People have long proposed that the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 20 (‘Q20’) might be a collection of recipes of some sort. This also suggests that there may well have been an original plaintext block of recipes from which Q20 was derived (though whether as a cipher, shorthand, or curious language it matters not at this stage): but do we stand any chance of identifying the original document?
Actually, we do know quite a lot about Q20: and having thought about these many observations for several years, the inferences I remain most convinced by are:-
(1) that the tails on the paragraph stars are probably hiding ‘y’, short for ‘ytem’ or ‘ybidem’;
(2) that the tail-less paragraph stars on f103r were added in after the event – that is, that f103r was originally written unstarred, but that untailed stars were later added in so that this page blended in better with the others (but I don’t know why, or what this means);
(3) that Q20 was originally formed of two distinct gatherings, with f105r the first page of the first gathering (‘Q20a’) and f116v the last page of the last gathering (‘Q20b’), and as a result we cannot really trust the layout of the bifolios as they have been handed down to us;
(4) that the last paragraph of f116r probably contains some kind of attribution or conclusion – e.g. this book was copied by me on the 4th January 1453 in the town of Milan, from the manuscript lent to me by the painter Giovanni from Verona etc etc 🙂 ;
(5) that even though we currently have between 345 and 347 starred paragraphs and four missing pages (i.e. two missing folios, or rather one missing bifolio), I think – because I’m far from convinced that all the paragraph stars are definitely genuine ‘item’ markers – we have to be very wary about trusting that the number of starred paragraphs we see is an accurate representation of the number of itemized paragraphs in the original.
All the same, my overall suspicion is that if we were to look for candidates for the original source of this recipe block, we should perhaps look for a source compiled prior to 1450 containing between 300 and 400 itemised recipes. As usual, I’d prioritize European sources over others, and I’d prioritize candidates whose writer obviously believed them to be secret; but everyone sees this differently, so make of those particular preferences what you will.
All in all, I currently only have a single serious candidate for that original block, one that I stumbled upon only recently: and because it’s Christmas time, I thought I’d throw it out to you lovely people, see what you think. 🙂
It’s MS. 6741 of the National Library of Paris, containing a sizeable (359 numbered items of varying size, plus various rhymes) set of recipes compiled from various sources by Jean le Bègue / Jehan le Bègue [1368-1457], as admirably transcribed by Mary Philadelphia Merrifield (and translated by her two sons) in 1849 in her book Original Treatises, Dating from the XIIth to the XVIIIth Centuries, on the Arts of Painting.
If you’re interested, there’s some modern discussion on Merrifield’s work here: but both her and Jean le Bègue aren’t really discussed anywhere much these days, which I think is a shame because there’s lots of lovely stuff in there.
PS: this post may be the first time someone has proposed a possible link between MS 6741 and the Voynich Manuscript’s Q20, but please correct me if I’m wrong. 🙂
The book begins (p.47):
EXPERIMENTA DE COLORIBUS.
1. Nota quod auree littere scribuntur sic, cum ista aqua ; accipe sulphur vivum, et corticem interiorem mali granati, aluminis, saltis, et de pluvia auri, tantum quantum vis, et aquam gummi liquide, et modicum de croco, et misce, et scribe.
The book finishes (p.320):
DEO GRATIAS
Compositus est liber iste a magistro Johanne le Begue, Licentatio in Legibus, Greffario Generalium Magistrorum Monetae Regis Parisiis, anno Domini 1431, aetatis vero suae 63.
THANK GOD
This Book is composed by Master Jehan Le Begue, a Licentiate in the Law, Notary-General of the Masters of the King’s Mint, at Paris, Anno Domini 1431, when he was 63 years of age.
Disregarding my promise to make no more comments until after the New Year: you got me hook, line, and sinker!
So recipe for making gummy ink or coloring material: mastic, honey, cane syrup, AND “croco” — saffron powder from crocus.
So, what’s cookin’?
😉
quo che dite
🙂
Oh my! I’ve just been skimming through the latest book my husband ordered from Amazon. It is jam-packed with the details of its title: “Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest”: authors Thomas M. Whitmore and B.L. Turner II.
