Since the recent Austrian Voynich Manuscript documentary (where the age of the VMs’ vellum was tested using radiocarbon dating), there has been debate about how vellum was created, stocked, sold, stored and used in and around the 15th century. The #1 issue is that if uncut pieces of vellum were routinely held for long periods (years? decades? centuries?), Voynich theories that require a later use dating still stand. Conversely, if you acknowledge that the manuscript itself displays many of the attributes of a copy, Voynich theories that require an earlier creation dating still stand. In which case, hard science would appear to have gone fairly soft on us.
However, simply relying on the possibility of storage is historically imprecise (if not actually woolly): we might well do better to try to understand the medieval parchment ‘ecology’ – that is, the set of trade, guild, and use behaviours associated with parchment – and see how parchment worked within (and for) the broader economy.
An accessible starting point for this is the first chapter of Cyprian Blagden’s (1960) “The stationers’ company: a history, 1403-1959”. According to this, the word stationarius (“stationer”) is mentioned in Oxford and Cambridge in the 13th century, and in London and York in the early 14th century, and denoted a permanent stall-holder (and so “stationary”, though we now spell it as “stationery”) rather than a hawker or peddler: the word quickly became associated with the book trade. The main people involved in 14th century book production in London were:-
- parchminer – supplied the parchment
- scrivener – wrote the text
- lymner – added the illustrations
- bookbinder – sewed gatherings into quires, and bound quires and covers into books
- stationer – “arranged for the manufacture of a book to a customer’s order” (p.21)
Of course, these were the trades most directly affected by the introduction of printing: but interestingly, Blagden notes that “even parchminers and text-writers were only gradually squeezed out of the book business” (p.23), and that there was “no evidence of unemployment or of organized opposition” (p.23) to mechanical printing presses in England (unlike in Toulouse in 1477).
Some Voynich theorists have posited that the parchment trade suddenly collapsed, so that old vellum was readily available many years later. Well… it’s true that paper eventually killed the parchment trade, just as video eventually killed the traditional radio star: but the suggestions that circa 1450 parchminers ‘suddenly’ found themselves with warehouses full of uncut parchment that would subsequently sit around unsold for decades or centuries seems just plain wrong. As paper manufacturing slowly evolved (and as madly expensive incunabula gave way to quite expensive books, and as the later gradually became affordable), parchment usage did experience a slow decline – but I can’t see obvious evidence of any rapid ‘phase change’ or ‘parchment catastrophe event’.
For sure, we’re still waiting for the raw radiocarbon dating values so that we can validate the headline dating calculation (and make a sensible assessment of the various uncertainties that would be implicit in it) in a transparent kind of way. But if the date range is basically as claimed, I’m finding it grasp to glimpse the economic mechanism by which sufficient uncut parchment to make the VMs would be stored for even a decade, let alone 50, 100, or 150 years. The numbers don’t seem to add up… all in all, a tricky history challenge.
Hmmm, I am of course lucky that I had access to more information than
is publicly available at the current time. I have seen a number of comments
and questions about the forensic examinations, and I would like to point out
(hoping that it doesn’t come across too bluntly) that the forensic experts (to
which I obviously don’t count myself) really don’t require any validation
by the Voynich community consisting essentially of amateurs
in this area (to which I do count myself).
I’m just picking up on a line in the above post, but this comment is not
at all meant to be directed specifically at you, Nick.
This scientific dating is a concrete piece of evidence, which still
needs to be interpreted correctly. It changes ‘probabilities’
but does not create any certainties. I remember a blog entry
by Elmar in the area of history vs. exact science, which I still
consider very much to the point about this.
Rene: perhaps “validation” isn’t quite the right word. What I specifically mean is a combination of:-
(a) transparency about the sampling, i.e. from where in the ms the samples were taken;
(b) transparency about the calculations, i.e. what the actual radiocarbon values were, which calibration curve was used, and the statistical reasoning; and
(c) transparency about the uncertainties, i.e. what the (non-Gaussian) nature of the output probability / confidence curves, and how that dovetails with historical reasoning.
