitioners of "travelling medicine" were medieval folk healers, such as are found in all pre-modern
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cultures. In south Louisiana one still finds a few traiteurs, the traditional healers of Cajun culture. In Mexico the curanderos are quite active. In many third-world countries these folk healers operate in addition to physicians trained in Western medicine. The alchemical herbals are best understood as shamanistic healing props. (This last point is more mine than Toresella's.) However, some of the users of these herbals were undoubtedly pure quacks; Toresella calls Master Ghino a charlatan. Dennis ********************************************************************* ******************* THE SCRIPT IN GENERAL ****************** ______________________________________________________________________ At this writing (June 18, 1997) we can say that the Voynich script could easily have come from known Latin characters, abbreviations, and embellishments and early Arabic numerals. 1) 2) 3) 4)
D'Imperio below (based on Capelli) gives a general script origin. Trachedino gave a summary of Renaissance cipher scripts. Capelli shows a sample of gallows-like characters. The Voynich script is clearly related to the "humanist hand" lettering style used only during the 1400's. (This is about the most definite time indication for the VMs that I've seen.)
"It is my feeling that we need not look beyond the system of Latin abbreviations, familiar to all learned men of the Middle Ages and Renaissance throughout Europe, combined with early forms of Arabic numerals and some common alchemical and astrological symbols, to find the inspiration for the design of the Voynich script." - D'Imperio, *The VMs: an Elegant Enigma,* , p. 24. ********************************************************************* ******************* TRANDECHINO - RENAISSANCE CIPHERS *************** ********************************************************************* From: "Jim Reeds" Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 18:22:45 -0500 To:
[email protected] Subject: Voynich-like cipher symbols This Christmas I had a chance to see a very elegant reproduction of a manuscript in Vienna containing several hundred different cipher keys from the late 1400's. This MS was written in exactly the time period and general location Toresella placed the composition of the VMS (based on the general appearance of VMS handwriting). Many of the cipher keys use made-up symbols, many of which look vaguely Voynichese. The executive summary: such symbols were in the "air" in at that time, and no theory of Aztec influence need be invoked to account for their presence in a late 15th century Northern Italian production. The MS is "Codex Vindobonensis 2398", which is a 500 Schilling way of saying "Vienna MS 2398". The book I saw was vol. 22 in series "Codices Selecti / Phototypice Impressi" published in 1970 by "Akademische druck -u. Verlagsanstalt" of Graz, Austria. Its title is "Francesco Tranchedino / Diplomatische Geheimschriften / Codex Vindobonensis 2398 / Der Oesterreichischen Nationalbibliothek / Faksimilieausgabe / Einfuehrung Walter Hoeflechner " The introduction is very long & interesting, but I had only a short time to look at it. The MS itself has 169 folios (all very clearly reproduced), with about 300 cipher keys, one per page. "Der Hauptteil des cvp 2389, das eigentliche Chiffrenprotokoll, enthaelt 297 vollstaendige Schluessel aus der Cancelleria segreta..." The compiler (Tranchedino) was a cryppie in the Sforza chancery in Milan in the late 1400's. Each cipher key lists 1, 2, or 3 cipher equivalents for each of the alphabet letters, a list of maybe 4 or 6 nulls (symbols without meaning, thrown into the cryptogram to amuse the opponents), cipher equivalents for doubled letters, and in some cases, cipher equivalents for as many as 50 or so words and
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proper names. The designer of the cipher symbols seems to have had fun. Each one has a kind of thematic unity: all the symbols are Arabic numbers, or all the symbols are letters and pairs of letters, or are all Voynich- or Capelli-like pothooks, or are all alchemical and astrological, or are all Greek letters, in every case occurring in all kinds of ligatured and pot-hook encrusted variants. -VIENNA, NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK, Cod. Vindob. 2398. Franciscus Tranchedinus, Furtivae litterarum notae . This codex contains some two hundred ciphers used by the Milanese Chancery between 1450 and 1496. Ciphers shown date from ca.1450. Original .
