Sometimes the biggest issues can hinge on the smallest questions.
It seems that, from Rene Zandbergen’s recollection of this week’s press conference, the Voynich Manuscript’s inks and paints are merely consistent with its vellum’s radiocarbon dating. Naturally, for the ‘smoking gun’ brigade, that alone is insufficient proof to rule out any later dates for the creation of the VMs. The argument against consistency goes that the VMs could have been made decades later, if not centuries… as long as you are happy to accept the putative existence of a über-sophisticated and determined reconstructionist hoaxer producing a simulacrum of something that never actually existed in the first place, producing language-like text by means as yet unknown. 🙂
Even though I’m sometimes painted as the ‘solo voice of the Voynich mainstream’ (unpick that knot!) which would seem to place me in diametric opposition to such “Matrix”-like simulatory claims, I am actually sympathetic to many key aspects. For example, Barbara Barrett has argued passionately for a 12th century date for the VMs, and I can quite see how a lot of the VMs’ visual content does appear to her to match many of the tropes and techniques of the period: from my point of view (and taking the dating evidence into account), the VMs does seem to contain some kind of post-1400 “appeal to antiquity”, insofar as it appears older than it is.
But I came to that position for other reasons. For me, the key statistical and palaeographic evidence that independently led me there came from the “aiiv” and “aiir” letter-groups, which very closely resemble medieval [quire + folio + side] page references, but whose usage statistics are completely inconsistent with their being page references. I find it basically impossible to believe that this pattern arose simply by chance: in fact, in a tricksy (but logical) writing system as spare and tight as Voynichese, I strongly argue that this can only have been by deliberate design. And so I would say that there is an appeal to antiquity built right in to the cipher alphabet’s construction – a kind of “quasi-historical covertext conceit“, if you like.
Hence, I am receptive to the idea that the Voynich was in some way constructed to appear older than it actually was: and so the suggestion that the maker bought in old vellum to help “sell” that idea would fit naturally into this whole misdirection. So I can’t honestly say that this isn’t (to at least some degree) the case here – the whole furore over the Vinland Map is an example of how the same forensic science looking at an artefact from the same period can remain contested for decades.
Unfortunately, this means that radiocarbon dating is therefore only part of the codicological story, and we need to take a slightly wider view of the evidence in order to move things forward. I think the right question to be asking is: if the vellum was made [possibly much] earlier than it was used, what physical processes happened to it inbetween times… and can we test for those (either by their presence or their absence)?
For example, was vellum stored flat, folded, or cut?
- If vellum was stored cut, then we should test the age of the extremely unusually-shaped Q9 sexfolio or the nine-rosette page, because these would have had to have been made specially.
- If vellum was stored folded, then I suspect that this would leave stress lines along the fold marks that would be visible under X-ray on the larger sheets.
- If vellum was stored flat, then I suspect that this might lead to a difference in physical properties of the two sides – the uppermost might have “aged” more from greater physical exposure?
The issue here is that I strongly suspect that vellum was in almost all cases stored cut: whenever I have read about caches of old vellum appearing, it is in the form of cut sheets. This would seem to match the three-stage business process used to make leather in the later Middle Ages, for which my source is the account of the Barcelonan leather trades in p.97 of James Amelang’s fascinating “The Flight of Icarus” (1998):-
First […] were the blanquers (in Castilian, curtidores), who purchased raw hides from butchers or from livestock brokers in the countryside and took the initial steps to convert them into leather. The next stage of preparation was presided over by the assaonadors (Cast. zurradores), who curried or dressed the skins the blanquers partially processed. At the far end stood various individual trades which specialized in finished products ready for sale: cordwainers […], embossers, makers of saddles, harnesses, reins, gloves, and parchment, and, above, all, shoemakers and cobblers.
Amelang goes on to point out that the most economically powerful group were the blanquers, because of “the higher capital requirements of their wholesale dealings in hides and other supplies, including sumac, alum […] and other dressing products”.
To me, what this means is that medieval parchment makers had probably always eked out a fairly marginal existence: furthermore given that paper had become so affordable (and was becoming ever cheaper), the mid-Quattrocento parchment trade must have been pretty much dying on its feet. Hence, I really don’t see parchment makers themselves holding large stocks of uncut parchment for decades: rather, I would expect to see caches of cut parchment sitting around on shelves or cases in monasteries and administration centres.
