Here’s a quick Voynich Manuscript palaeographic puzzle for you. A couple of months ago, I discussed Edith Sherwood’s suggestion that the third letter in the piece of marginalia on f116v was a Florentine “x”, as per Leonardo da Vinci’s quasi-shorthand. I also proposed that the topmost line there might have read “por le bon simon s…”
Going over this again just now, I did a bit of cut-and-paste-and-contrast-enhance in a graphics editor to see if I could read the next few letters:-
OK, I’m still reasonably happy with “por le bon simon s…“, but what then? Right now, I suspect that this last word begins “sint…” (and is possibly “sintpeter“?) – could it be that this is the surname of the intended recipient? Of course, in the Bible, St Peter’s name was originally Simon, so “simon sintpeter” may or may not be particularly informative – but it could be a start, all the same.
But then again, the “n” and/or “t” of the “sint” could equally well have been emended by a well-meaning later owner: and the last few letters could be read as “ifer“, depending on whether or not the mark above the word is in the same ink. Where are those multispectral scans when you need them? Bah!
Feel free to add your own alternate readings below! 🙂
With a little imagination, I can read the “sintpeter” as “Lucifer”, although the initial L looks oddly shaped and smudged.
Nick,
I still think the VM’s a Duran Duran songbook, perhaps with a real weird tabulature… for lute or harp? (IIRC the guitar as we know it nowadays had not yet been invented, so this might account for that.)
But if there’s a copyright notice related to Simon le Bon… that’s compelling. 😉
Elmar
Hi Elmar,
Well, let’s look at the primary evidence:-
fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cth!res.y.kor.sholdy!-
See them walking hand in hand across the bridge at midnight
sory.ckhar.o!r.y.kair.chtaiin.shar.are.cthar.cthar.dan!-
Heads turning as the lights flashing out it’s so bright
OK, though it’s far from a brilliant match, I must confess to having been shown worse Voynich theories. 😮
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
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IMHO in first word i can read ancient greek letter “gama” and word sounds in German: “gotleben” … Too many possibilities for reading 🙁
Too many possibilities, too few probabilities: it’s The Voynich Way. *sigh*
Came back to this post.
Recently had a blinding revelation – no one including Baresch, ever said the manuscript contained ‘ancient’ Egyptian medicine.
Ancient Egyptian was a bee in Kircher’s bonnet, and not neccessarily the sort of script which Baresch expected at all. He also speaks of a thesauros – which certainly can mean ‘treasures’ as Neal translates it, but more literally a warehouse, or a thesaurus-as-glossary of which we have at least one example in medieval medicine – by a chap called Simon!
He was a Genoese (which I rather like) and Bacon clearly had a copy of his work, because he refers to him in his tract against physicians. Approving of Simon, though.
So perhaps this Simon (or another) set out to compile another glossary of ‘Egyptian’ medicine and its languages, too.
So ‘Simon’ is a good name to find inscribed here. If it is.
Not sure if this has already been mentioned –
a Symon Semeonis (OFM) left Ireland to travel through Crete, Egypt and the holy land with one ‘Hugo the Illuminator’ in 1323. On the offchance that the inscription on f.116v does read ‘pour le bon Simon S..’ – then Bdid may be justified in taking this inscription as a colophon rather than a prayer (recent interpretation on the list) etc..
and another one…
Bonet de Lates.
inventor of an astronomical ring-dial by means of which solar and stellar altitudes can be measured and the time determined with great precision by night as well as by day.
etc.
Too late to have composed the Vms, or to have first copied it, he might yet have received part or all of the ms from his predecessors – who mostly wrote ‘Lattes’
see
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9661-lattes-lattas#289
Among them, in the thirteenth century, is Isaac de Lattes who mentions one ‘Master Viole’ credited with a text called the Strategems of Compounding, about the pharmaceutical gradations.
This ‘Maestro Viole’ might possibly have been from Rhodes.
Tzvi Langermann says the text is that of Ibn Rushd.
We have just one copy, in MS Guenzsburg 642, written in a Spanis hand of the 15thC-16thC.
Perhaps Spanish hand was as popular as Spanish costume and Spanish word-games just then?)
Langermann’s article:
Tzvi Langermann, ‘Some New Medical Manuscripts from Moscow’, academia.edu
Simon Nucifero.