--------Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 08:29:29 -0500 From: Jim Reeds To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Code-talkers, but it has wandered...Voynich I don't know what it has to do with Navajo (or is it ho?), but Dennis mentioned my post about Tranchedino's collection of Milanese cipher alphabets from the late 1400s. Since then Rene Z has looked at a copy of the same facsimile I saw. He was disappointed that there were no 'gallows' letters, and concluded (I think) that Tranchedino was not the author of the VMS. All I had claimed was that many of the cipher symbols looked "vaguely Voynichese." My point was that fanciful cipher alphabets were in common use in the 15th century. Kahn's book shows some others from the 16th century on pp. 115, 120, 123, and 139 (in the 1st edition of his book).
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-------------Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 10:52:51 +0200 From: René Zandbergen To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Code-talkers, but it has wandered...Voynich Dear all, Jim Reeds wrote: > .... Dennis mentioned my post about Tranchedino's collection > of Milanese cipher alphabets from the late 1400s. Since > then Rene Z has looked at a copy of the same facsimile I saw. > He was disappointed that there were no 'gallows' letters, > and concluded (I think) that Tranchedino was not the author > of the VMS. Yes, though not on the basis of the absence of gallowslookalikes. And in fact it seems unlikely any professional cryptographer would have written the VMs > All I had claimed was that many of the cipher symbols > looked "vaguely Voynichese." I realised that and fully agree. Even down to such special things as Currier 'S', the i-shaped variant of Currier-S, 'SO' ligatures, picnic tables, and things like the 'chinese hat in corner', looking more like the mirror image of Arabic 'k'. > My point was that fanciful cipher alphabets were in common > use in the 15th century. ... and references in the introduction to ciphers in the early 15th C, Tranchedino being late 15C. ************************************************************************ ************************* CAPPELLI - GALLOWS CHARACTERS *************** ************************************************************************ From: "Jim Reeds" Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 22:27:57 -0400 To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Gallows, Glagolithic and Greek I have always thought of the gallows letters as being a typical feature of Visigothic writing, but I cannot put my hand on any examples right now. But I can refer to one of the few photographic facsimilies in my copy (well, really my wife's copy) of Cappelli's Dizionario (the 1967 reprint of what appears to be the 1929 edition), namely "Tavola IV", which shows a letter "1172, Giugno 13 -- Savino abbate del monastero di S. Savino in Piacenza investe il mugnaio Gerardo Albarola per se e suoi eredi maschi in perpetuo, di un mulio di ragione del detto moasstero -- Scritura carolina. -Pergamena origen., conservata nell'Archivio di Stato di Parma, monastero di S. Savino." with glorious gallows letters all over it. -From: "Jim Reeds" Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 09:32:44 -0400 To: René Zandbergen,
[email protected] Subject: Re: Gallows, Glagolithic and Greek About the text I found in Capelli with gallows letters. Most of Capelli is a list of abbreviations, but the book starts with a short overview of paleography in general. That overview section has a series of plates, showing whole document pages, in a variety of writing styles, together with transcriptions. So there is no guarantee that these gallows letters are actually abbreviations. I think they are just a embellished letters. I'll check tonight. I might possibly be able to scan some of the plate. Rene is right, gallows letters are not a usual feature of Carolingian writing. The sample in question looks Carolingian to me, otherwise, but does have a lot of VMS-like gallows letters. Deeds, charters, & similar legal documents often, I think, received some form of caligraphic decoration. I'm sure that's what's happening here.