Hence, I would argue that the key test here would be what the dating was for any of the unusually shaped pages, because these would most likely have had to have been made specially for the VMs. Hopefuly we will find out soon which particular four bifolios were tested…
Nick, I agree with Barbara, it’s older …in a sense..I’m convinced it’s a copy of an older book.
With regards to parchment makers keeping stocks, surely if paper was becoming cheaper, parchment would become more valuable and prized. Today, just because we have synthetic fabrics, it doesn’t mean that nobody keeps stocks of fine linens.
Keep up the great work, I love reading your blog!
PS It could have been stored rolled, then the ‘rough’ ends cut off before use.
I know what you’re saying, but I’d prefer to have evidence of what people actually did, rather than of what we think surely must have happened (which, at this distance in time and space, is normally wrong). For example, I somehow doubt that parchment was becoming more prized: I don’t recall it reading anywhere about it becoming any more expensive. Pricing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance worked quite differently from how it does now… or rather, it was just as political but in a somewhat different way. 🙂
You could just as well look at stocks of parchment as if they were shops full of blank videos. 🙂
See what you mean, but I can’t fathom: Italy was already exporting paper to Spain second half of 14th century, but in Tivoli they continued to PRODUCE parchment AND paper even into the 18th century.
Well this will be a major point of interest, and something which has not been so important before the VMs dating. A question which has not been answered before, or even asked with such detail. For instance, I would ask the question, “What other examples of vellum tests showed a date earlier than known use, and how much earlier?”. There must be examples. If it is found that no such example shows vellum used past, say, 5 years after creation, then it tells us something. If there are many examples of it being used 50 years after, then something else.
This is why I asked Rene on your previous post, and ask him again… and anyone who might know of such examples. Are there any, and what do they tell us?
I could imagine that once it has been established that a certain manuscript was written on a certain date, no one would bother testing the vellum… it would be a non-issue when the sheep was killed. It would be expensive and damaging to the document, and no one might have cared about the answer, or assumed it any such date was close to the writing. But perhaps this understandable situation has been hiding a history of “old vellum use”… something which has not been of interest in the past, and still would be only to a select few VMs researchers, such as 15th and 16th century proponents. Rich.
Well, people continue to make parchment even now, so that’s not the issue. Rather, paper became cheaper than vellum during the 14th century, and then become a lot cheaper (as well as available in vastly higher quantities) during the 15th century. I’m sure that some economic historian somewhere will have compiled a graph of vellum sales vs paper sales, and it will show a sharp decline in vellum sales circa 1400-1450. But leather continued to be made and worked (for shoes, belts, whips, etc), so my prediction is that the principle losers from all this were probably the parchment makers, who I would expect were never vastly well-off in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong – people continued to use parchment / vellum for various specialist tasks (maps and deeds being the most well-known, though a few copies of incunabula were also printed on vellum – opulence for its own sake, I suspect). But the vellum volume must have dropped to 10% or so of its peak value – and that’s 90% less parchment makers to support.
For most normal historical purposes, carbon dating is amply sufficient: but here, we’re dealing with a knot of codicology and cryptography that is tangled on a far grander scale. It’s excellent that we have a basically solid earliest date for the VMs: but we now need to find new ways to push the technical boundaries of what can be strongly inferred as to its latest date. In my opinion, a lot of this process will involve trying to turn the kind of fuzzy glow of uncertainty around it all into a few sharply pointed questions that can (in theory) be answered with recourse to strictly physical examination. Such as: “was vellum stored flat, folded, or cut?” 🙂
Asking the right question can be no less hard than trying to answer it!
Nick: Good points as always… but do you have thoughts on this specific question, “What examples of length of time between production of vellum and it’s use are known, and if so, what are they?”. I like your questions, and hope that we do see answer… but I would also love to know the answer to my question, if you or anyone knows one. Rich.
Nick, I have other questions, sorry for being naive, but what animal skins were used for the vellum? If you have seen the Vms ‘live’ what thickness and colour ( very white or tinted ) are they? Thanks.
Forgot to say, that maybe the fact that paper-makers put filigrain marks into their paper (at least in Italy- making the producer easily recognised ) could have been why vellum was preferred for the Vms.
Hello Rich, I am not aware of concrete examples of MS for which it
was demonstrated that the parchment was stored for a longer time.
I agree that this is now one of the most interesting questions.