The only surname that seems to fit if it ends with “fero”.
http://www.gentedimaregenealogy.com/data.html
Folatt: could be, could be… but the first letter still looks like the same ‘s’ used in ‘simon’ immediately before it. 😐
I found some others ending with “-ifero”
Sonnifero
Semifero
Scutifero
Trifero
I’m going for SintTrifero.
I just re-read your article.
Yeah, if the n and t were added later, then at some point one could only read: “Simon Si.. Trifero”
Perhaps it was Simon Si.(Simonis) Trifero instead. You know, like Simon’s son.
Sleuthing forth, I found that Trifero is a rare surname originating in Catania, a city in Sicily that flourished during the Renaissance period.
www[dot]ganino[dot]com[dot]cognomi_italiani_t
en[dot]wikipedia[dot]org[dot]wiki[dot]Catania
Maybe it was a gift because the University opened there in 1434?
I’d just like to send one more message to strengthen my argument that it reads “Simon Si(monis) Trifero”.
Now I’m just an amateur sleuth, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe both the two ‘s’es and the ‘t’ are written in capital letters.
If the t was a small t then it wouldn’t have such a long “ceiling”.
One more thing..
Perhaps the “n” Between “Si” and “Trifero” is one of those double comma characters added later to indicate a repetition, which messed up the space between the patronym and surname.
So it reads: “Simon Si,, Trifero”
Folatt: palaeographically, the thing that bothers me about this line is that even though I’m comfortable with the idea the ‘/\’ character is for ‘s’, I’ve never seen any sample of handwriting that actually does this. I suspect that if we could find such a sample of handwriting, this line would instantly become much clearer to us. Because right now, it’s just too difficult without any external reference point to work with.
Maybe he was a few centuries ahead of his time and started to write in cursive ;-P.
He also wrote all the ‘r”s in reverse which look more like a cursive ‘r’ than a Rotunda ‘r’, so why not? ;-P
Something that bothers me, by the way, is
“Por le bon”. Now I never studied Latin, but that strikes me as bad French.
I suggest that “le bon” is actually “liber” (reverse ‘r’ strikes again) and that whatever po’scribble’ stands for, it’s gonna be short for pontifex.
So I’m wild guessing now that if Antonio Averlino (I prefer Fontana though) wrote it, he must then have given it to Eugene IV, who then put it in his new University of Catania and a clerk called Simon Si Trifero who writes ‘s’es like it was the 20th century wrote this down.
Folatt: now you’re starting to understand why this is genuinely difficult – here, even though there are lots of pieces that make sense individually, trying to assemble them into a coherent palaeographic picture isn’t really working satisfactorily.
Do you have any books/writings from 15th century Sicily in humanist miniscule then to compare?
By the way on Voynich marginalia: French Secretary hand? you said:
What is the high-ranking surprise?
Folatt: I meant “I’m sure there are plenty of sites with videos of topless French secretaries, but they may not help with your palaeography search“. 😉
Ohhh… and here I thought you meant that a topless p is reserved for the pope. 😀
Folatt: I’m sure there are plenty of books detailing the excesses of past popes, though I’d be somewhat surprised if (m)any of them are on sale in the Vatican Museum’s gift shop. 😉
I just sleuthed on again and found a pdf of a book by James J. John that talks about Paleography. According to him there’s two types of humanist miniscules: round and cursive, of which the latter was informal and not so much bound by any rules.
The example he shows of humanist cursive is from a book from the Cornell University Library Department of Rare Books from 1500? Naples(?), who uses the cursive miniscule ‘r’.
Doing some wild guesses here:
If you search the Cornell University Library Department of Rare Books (where that book is from) for more (South) Italian Renaissance books and you’ll find a cursive ‘s’ too.
If you search Catania’s genealogy you find Simon Simonis Trifero and you know from which decade the book was held, perhaps even given a clue to what year VMs was written.
Surely someone has already said, somewhere, that the inscription might relate to Symeon Seth?
11thC. Jewish physician. added information from Islamic and Indian sources to the Byzantine Greeks’ repertoire?
His first major work was a dictionary focusing mostly on the medical properties of certain foods (most of the material came from the Muslim world and some from India). In this work, he introduced Arabic words into the Greek language. These were words that were also adopted in the West in translations into Latin, for example, camphor, musk, ambergris, julep and syrup. Sarton points out, “Most, if not all of these drugs and spices are here mentioned in Greek for the first time.” Seth also wrote a botanical dictionary.
– but I’m sure someone has already mentioned him; just nothing turns up for me through Giggle.
neglected to add that most of the above info. is quoted from an enthusiastic study entitled ‘Studies in Islamic Civilization: The Muslim Contribution to the Renaissance’ by Ahmed Essa and Othman Ali.