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-Date: Sat, 14 Jun 1997 00:13:18 -0700 To:
[email protected] From: Clay Holden Subject: Updated Cappelli Tavola IV scans Jacques Guy wrote: >Jim Reeds wrote: >>I have just been told that there is a JPEG scan of the plate from Cappelli's >>abbreviation dictionary which contains gallows-like letters. You can see >>the picture: > >> >> ftp://ftp.dnai.com/users/c/cholden/TavolaIV.jpg > > >I had a look. It's a 1.8Meg jpeg. Yes, 1.8Meg! > >Not the easiest thing to download, and my Netscape Gold just refuses >to display it. Sorry, not trying to choke anyone. It's a 300 DPI grey-scale JPEG. The original TIFF was nearly 6 MB. I've gone back to Photoshop and uploaded "Lite" versions. For those with smaller appetites, try these: The top line of "gallows" characters, 289 K: ftp://ftp.dnai.com/users/c/cholden/gallows1.jpg The bottom line of "gallows" characters, 289 K: ftp://ftp.dnai.com/users/c/cholden/gallows2.jpg The whole plate, reduced to 50% of the size, 510 K: ftp://ftp.dnai.com/users/c/cholden/Table_IV.jpg I have displayed these images from the ftp site on both Macs and PCs using Netscape without any problem, and have succsssfully downloaded them as well, so Netscape is not the issue. These are still 300 DPI grey-scale images, certainly large enough to have a good look at the "gallows" characters, but you're probably better off avoiding the large image unless you have a fast connection and hard-drive space to burn. I'll leave these up for a few days, but not indefinitely. If someone else wants to archive them, fine. Sorry if anyone else had a problem with them. Regards, Clay
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 97 11:18:27 EST To:
[email protected] From: Jacques Guy Subject: Re: Updated Cappelli Tavola IV scans I am in the process of downloading the first set of
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gallows (and, at 0.5K/sec, it is painful...) and... BON SANG! They are the spit image of Voynichese! It seems likely that the Voynich authors knew about those gallows. Of course, we could entertain the notion that they were the inventors, and that what I am seeing slowly forming on my screen is inspired from Voynichese, but it seems unlikely. Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 08:03:51 -0700 From: Dennis Stallings To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Updated Cappelli Tavola IV scans Gabriel Landini wrote: > > On 16 Jun 97 at 11:18, Jacques Guy wrote: > > > I am in the process of downloading the first set of > > gallows (and, at 0.5K/sec, it is painful...) and... > > > > BON SANG! They are the spit image of Voynichese! > > I was quite surprised as well. > Some details. The right hand side of the loop is itself different > from whatever we see in the vms. > The horizontal stroke (the connection) is part of the character. I > wonder then if the complex gallows are just 1 character. These things certainly do look like gallows! Looking at the top line, most of the gallows characters are in fact embellishments on top of normal characters in the main line of text. However, in the word "sancti" in the phrase "infra monasterium sancti Savini", the gallows character forms the letters "sanc". Dennis From: "Jim Reeds" Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 10:01:01 -0400 To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Updated Cappelli Tavola IV scans Let me summarize the situation as I see it. An ongoing thread in discussions of the Voynich MS has been the source of the alphabet, only some letters of which looked like ordinary letters or numbers. So a non European origin, or at least some non European influence, was posited for the VMS. To the contrary, I argued at the begining of this year, many of the supposedly non-standard Voynich letters were exactly the sorts of fanciful invented letters used in Europe in ciphers. By good luck I found an edition of Tranchedino's late 1400's book of cipher alphabets, many of which had a strong Voynich-like look. Rene Zandbergen said (if I recall correctly) that all that was lacking from the Tranchedino collection were the gallows-like letters. So now we see the gallows-like decorative letters in the document reproduced in Cappelli. I think it is now clear that all the VMS