For me it is a matter of probability. For the C-14 dating we have a quite
deterministic (quantitative) probability curve. For the ‘storage’ of the vellum
we don’t. This question iabout the storage is also addressed in the film.
In my opinion it is relevant that all tested samples date to the same (few-year)
time frame. If old vellum is reused, how likely is it to find a large batch after
N years, for N ranging from 1 to (say) 200?
If there are concrete examples, they may start turning up, now that
this has become a more important issue for the Voynich MS.
Hopefully the issue of what type of animal the vellum was from will merit discussion in the film: and though I look forward to the discussion of length of storage there too, I’m more immediately interested to know whether any samples were taken from outsize bifolios.
Hi Rich,
You ask: “What examples of length of time between production of vellum and it’s use are known, and if so, what are they?”
I don’t think this is normally a codicological focus: all I’m trying to do here is to turn that same fuzzy uncertainty into something that can actually be tested empirically / physically.
Alternatively… the closest to this I can think of is where people talk about how vellum changed between different centuries: and in that context, the most obvious (and perhaps now most embarrassing) is the mention from Robert Babcock at the Beinecke that the VMs’ vellum resembled 16th century vellum.
Having handled the VMs myself, I do suspect that there’s something a bit non-standard (if not actually bespoke) going on there: for example, I went to New Haven expecting to be able to tell the hair side from the flesh side very readily… but that’s not the case. I suspect that the pages have been worked on very heavily by the parchment maker, and it’s not at all obvious to me why that should be so.
As an aside, one of the herbal bifolios was noticeably thicker than the others, and I would say that that would be a standout test for a page of vellum I’d particularly like to see studied, as I suspect it came from a different source to the others. (It was around f50 or so, but I can’t remember the folio number off-hand, though).
Aparently it’s only under a microscope that you can tell the ex ‘hairy side’ from the ‘flesh side’. The vellum was rubbed for quite a while with pomice stone to make it smooth, but also to take away the shine which would hinder any writing. The biggest hint would be the colour ( darker on the hairy side). White or cream would be a skin from a sheep and a brownier colour from a goat ( cow hides were rare in Italy).
Another interesting point is that before the XIII century vellum production was restricted to monasteries and were much ‘thicker’. Maybe your thicker page was much older. Holes were acceptable for monks and pages with holes were not discarded but ‘written around’. If the Vms doesn’t have any largish holes then it is from a more prestigious and later source.
…. Mentre un uomo sta riducendo la pelle in fogli rettangolari, un altro sta trattando altri fogli con la calce per renderli adatti alla scrittura. La merce stipata sugli scaffali comprende tanto rotoli quanto pacchi di fogli già pronti.
‘Nei primi tempi, quando la produzione di pergamena era affidata ai soli monasteri, la pergamena era assai spessa ma, a partire dal XIII secolo era divenuta levigata e fina come un tessuto’.
Rene and Nick: Thanks for the answers, just what I was looking for, right on the nose. All very interesting. Too interesting… the “side lines” are almost as time consuming as the investigations, it seems… Rich.
I suppose I had been led to believe (before going to the Beinecke) that the VMs was a bit, ummm, “agricultural” quality-wise (hence my expectation that I would be able to tell one side from the other purely by touch). But actually working with it directly was enough to convince me otherwise…
I’ve found from various Italian websites that vellum was usually stored rolled or cut ( or sometimes sewn or glued already into quaderni – with 16 writable sides ) The first face in a codex was usually a page with the ‘flesh’ side. Fur side would be coupled ( facing) another fur side, and then the slightly smoother flesh side against another flesh side ( a good scribe could recognise which was which). The thicker vellums were used by notaries, so looks like some stray pages got in there!
It also seems that until late 1500’s when printing was making the request for ( and availability of )books more common, parchment was still preferred by most even though paper was available.
Michelle writes:
Could you direct us to those sites, Michelle? I did not know that vellum was sometimes stored in pre-sewn quartos… this is of course very interesting. Rich.
Hi Michelle,
You have to be very careful about this: in order to confound the applicability of the dating evidence, people will want to suggest that the vellum could have been stored for a decade or a century before being used. My historical instinct is that vellum would only have been stored flat or in rolls by a commercial parchment maker for a relatively short period of time (a month? two months?), and that where it survived for longer periods of time it would have been sold and cut (and perhaps even sewn or glued into quaderni, as you say) and held by a buyer.