As you know, good science is less about solid end-results than about the transparent (hopefully peer-reviewed) reasoning that gets you there: so for all the attention-getting headlines here, we’re still waiting for the good science train to reach our station.
The problem we face is that there is a lot of sophisticated historical machinery that people would like to balance on top of this single piece of knowledge, so we need not only to review its internal construction pretty carefully, but also to understand its nature and limits. Hence: I’m in no way rubbishing forensic experts – rather, I just want to see how their evidence works, just as I do with every other piece of (equally fragmentary) evidence that relates to this historical and cryptographic mystery.
Hi, Nick:
I don’t think it is necessary to expand the suggestions that this document could have been from old vellum, into a belief that “warehouses full of uncut parchment that would subsequently sit around”. One does not need a warehouse, just a hundred or so leaves.
But it is a fact that there are examples, so one is not “relying on the possibility”, but actually has known examples. I think I gave a few of the ones I came across, but to repeat here: 1) A church ledger, made in 1523, continuously written in until 1839, when it was left with 88 blank pages. 2) A mid-18th century blank vellum book of 140 pages. 3) 20 plus blank 16th century pages, still available in 2007. 4) A 19th century catalog entry for a book with over a dozen blank vellum pages (I forget for the moment if it was thought to be 15th or 14th century).
Again, don’t get me wrong: It is clearly not any sort of evidence that this was done in the case of the Voynich… and I still doubt it was, for a variety of reasons. I think this is most likely a 15th century document. I only wanted to point out that far from being a “woolly” issue, it is a known and established fact that it was done, because several examples can be cited… however common or rare they may turn out to be. Rich.
Rich: I suspect you’re missing the difference beween uncut vellum (i.e. stocked by a parchminer or [more probably] a stationer) and cut vellum (i.e. stored by a buyer, for example as a book or ledger).
Because the VMs has unusually shaped bifolios AND we have all just watched part of Q9’s unusually shaped bifolio being trimmed on the Austrian documentary AND Rene tells us that the four vellum samples all came back with more or less exactly the same radiocarbon date, I contend that that the VMs was very probably folded and cut to order from uncut vellum, not from cut vellum.
My inference is that we should therefore expect our codicological hypotheses to revolve around uncut vellum, which I suspect had a very different kind of business dynamic to cut vellum.
If parchminers only ever worked to order, it would seem unlikely that they would stock parchment: so we should probably be looking to stationers?
Sorry if this wasn’t clear, I didn’t really want to keep repeating the point ad nauseam. 🙂
Oh I see the distinction you are focusing on now. Cut and uncut. I don’t know the state of the different examples I cite, but I’ll look into it. The difference then is that one would assume that uncut vellum would be stored unbound, and so if all from the same date, would likely have been used closer to that date. Whereas cut vellum would have been stored cut and bound, and so, dating consistent between leaves would not be as surprising even if used later. Am I closer?
On a closely related theme, it will be interesting to see if there are any examples of vellum manuscripts with known dating, which for some reason or another were carbon dated. If this were done, it would tell us alot about the very habits we are trying to deduce with so little information, and so much speculation. I intend to ask around, when I have some more free time… Rich.
Before, I deliberately used the words ‘probability’ and ‘certainty’. I can confirm
that both the C-14 expert and the Yale conservator who appeared in the
documentary have said that it is still possible that the parchment was
written upon later.
In my view, we should not assume that all vellum was bought at once.
While the dating gives a relatively narrow time frame on a historic scale,
looked at from the point of one person writing a book, it is quite long.
We can’t exclude that the author took 20 years (I think that the Liber
Floridus of Lambert de St. Omer took even longer).
Rich: you’re closer! As to ‘calibrating the calibration’, we’d need to know which calibration curve was used (there are several)… still waiting.
Rene: when I asked you about this, you said that the difference between samples was not statistically significant – surely this makes it very likely that all the vellum was bought relatively close together? Of course, the actual figures would help… still waiting.