letter shapes are well within the range of fanciful and decorative letter shapes actually used in the late middle ages. If you had asked an Italian of 1470 to invent a cipher alphabet he would have come up with something like the VMS alphabet, and there is nothing about the VMS alphabet incompatible with such an origin. Of course I make no claims of the form "Tranchedino was the VMS author" or "the VMS author visited the monastary of St. Savino in Piacenza". I am saying that all the VMS letter shapes fall well within the repetoire of alphabetic letter-like shapes available to, and used by, European scribes of the 1400s. -From: "Jim Reeds"
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Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 16:17:54 -0400 To: Denis V. Mardle Subject: Re: Cappelli Cc: VMs List I am sure the Cappelli D'Imperio saw is an earlier edition of the Cappelli I have. It is used by essentially all medievalists who have anything to do with manuscripts. It lists abbreviations and conventional signs used in writing throughout the middle ages, throughout Europe. Not all abbreviations were used everywhere, at all times; Cappelli gives a century or century range for each entry. I don't really know what point D'Imperio was trying to make with her Fig. 17. Let me hijack her evidence, and use it this way: Cappelli and Fig. 17 show how many of these VMS-like letter shapes were in common use in medieval Europe as conventional abbreviations, in addition to their uses as decorative letter elements and as invented cipher letters discussed in my earlier posting. More evidence, in other words, that the VMS letters are European letters. Is it likely that Cappelli is the Rosetta stone for the VMS, that Currier F in the VMS means "mbrus" because the same letter shape was so used in ordinary writing in medieval Europe? I think we discussed this several years ago, with the usual results. -Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 17:33:46 -0700 (PDT) From: R. Brzustowicz To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Cappelli On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, Clay Holden wrote: > follows: > > "MANUALI HOEPLI // LEXICON ABBREVIATURARUM // DIZIONARIO DI / ABBREVIATURE > / LATINE ED ITALIANE // USATE NELLE CARTE E CODICI SPECIALMENTE DEL > MEDIO-EVO / RIPRODOTTE CON OLTRE 14000 SEGNI INCISI // con l'aggiunta di > uno studio sulla brachigrafia medioevale, un / prontuario di Sigle > Epigrafiche, l'antica numerazione romana / ed arabica ed i segni indicanti > monete, pesi, misure, etc. // PER CURA DI //ADRIANO CAPPELLI / > Archivista-Paleografo // Seste edizione (anastatica) / corredata con 9 > tavole fuori testo // [publisher's mark] // EDITORE ULRICO HOEPLI MILANO // > Ristampa 1967" > > Cappelli's Preface was written in March, 1929. > > As far as I know, this book is still available in reprint from the same > publisher, as I bought one no more than three years ago at Stanford > Bookstore. Anyone out there with access to an online Books-in-Print? > > Clay > Contributors: Cappelli, Adriano (Editor) Title: Dizionario di Abbreviature Latine Ed Italiane Language: Italian Latin Publisher: S. F. Vanni Year: 1990 Pages: 531p. Illustration: Illustrated ISBN/Price: 0-913298-95-6 Trade Cloth $42.00 Subj (BIP): ITALIAN-LANGUAGE-DICTIONARIES> > R Brzustowicz Date: Tue, 17 Jun 97 11:41:28 EST To:
[email protected] From: Jacques Guy Subject: Re: Cappelli, el cheapo edition (my apologies to R.Brzustowicz, I pressed the wrong button, and he is going to get two copies of this) >Contributors: Cappelli, Adriano (Editor)
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>Title:
Dizionario di Abbreviature Latine Ed Italiane
>ISBN/Price:
0-913298-95-6 Trade Cloth $42.00
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I found that www.amazon.com had a shorter, paperback, version of it for ... $4.50! And it seems to be pretty good according to the review of it there. So what do you think? I ordered a copy, of course. Search for it under Cappelli Adrianie. Yes, "Adrianie" -- they misspelt his first name. But they get it only special order, which means up to 6 weeks, or, if it is no longer in stock, never. At any rate, it seems to that, at long, long, long last, we are getting somewhere with the VMS.