Paper was not a fringe purchase. Cicco Simonetta’s Sforza chancellery famous consumed mountains of paper (not vellum) circa 1450-1470, and its approach to administration (and to ciphers, too) was much admired and copied throughout Italy. People tend to think of there having been only a few (pre-1500) incunabula, but this was not true: and 99.9%+ of incunabula were printed on paper, with just a handful of show copies printed on parchment. Many people also started keeping paper diaries 1400-1500, because they could now afford to. Parchment was nice, for sure: but paper quickly came to rule the roost.
Cheers, …Nick Pelling…
I agree that it was probably stored for short periods, as everything I can read on Internet indicates that parchment was expensive, afterall an animal, be it a goat, sheep or calf had to be bought first and the process was time consuming. In some cases it would be made ‘to order’.
I’m looking through my bookmarks to extract where I got this info, and then I’ll post it. In the meantime I’m also waiting to a response to an email I’ve sent.
Another thing I find interesting is that parchment is ‘inifuga’, hard to set fire to-Another good reason for preferring parchment to paper
Thank you, Michelle… we look forward to it. I’ll poke around also, in the meantime. Rich.
I’ve managed to get back to one site where the person writing seems to take for granted ( hopefully from his personal knowledge) that the Stationarii used ‘quaderni’ that were already bound.
http://www.villaggiomedievale.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=571&whichpage=2
It does seem logical. With the advent of Universities and a need for more texts in the !3th Century, professors would give a text to Stationarii to have copied. To make this quicker and easier a text was ‘divided’ into ‘pecia’ and each transcriber would be given one to copy. When each pecia that formed the text had been completed it would be bound into a book, so it would have been much simpler to give a quaderno to a copier to ‘fill in’ ( the length of the text and the size of the letters would be visible on the original). Surely someone wanting to buy parchment would go to this same supplier ( stationarii) rather than a merchant selling rolls of parchment ( which would also give less useful offcuts – usally consumed by notaries and the likefor single page documents).
Here is also another interesting link which lists criteria used to form a codex according to it’s utility
http://www.medievista.it/codici/libro.html
OK.
Monastic scriptoria may be eliminated as a material source because they
produced parchment or vellum only when required for a planed book, or to
renew the personal stock of the abbey’s prior, accountant, or other person
who’d a regular need to keep records. Monastic writing material was not
stored but used almost immediately. By the end of the 13thC the
monastaries had been overtaken as the major source of books, documents, and
writing material, and by the 15thC most monastaries actually ordered their
materiels from lay stationers. Secular scriptoria were the main source of
books by the begining of the 14thC.
That leaves us with secular stationers who sprang up in the late 11thC and
soon became the primary source of writing material. Most commonly Vellum was
produced and stored in whole quires. The hide was prepared and then while
still animal shaped folded across its length, once (forget the name for this
size but it was used in the Codex Gigas) twice, (quarto) thrice (octavo) or
again to produce the size of the VM which I do not believe anyone has named
but it was a popular size with students. Then it was trimmed into
gatherings which as a natural consequence of the folding had hair side
facing hair and flesh side facing flesh. Note here that until Caroline
times the flesh side was outermost on quires, but from the 9th to the end of
the 14thCs it was the hair side that was outermost. In the 15thC the order
went back to flesh outermost in imitation of early Caroline practice. No one
knows why this order reversal took place, only that it did, and many
appraisers regard which side is outermost as an infallible method of placing
an MS in its historical context. Most often, just after folding and
trimming, these loose gatherings would be sown together.
Other hides could be cut into sheets, but most of these would
be sown into the above gatherings to make 5+ sheet quire. Other Single
sheets were sometimes cut and/or sown into rolls (the roll being an
administrative government document that was extended as needed over a year)
or odd sized individual sheets were set aside for document work.
It really depended upon the demands the stationers customers usually made
which the stationer would anticipate. Sheepskins were popular for patents,
donations, declarations, etc that only needed one side. There were always
more sheep than cattle but it took a heck of a lot of work to make the flesh
side of sheep hide writable. The stationers’ solution to this problem was
only to prepare the hair side and sell them for one sided documents. This is
the origin of the slang term for a university degree; “a sheepskin”.
Most stationers, right from earliest times, adopted the practice of storing
individual quires, sheets or rolls, in cloth until sold.