A different slant on his work is offered by the wiki article, which spells his name ‘Simeon’. But it does offer an excellent list, and links, to extant mss of Simeon’s work.
If the Voynich turned out to be mainly from his text, I think honour would be satisfied in many presently opposing Voynich camps. But who knows?
No, that’s definitely not an “S”, so I think “Simon” is a completely wrong discourse, he can be safely dismissed.
Anton Alipov: if you look at handwriting from Savoy circa 1400-1500, you often see ‘s’ written in a very similar way, so the answer isn’t as straightforward as you think.
Anton – how do you know?
Nick:
That would mean that line 0 is something altogether different from lines 1-3. Because the latter do feature a totally different shape of “s” (like in “six”, line 2), and perhaps yet another one (like in “oladabas”, if “s” that is). Both shapes are met in German (sorry! ;-)) MS’s of the time.
No Savoy-like “s” in lines 1-3.
Yet I admit that that character is not transliterated easily. To me it looks like an “u/v” or perhaps the survived part of a “p”.
I published my thoughts on line 0 in a blog post http://athenaea.net/index.php?id=57
I’m still seeing leben instead of le bon.
Nancy: as far as the Voynich Manuscript’s f116v page goes, people have always interpreted the same letters as different things – whether because of what they’ve seen before or what doesn’t really matter. Yet despite that, a well-planned and well-executed codicological and palaeographic examination should be able to yield a single absolute answer about what strokes were originally intended, and what (if any) came later. It’s just a shame that nobody apart from me seems to think this is probably the lowest-hanging of all the fruits on the (very tall) Voynich research tree. :-/
Nick, has there been any advance on the matter of multispectral scans? As you are aware such scans would probably clean up the writing and make it easier to read.
Byron Deveson: sadly, there has not – even though a series of multispectral scans were carried out on that particular page, the full depth scans have not yet been released (or even written up).
However, from the low-colour-depth scans I did manage to get hold of, my suspicion is that multispectral scans aren’t quite informative enough to resolve these issues, and that it would instead require a combination of Raman scans (e.g. from stuff contaminating the various inks) and physical indentation scans (to try to separate early writing on fresh vellum from later writing on not-quite-compliant vellum) to solve the problem. All of which would take a good bit of time and money to arrange, plan, and execute. 😐
Nick: Por Simon; now there’s an aberration for you. A marginal flash in the pan that was poorly conceived from the get go; now suspiciously regurgitated for no valid purpose. Bon chance old man, though not one of your better ploy destined to receive a right royal shafting
Hi Nick, I do think that the scribbles might be the most important thing at this moment. I was wondering if that b letter could actually be a ringel S.
I’m trying to look at it as if it’s not a part of this manuscript, but something on its own. Because tying this to the manuscript makes interpreting it subjective.
Nick – here’s another ‘Simon/Simeon’ – just to add to the list, and because he was educated by the Jesuits at an interesting time. I realise that what you say about the hand makes a seventeenth-century figure unlikely to be the ‘Simeon’ meant.
Simeon Polockij, an Orthodox Christian (probably Uniate) monk [who] was born in 1629 in Poland. He received a Jesuit humanistic education. Polockij (or as he styled himself late in life, “Simeonis Piotrowski Sitanianowicz Jeromonachi Polocensis Ordfinis] S[ancti] Basilii Magjni]”) moved to Moscow and attempted—largely unsuccessfully—to introduce Latin, humanistic values, and the works of classical pagan authors to hostile Muscovites.
from: Max J. Okenfuss, ‘The Ages of Man on the Seventeenth-Century Muscovite Frontier’, The Historian, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Autumn 1993), pp. 87-104.
Wow, 2009 and I’m only just seeing this blog for the first time.
Based on research from scanned documents, I can verify that the “x” in pox (which is the same shape as the “x” in six, marix, morix) is a pretty normal “x” throughout the medieval period and is found everywhere from England to Italy and Spain.
I wish it were confined to a tighter time period or geographic region, but it’s not. I’ve searched for years. It’s not super-common to connect the second stroke with a loop, but it’s not uncommon. I have hundreds of examples from different manuscripts.
The closest matches I have found so far are from France, Switzerland, Austria, Silesia, Belgium, Spain, England, and Italy, between about 1399 and 1480, so clearly a lot of people learned to write it this way.