From: Brian Smith To: "'Jacques Guy'" ,
[email protected] Subject: RE: Cappelli, el cheapo edition Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 18:53:03 -0700 The $4.50 version at amazon.com is just a translation of the introduction to the full Dizionario. It does not include the dictionary proper, nor the plates discussed in the past week. The introduction is a useful discusion of the theory behind medieval abbreviation but not a substitute for the whole thing. ************************************************************************* **************** HUMANIST HAND ****************************************** ************************************************************************* From: "Jim Reeds" Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 10:51:40 -0400 To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Toresella On Sep 10, 9:16, Dennis wrote: about what I wrote about what Toresella said: > > > > > > > > > > >
.... What you had: "The VMS is, with certainty, authentic; not a fake. It was manufactured in the period 1450-1460. It was in France for a while: the month names on the zodiac diagrams are in French in a French handwriting. The book itself comes from Italy; the mysterious writing is done in a round humanistic style found only in Italy in the second half of the 1400's." It would be interesting to know what specific "humanistic style" he had in mind; does it have a name? It always puzzled me how T. could specify such a narrow time range, given the uncertainties here.
The shifting of the date range from 1450-60 to 1460-80 is a bit bothersome. The "humanistic style" question is easy to answer. In about 1450 a new kind of handwriting arose in northern Italy, consiously associated at the time with the Humanist movement (Petrarch, the recovery & revival of classical MSS & learning; the literary aspect of the Italian Renaissance). This handwriting was based on classical Roman models (some MSS, I think, but also on samples seen on stone monuments) and was a model for our printed "Roman" typefaces. Unlike the "textura" (aka "bastarda" or "gothic") handwriting common througout Europe in the period 1100-1400, which can be seen in Stofi's web pages), humanist hand is easy for us to read. It fell out of popularity in a few decades, however, being supplanted by the "Italic" hand, which is still in use. This brief period of popularity is what allows Toresella's puzzling narrow range of dates. Unlike the slanted Italic hand, the humanist hand is upright. Round letters seem equally round on both sides. The book by Tradechino I mentioned earlier this year is written in this kind of handwriting; there are samples in Bischoff's "Latin Paleography". (Which I don't have at the office, so I cannot check any of the details above.) After Toresella pointed it out to me I am completely convinced that the VMS script was written by a user of the humanist hand. From: "Jim Reeds" Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 10:50:09 -0400
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To:
[email protected] Subject: Humanist hand, 1400's dating, and so on. I took a look at Bischoff's Latin Paleography book after posting my blurb about Toresella's round humanist hand dating of the VMS, and it is clear that I oversimplified and overstated things. The humanist hand dates from the earliest years of the 1400's, and was not instantly supplanted on the invention of the Italic hand, so the time bracket for the VMS (if you believe the VMS scribe was used to the humanist hand) is wider than the decade or 2 I suggested in my earlier letter. Unfortunately Bischoff does not say very much about the h.h. (it is at the very end of his time period) so I cannot give more info here. He does cite several books about the h.h., so there is clearly a lot more to know. [From the Editor:
Some samples of humanist hand, from Rafal Prinke's page:
http://hum.amu.edu.pl/~rafalp/HERM/VMS/palgraf.htm A page from Cracow castle court records (late medieval cursive) 1497
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Humanist hand Italy (1453)
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Humanist papal document (1462)
Another sample (1465)
********************************************************************* ******************* DATE OF COMPOSITION OF THE VMS ****************** ______________________________________________________________________ D'Imperio gives the time range of 1400-1550 for the VMs' composition, probably late within that period (p. 8-9). This is simply the majority of scholars' opinions at that time. More recently we have found evidence
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placing it more narrowly in the late 1400's. ************************************************************************* **************** HUMANIST HAND ****************************************** ************************************************************************* From: "Jim Reeds" Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 10:51:40 -0400 To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Toresella On Sep 10, 9:16, Dennis wrote: about what I wrote about what Toresella said: > > > > > > > > > > >
.... What you had: "The VMS is, with certainty, authentic; not a fake. It was manufactured in the period 1450-1460. It was in France for a while: the month names on the zodiac diagrams are in French in a French handwriting. The book itself comes from Italy; the mysterious writing is done in a round humanistic style found only in Italy in the second half of the 1400's." It would be interesting to know what specific "humanistic style" he had in mind; does it have a name? It always puzzled me how T. could specify such a narrow time range, given the uncertainties here.