The thing to remember is that in all eras demand always outstripped supply.
Right then, that’s the main facts, now for my own deductions for what
they’re worth along with more facts; I’ll try to make clear which is which.
So while it is not impossible that enough blank quires and sheets to create
the VMS lay around for decades before use, it is so improbable that it
beggars belief. This is particularly the case for high quality vellum such
as the semi transparent skunk, or uterine, vellum the VMS is made from (the
term uterine is slightly misleading because although such fine vellum could
be made from aborted calves it was economically wasteful and the majority of
so-called uterine vellum was in fact very very finely pared down parchment).
Personally I find it exceptionally difficult to imagine the quantity needed
for the VMS could have lain around for any length of time.
One the other hand, if the VMS was produced on recycled quires I’d expect it
to show evidence of it being a palimpsest, which it does not.
While it is true that occasionally a sheet or two did escape use and even
survive to modern times, it was only the odd sheet here and there and most
of these were ones in private hands that’d been bought and never used; so I
feel that loose sheets surviving any length of time in a stationers, if it
happened, must have been rare. The VMS’s vellum seems from the SIDs, with
the exception of the Rosettes fold-out page, to all be of a type; very fine
high quality semi-transparent vellum. But if someone were collecting “old”
sheets from here and there to make the 116+ sheets (remember there are pages
and two quires missing) then I’d expect it to be a mixture of parchment,
vellum, and skunk vellum; which is not the case.
By the 15thC Paper had replaced prepared hides which became rare in
stationers’ stock, but could be produced for made to order for commissioned
works.
Make of all that what thou wilt.
All facts quoted originated in the following tomes;
Scribes and Illuminators (Medieval Craftsmen) by Christopher de Hamel ISBN
978-0714120492
Medieval Illuminators & their Methods of Work by J J G Alexander ISBN
0-300-06073-4
Introduction to Manuscript Studies by R Clemens & T Graham ISBN
978-0-8014-8708-8
The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books (12th to 16thC) by A Derolez
ISBN 978-0-521-68690-7
The Book Before Printing by D Diringer ISBN 0-486-24243-9
Latin Palaeography by B Bishop ISBN 0-521-36726-3
An Introduction to Greek & Latin Palaeography by Sir E M Thompson
Michelle: Thank you for the link and information. I couldn’t find a reference… now we have two. And Barbara also states that, “Most commonly Vellum was produced and stored in whole quires.” So I’ve learned something new.
But I suppose it should have occurred to me that this would make more sense than handing a scribe a pile of loose sheets, a pen, and a sewing needle. Storing prepared, sewn and assembled quires would make much more sense. Rich.
Thanks Barbara, for your detailed, informative and
obviously well-founded contribution.
For the Voynich MS we know, of course, that it
was not written on fully prepared quires, or at
best only part of it (at most up to and including
quire 8 ) could have been.
Well done Barbara. Someone suggested this book too, but unfortunately doesn’t seem available to read on the web
‘Libri, scrittori e pubblico nel Rinascimento. Guida storica e critica’, a cura di A. Petrucci,
This is the same as what I’ve been able to read ( in less detail ) on the Italian web.
Also that the folded sheets were put ‘fold into fold’ , so one would have to be folded one way the next in another way, (or you would get hair to flesh).
I should very much like the chance to know more of what Barbara Barrett has written about the Voynich. Her research is impressive and I believe that on a number of points our views co-incide, and that her conclusions, being reached first, ought to be credited if so. Where can I find more articles?
However, on the issue of where monasteries got their parchment, and the quantities in which they got it, there are exceptions, both regional and occasional. That is, in more outlying regions, monasteries continued to make their own parchment, and made it seasonally, as the annual slaughter of animals was done, preparatory to wintering under cover.
Whether a person acquired a book from a secular or monastic scriptorium was partly determined by the sort of book it was, and partly by the degree to which the religious authorities felt nervous about the contents. Books of Hours, for example, tended to be ordered from monastic scriptoria, whereas packs of cards were almost always got from secular sources by the mid-fifteenth century. Before that, we do have records of their being made as memento-pictures by members of the Domincian order.
Sorry – I’ve run on. But I would be very glad to read more of Barbara’s writings about the Vms.
Diane: Barbara probably still posts to the Voynich Mailing List, you might ask her there – I don’t know if she has published anything else though (apart from a review of “The Curse of the Voynich” in Fortean Times).