Hi Nick, yes, relatively close, but as the combined 95% interval from four
samples spans 34 years, we can roughly estimate the standard deviation of
each indivudal sample to be 15-20 years. That’s the highest ‘resolotion’ in
time we have, so ‘close together’ means within 20 years (as a ballpark
figure).
The combination of individual probability curves into one is a statistical manipulation
which is valid under the assumption that the samples are independent. The
result is a ‘formal’ uncertainy, which, in practice, tends to be smaller than
the actial (practical) iuncertainty due to:
– omitted error sources (usually unintentional 😉 )
– systematic errors which don’t reduce by combination
By the way, you can clearly see the overlap of the error curves in the film,
looking at the curves plotted against the vertical axis on the left.
(1) Without knowing which bifolios were sampled, I can’t make my own assessment of whether or not they were independent – an uncut sheet of parchment makes multiple bifolia, and if (say) two samples were from the same sheet, that would affect the reasoning. The notion of independence has to be used with careful attention to the historical detail!
(2) These qualitative descriptions of data aren’t really working for me – “not statistically significant”, “relatively close”, “within 20 years (…ballpark…)”, etc. Perhaps when we have some real quantitative data we can resume this discussion more fruitfully?
(3) I don’t believe you can trivially combine non-Gaussian probabilities in the way you describe – there’s a fair amount of sophisticated statistical machinery implicit in the end result, which I’d like to see made explicit.
As to (1), the independence is an assumption.
As to (2), I think that it’s much better to accept the uncertainty, than to try
to force some quantitative facts out of it that are not backed by real
knowledge…
In any case (1404-1438) at 95% is pretty darn quantitative to me.
On (3), Yes, I also think that they should be published and I am sure that they will.
Note, however, that the statistics that were combined were the C-14 percentage
values, where the assumption of normal distribution is not unreasonable.
I just want to understand the reasoning, nature, and limits of this particular piece of knowledge before building upon it – as just about the only empirically tested aspect of the VMs, it is a big deal. As for accepting the date range at face value – this requires more supporting evidence than [none at all] to qualify as, ummm, ‘non-oracular’, let’s say. 🙂
I fully agree with the need for proper publication, of
course.
Until the publications are available, I think one should
keep in mind that these findings are not from some
Voynich enthousiast working by himself in his
basement, and published on an internet mailing list
or blog, but from bona fide research institutes working
in their area of specialisation.
For sure – but we collectively have 1000x more resources (of different types) to apply to the overall historical problem than they do. It’s not a one-sided game, by any means. 🙂
Thanks for another interesting blog post with an accompanying interesting discussion 🙂
🙂
It’s says here in Wikipedia, that the cartolai in florence sold…quaderni e registri di carta pecora..
Ceraioli e cartolai [modifica]
Le botteghe dei cartolai e ceraioli erano concentrate nell’odierna Piazza San Firenze, all’angolo con la Badia Fiorentina e davanti al Bargello, dove si vendevano libri, quaderni, registri in carta pecora e bambagina. Fino all’invezione della stampa alla fine del Quattrocento, i cartolai svolsero anche il lavoro di copisti, ricopiando a mano i libri poi messi in commercio.
And on here there is an illustration and brief description…parchment stored on shelves ready cut and in rolls (from XI century)..
..Una rivendita di pergamena così come illustrata in una cronaca italiana del secolo XI. 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.
http://www.webalice.it/inforestauro/manoscritt_04.htm
Yes, I’m pretty sure that the usual practice right through the Middle Ages was for uncut parchment to be stored rolled up. Yet by 1400, it seems that parchminers made the parchment on behalf of stationers: and remember that the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum has been deemed to have an unusual finish (most notably by Robert Babcock, who noted that it seemed more like 16th century vellum), which is a convincing reason why it looks likely to have been made to order.
It says ready cut AND in rolls.