The shifting of the date range from 1450-60 to 1460-80 is a bit bothersome. The "humanistic style" question is easy to answer. In about 1450 a new kind of handwriting arose in northern Italy, consiously associated at the time with the Humanist movement (Petrarch, the recovery & revival of classical MSS & learning; the literary aspect of the Italian Renaissance). This handwriting was based on classical Roman models (some MSS, I think, but also on samples seen on stone monuments) and was a model for our printed "Roman" typefaces. Unlike the "textura" (aka "bastarda" or "gothic") handwriting common througout Europe in the period 1100-1400, which can be seen in Stofi's web pages), humanist hand is easy for us to read. It fell out of popularity in a few decades, however, being supplanted by the "Italic" hand, which is still in use. This brief period of popularity is what allows Toresella's puzzling narrow range of dates. Unlike the slanted Italic hand, the humanist hand is upright. Round letters seem equally round on both sides. The book by Tradechino I mentioned earlier this year is written in this kind of handwriting; there are samples in Bischoff's "Latin Paleography". (Which I don't have at the office, so I cannot check any of the details above.) After Toresella pointed it out to me I am completely convinced that the VMS script was written by a user of the humanist hand. From: "Jim Reeds" Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 10:50:09 -0400 To:
[email protected] Subject: Humanist hand, 1400's dating, and so on. I took a look at Bischoff's Latin Paleography book after posting my blurb about Toresella's round humanist hand dating of the VMS, and it is clear that I oversimplified and overstated things. The humanist hand dates from the earliest years of the 1400's, and was not instantly supplanted on the invention of the Italic hand, so the time bracket for the VMS (if you believe the VMS scribe was used to the humanist hand) is wider than the decade or 2 I suggested in my earlier letter. Unfortunately Bischoff does not say very much about the h.h. (it is at the very end of his time period) so I cannot give more info here. He does cite several books about the h.h., so there is clearly a lot more to know. ************************************************************************* **************** NYMPHS' HAIRSTYLES ************************************ ************************************************************************* Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1998 19:23:04 -0700 To:
[email protected] From: (Julie Porter) Subject: Re: Date of VMs (Was: Re: Where are the numbers!!!?) >On August 3, 1998, Julie Porter wrote: >> >> The VMS to me seems to say 1480 to 1520. I do not see
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>> it as earlier than 1470 and 1620 on the late end. > > You have different expertise from most of us, so I'm curious - what are >your reasons for these dates? My own guess is mid- to late-1400's, >based on the "humanist hand". Based on the hairstyles of the nyphs. I did a stint at the ren-fair here for about 10 years. There is nothing that gives a decade away more than the hair. The early dates are is the ms is mainstream, the latter if the ms is provintial. I have not done a lot of study on the era. (My main intrest are the time from 1770 to 1870 with the emphasis on the mid point late 30s early 40s, which is where the real progress in mechanics were made, but then I digress, see Charles Dicken's for more details). What the costumer does have to work with are paintings and drawings attributed to a given era. Many of my books cover wide ranges of times. Back when I joined the list, I was asked this so I took some time and scanned through my copy of petersen and my costume books. Granted much of what is recorded is upper class so if things are provintal they may relate to an earlier date than the mss. -julieP ********************************************************************* ***************LOCALE OF COMPOSITION OF THE VMS ****************** ______________________________________________________________________
Subject: Re: Historical Precedents I Missed Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 10:47:43 +0200 From: René Zandbergen (Rene) To: Dennis Stallings Most important was the astronomical diagram in Vat. Gr. 1291, a 9th Century Byzantine MS which has nude nymphs in a circle. While they are artistically done, their postures are very much like in the VMs. I lost part of the pictures in a web site crash but will rescan. Check http://www.voynich.nu/vatg1291.html By the way, what could be relevant is that Vat.Gr.1291 was in N. Italy in the second half of the 15th C, in Brescia to be precise, which is right in the middle of the area where the castles look like the one in the Voynich MS. It is so easy to speculate.... Subject: Re: Sagittarius and crossbow Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 22:20:07 +0200 From: René Zandbergen (Rene Zandbergen) Reply-To: René Zandbergen To: Dennis Stallings
Hi Dennis! You wrote (quite a while ago): > Yes! I've seen several items which could help us > to nail down the area where the VMs author(s) might have > been, to wit: > > - Sagittarius and crossbow; > - Rene notes that the Ms with the nymph-like diagram in > Vat.Gr. 1291 was owned in the 15th Century > by two bishops of Brescia; > - Toresella notes Ms's of "alchemical herbals" > in Bergamo, Bologna, Firenze (Florence), > Genova (Genoa), Lucca, Napoli (Naples), > Padova, Roma, and Venezia (Venice). It's mostly northern > Italy, at the time of the Renaissance, which > helps some. > - The exact date when the humanist hand was first used in this > area.
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> - Details on when and where the hairdoes like those of > VMs nymphs were in fashion. > > A lot of these are weak and I'd like to see > further examples. There are more! 1) The little castle on the upper right circle in the rosetta. I've not seen a castle that looks exactly like it, but there are plenty of castles with such elements in Northern Italy. They date from the 14th-15th Century which doesn't help pinning the date down any further, but the style of the crenellations is typical for N. Italy (all the way from Aosta to Friuli / Trieste). I even found a castle in the latter area for which there is a 15th C drawing. It's called Villalta. Compare it with the modern picture at (about 100k together): http://www.voynich.nu/vilalold.jpg http://www.voynich.nu/vilalnow.jpg 2) Not the best possible source, but Brumbaugh has repeatedly stated that the Sagittarius picture shows a man in a 15th Century Florentine hat. The hat is quite conspicuous, and noone seems to ever have contested this identification. For what it's worth. 3) In my opinion the most exciting possible identification, but highly contestable and not really a clear precedent: I think that when the VMs artist drew f77v (Fig.2 in the Aesculapius article) he had in front of him (either physically or mentally) the text of one of the pages of the 'Balneis Puteolanis' which describes the baths of Pozzuoli near Naples and which was written some time in the 15th Century. This MS was brought to our attention by Brian Smith. The text describes, one by one, the pictures on the VMs page. http://www.balnea.net/museum/terme/gallerie/pietro/pietro5.html BALNEUM PETRAE, [...] Si chiama così perchè frange i calcoli; [...] apre la vescica, libera i reni dalla renella, lava gli intestini. Vidi molti calcolosi che, bevutane l'acqua calda, ebbero l'urina pietrosa. (Called like this since it breaks chalk /kidney stones I think/. opens the bladder, relieves the kidneys of , washes the intestines. You will see many 'with stones' who, after drinking the water, have urine with grains) You really _must_ look at the VMs page and read the text to get the full impact. Or maybe I'm just imagining things - I'd like to hear your honest opinion. The original text (presumably Latin) would constitute a great 'known plaintext' sample. So that's three more :-)
************************************************************************* **************** HISTORY FROM THE AUTHOR(S) TO THE PRESENT ************** ************************************************************************* There is now a superb article with the latest information on the history of the VMs from the author(s) to now: Voynich MS history after 1600 by René Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini http://voynich.nu/history.html
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----------------From: Neal P Date: Tue, 28 Jan 97 21:42:17 GMT To: voynich%
[email protected] Subject: introducing myself
3. Andrew Watson has identified the page numbering as the work of John Dee, and a man of his authority has to be believed. It is a general rule that the annotations and marginalia of manuscripts are added when the text is nearly new (manuscripts, like printed books, were avidly read for 20 or 30 years and then became obsolete). It is also true that manuscripts were not usually paginated by the original scribe, but by the first owner or the librarian of the institution where it was first kept. I therefore think that the Voynich manuscript can be securely dated to the 16th century quite apart from the question of the possible New World plants in the illustrations.
From: Neal P Date: Wed, 29 Jan 97 22:01:59 GMT To: voynich%
[email protected] Subject: Moreover Thanks to everybody for the response.