Michelle: yes, that’s right. But as I described in the post, in the succeeding centuries parchment-making split into two largely separate jobs – parchminers and stationers. Hence by 1400, I believe that parchminers made parchment to order for stationers and that where stock of parchment (uncut rolls and cut sheets) existed, it was almost entirely held by stationers. Effectively, the working capital requirement moved from the parchminer to the stationer.
The economic point about all this is that I think parchment stopped being made speculatively – I don’t see any 15th century market mechanism that would encourage stockpiles of uncut parchment rolls to be built up. And – from the odd-shaped multi-sheet bifolios such as in Q9 – I think we can be prety sure that the VMs was at least partially written on uncut parchment
Firstly I havent seen the film in question and the C14 date is news to me. I had favoured the idea that it was a late c16 confection but I’m a scientist by training so I’ve got some thinking to do! I have seen a 1540’s account book whose blank pages were cut out later with a knife and re-used elsewhere. There were a lot of blank pages…
Wm Harrison (c16) writing about Oxford c. 1236 says ” Certes there were in Oxford at this time 500 parchement makers 1200
burgesses & 24 parish churches”
I’d love to know where he got the 500 from!
Had nothing better to do, so I tried doing a search on Google books ( in Italian) and even though I haven’t had a chance to go into it further, it seems that it was quite usual to get blank pages in manuscripts
http://books.google.it/books?q=quaderno+pergamena+in+bianco&lr=&sa=N&start=20
Shame that most of what one wants to read isn’t actually visable in the extracts of the books that come up ( you can only read them on the ‘listings’).
Maybe someone went around cutting out blank pages from other manuscripts!
A few blank pages lying around, yes: but odd-shaped bifolios (such as Q9, Q10, Q11, Q14, Q15, Q17) lying around already cut to shape? I don’t think so. The inference surely has to be that these were bought as uncut parchment sheets and trimmed to the unusual shapes by the author as required.
Furthermore, Rene’s suggestion that the author might have been carrying these oddly-shaped n-folios for decades doesn’t really work for me: combining this with the evidence that the VMs is in some way a copy of an earlier document would suggest that there was most likely only a relatively brief period between the time the vellum was made and the time that the vellum was used. I don’t have all the answers right now… but at least there is a new class of codicological reasoning forming around the bare bones of the radiocarbon dating, we’ll just have to see to where it leads…
I agree with your reasoning, and am pleased to see that you too think it was copied from an older doc.
Yes… but perhaps not quite how you think. The evidence I presented in “The Curse of the Voynich” pp.99-101 argued for the hypothesis that the VMs was constructed to duplicate the layout of the original document – not only the text and diagrams, but also (implicitly) the lacunae / gaps within the original pages, such as holes and vellum flaws. [Note that Philip Neal has also proposed the same kind of thing, though from an entirely different angle.] Hence I would say that we are very probably looking at an enciphered vellum copy of a vellum original – somewhat like looking through a (very!) distorted lens.
As to how much older that original document will turn out to be, that’s another question entirely. 🙂
John Lock: I’m collecting all the cases I can find of blank vellum pages in ledgers and whatnot… could you share the reference to the 1540’s example? You could post here, or write me at [email protected] Anyone else, also, who has specific examples, I’d love to hear them.
Nick I hope you don’t mind my asking on your blog… I think it’s of interest to everyone. This runs to the core of the problem… or question, and affects almost everyone. As it is, there is so much “I think”, and “I doubt”, and “maybe”, and “would probably”. We still don’t know, but I think everyone is learning fast… just what the case is. I think it’s been surprising so far, IMO.
Rich: fine, no problem. I’ve made it transparently clear why I believe looking for stored cut vellum is of little use in understanding the VMs’ history, but you’re welcome to carry on searching under that streetlight. 🙂
The question is of general interest, and I don’t think that anyone will
claim that it is impossible that the parchment was written upon later than
it was produced. Still, finding specific examples will be interesting,
especically if one gets some statistics out of this.
I know of one example, which may, however, not be representative.
The Dioscorides herbal MS gr.194 kept in the Biblioteca del Seminario
Vescovile consists of 200 paper folios. The paper watermark is datable
to 1329-1339, but the illustrations and text must have been written
between 1353 and 1406.