One or two things...
I stand by what I said about Andrew Watson's judgment: he is a renowned authority on the dating of manuscripts (responsible for the Dated and Datable Manuscripts series about the major British collections) and is the author of a monograph identifying surviving books from John Dee's collection. I think he is quite able to identify pagination by Dee and is not a man to advance a poorly considered opinion (I have met him once or twice).
From: "Jim Reeds" Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 22:13:42 -0500 To:
[email protected] Subject: Voynich obsns by Philip Neal On Jan 29, 22:01, Neal P wrote: > > > > > > > > > >
Subject: Moreover Thanks to everybody for the response.
One or two things...
I stand by what I said about Andrew Watson's judgment: he is a renowned authority on the dating of manuscripts (responsible for the Dated and Datable Manuscripts series about the major British collections) and is the author of a monograph identifying surviving books from John Dee's collection. I think he is quite able to identify pagination by Dee and is not a man to advance a poorly considered opinion (I have met him once or twice).
I agree. Watson is an authority on these things, and Dee's Arabic numerals were indeed written in a very distinctive way. Still, to a layman, it seems amazing that one can be certain about this, just on the basis of the way numbers are written. > > > > > > >
I forgot to ask about the evidence that the illustrations were created before the text. This is a suspicious feature of the manuscript, being very unusual. Only a small proportion of mediaeval manuscripts were illustrated at all (of course these are the ones on show in museums) and even then, the practice was for a scribe to leave blank spaces which a purchaser could choose to have filled by an artist of his choice - usually.
Evidence for drawing before writing: In the botanical section the writing seems to fill up the space disected by plant stems. For a while I was sure I could track ink depletion and inkwell dips in the color plates in Blunt and Rafael. In particular, on f33v, two stems cross the paragraph of writing, dividing it into 3 sections. On the whole it looks like the left section was written first,
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then the middle section, the right section: the pen gets less and less inky. Also, the alignment of writing lines seems to mismatch between the 3 sections. Evidence for writing before drawing: on f112v there seems to be an indented rectangular space in the upper left corner: the first 10 lines are indented about 8 or 9 mm, as if to leave room for an illumination. --------------*** From the Yale University Beinecke Library entry for the VMs: (MS 408) ............ It is very likely that Emperor Rudolph acquired the manuscript from the English astrologer John Dee (1527-1608) whose foliation remains in the upper right corner of each leaf (we thank A. G. Watson for confirming this identification through a comparison of the Arabic numerals in the Beinecke manuscript with those of John Dee in Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole 1790, f. 9v, and Ashmole 487). See also A. G. Watson and R. J. Roberts, eds., John Dee's Library Catalogue (London, The Bibliographical Society, forthcoming). Dee apparently owned the manuscript along with a number of other Roger Bacon manuscripts; he was in Prague 1582-86 and was in contact with Emperor Rudolph during this period. In addition, Dee stated that he had 630 ducats in October 1586, and his son Arthur (cited by Sir T. Browne, Works, G. Keynes, ed. [1931] v. 6, p. 325) noted that Dee, while in Bohemia, owned "a booke...containing nothing butt Hieroglyphicks, which booke his father bestowed much time upon: but I could not heare that hee could make it out." Subject: another Horcicky's MS Date: Sat, 08 Jul 2000 22:40:56 +0200 From: "Rafal T. Prinke" To: VMS I have added some more info to my Web site. There is a report from my initial survey of published catalogues of manuscripts in Prague libraries. Most interesting is one MS signed by "Jakub z Tepence" on folio 1v - which has finally convinced me the erased signature on the same folio of VMS was genuine (I was uncertain of it before). There is also included a sample of Raphael Mnisovsky's handwriting (from a reference supplied by Jim Reeds). I have also made a simple chart showing the VMS ownership chronology for reference. All that and more at: http://hum.amu.edu.pl/~rafalp/HERM/VMS/vms.htm Best regards, Rafal
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