Oops, the Biblioteca del Seminario Vescovile of Padova is meant, Rene
Hello Rene!
That is what I would like to do, and am doing… compiling some statistics. And there are so many separate categories to this… it would be wrong to jump to conclusions about the relative use or frequency of these different cases: Cut/stored, uncut/stored, unused blank pages bound, unused blank pages unbound.
Then there is the separate case which is another unknown: Our missing knowledge of “habits of old vellum use”. For all we know, many (undated by C14) manuscripts were written on vellum which was decades old. It actually surprises me that there is any resistance at all to learning about these points. These unknowns affect almost everyone… me the least of course, and probably not at all… but most others “in” the late 15th to mid-16th centuries (I would have thought) should be very excited about what can be learned, and the fact that it would support many of these ideas the more case that we find… assuming we continue to find them. This “streetlamp” actually covers many, and we do have to look under it pretty carefully, and not assume anything about this before we have some figures.
Rich: unless I’m missing some obvious codicological insight, the many unusual bifolio shapes are a bit of a giveaway that the Voynich Manuscript was – to a very significant degree – constructed from uncut vellum… basically, you can’t piece together cut sheets to make bigger sheets. The only statistics worth pursuing would therefore be those to do with the stocking or storage of uncut vellum – though interesting in its own right, doing the same for cut vellum is unlikely to give us any historical assistance. But you know all this already. 😉
Nick: In my opinion, learning the habits of vellum use… including all cases, and all conditions, will give a better picture than focusing on the specific case of the Voynich. My point is that I think it would be a mistake to look only at this one condition, and not learn about the greater picture. Quite the opposite of the allegorical situation you relate by evoking the “streetlamp” parable (for the person looking only under the streetlamp because it is the only place which is lit), I think in this instance we would learn more by looking at all cases we can find… even those seemingly unrelated to the exact type used in the VMs. I feel that it is too soon to assume that this cannot be helpful to us in this case… but do understand your feeling that some of it being unrelated in some ways, it will not help.
But: it is easy enough, and interesting enough, to pursue all cases… and as often happens, I feel that we might all be surprised and enlightened, whatever comes of it. It has often happened that something surprisingly pertainant has been learned by asking a question slightly tangential (although this is both tangential and inclusive).
What I would be especially interested in is in examples (statistics) of C-14
dating results compared against other (reliable!) dating evidence for the
same items. This includes the writing delay time, if we may call it that,
but also ‘errors’ in the dating (either dating).
Rene! I like that, “Writing Delay Time”… WDT. I got my first response back from the blanket inquiry I made on the subject, from Cambridge:
I like that the question has never arisen! Imagine: a question which may have not been asked, as the answer has been assumed, so no one probably knows! Somehow that is exciting to me. There may be a whole new understanding buried just beneath the surface of this… value: unknown.
I’m pretty sure that the question has been asked before (it would be a way of validating the calibration), but that it is (pretty much as your Cambridge contact said) too costly for too little historical return.
Seems to me we should just accept the scientific evidence – unless and until we have some absolutely irrefutable evidence that part, or all, of the inscription must have occurred later.
Of course it means relinquishing a theory or two, but surely fact must take precedence over hypotheses, no matter how dear to us.
Diane: Good science isn’t just about facts, it’s also about demonstrating the reasoning that gets you to those facts from the evidence – and right now, we’re still waiting both for the evidence and for the reasoning…
Well, perhaps it’s the sort of science I’ve done, but reasoning has had surprisingly little to do with establishing facts. More identifying the appropriate methodology, and employing meticulously the prescribed standard procedure(s). Must say I’ve never had anyone dispute my results on the basis of reasoning, but method and methodology which will alter results and thus any decisions – yes, or reasoning – which may follow from that. Facts first, and if the facts are rightly got, then you may have evidence of something.
I’m speaking here of the pragmatic sciences, not the critical ones. 🙂
Has anyone answered the question of the number of sewing supports the bookbinder used?