Not just tomato but also tomatillo. Not just squash but also pumpkin, calabash….four full pages of seed plants, vegetables and condiments, fruits and nuts, roots and tubers, fibers, dyes, ornamentals, and non0food uses.
Also a list of protected and gathered species:
Jiote: wild papaya
Hule: Kapok, ceiba, pochote, yaxche
Wild fig: Amon
Balsam: balsamo
Palms: corozo, cohune
Blue-green algae
Vanilla: vainilla, tlilxochitl
The above is just the list. Further, in depth discussion for Maize, manioc, beans, cucurbits
Cucurbits -squashes, pumpkins, and gourds
Chilies
Maguey (Agave)
Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) & (Gossypium barbadense)
I’m still looking for discussion of the plants and mushrooms which were used for some brilliant dye products.
About twenty years ago, I spun some wool yarn “in the grease’. I then picked a pail-ful of “tunas” (cactus fruit). I rubbed the fruit in sand to removes the spines. I then mashed the fruit for its juice. I put the yarn (still greasy) in the dye bath so that it would ferment and, maybe, give the yarn a beautiful salmon-pink color.
While the ‘dye’ was fermenting it gave off a mouth-watering fragrance delicately reminiscent of a pale rose/blanc blend wine. Torture!
I pull my salmon-pink sheep-wool and white-angora rabbit hair jacket out of storage now and then. Usually between St. Patrick’s Day and Easter I can be found ‘here and there’ wearing my jacket and my matching “Easter Bonnet”.
No kidding! No bs!
bd-id-1-dr with tongue in cheek
:-^
Aha! Yesterday I discovered a connection between the Colegio de Santa Cruz, Fray Bernardino Sahagun,(B408/Voynich/Florentine mss) and Fray(?) Juan Badianus’ manuscript.
So, I now would like to find out who did the artwork on the dome’s interior. I’d also like to find out who did the artwork for Nick’s blog ‘masthead’ which appears with every discussion.
🙂
Alum was/is used as a fixative prior to dipping yarn into various colored dyepots. It worked for me when I dyed the yarn for the jacket.
BTW: I obtained the sheep-wool from the shepherdess who escorted me into the field. She let me approach several of the sheep, including the bellwether, so I could find a fleece most suitable for my spinning (whether by spindle or spinning wheel). She just happened to have a fleece in storage.
Nick, would you like for me to attempt a translation of LeBecque’s recipes?
beedee-eyed-won-der
In re the ‘tail-less stars’ or stars in particular: My ‘take’ on their appearance is that they are ‘bullets’ or ‘asterisks’ used to expand the discussions for the various botanical items. They probably also are addendae to the “recipes” folios (99 through 102?). In the past I have translated a few of the recipes for you, Nick. I was unable to do much more than cross-refer folios 99 through 102 (the three-tiered ‘measuring cups were color-coded to indicate the proportions of leafy or blossom specimens to the water or wine, and whether heat or cold was recommended for the entire process.
One of these days, when I can find a magnifier overlay for an entire discussion page, I may be able to translate more clearly. BTW, the process being described and illustrated in B-408 is much more simple than the calculations we had to do to prepare an intravenous medication solution bag.
But why would Monsieur Le Begue be concerning himself with raw materials for making ink and dyes?
Diane, how does ‘quo che dite’ translate?
Oh! Roots are often designated too (in the recipes section). The sketch/drawing for each ‘recipe’ is an exact copy of each particular botanical item which was earlier displayed. My guess, which I mentioned several months ago, was that those pages of discussion which had ‘bullets’ (blossom or star) were the written-out recipe for each of the portrayed botanical combinations.
My guess is as good as yours? The Florentine Manuscript has a large section (Yerbas) which labels each plant specimen, and its combinations with other plant specimens.
I’ve generated some queries to help identify where the keywords in each paragraph occur in the manuscript.
For example, for paragraph 9 in f115r:
http://www.voynichese.com/#/lay:f115r-p9-density/f115r/exa:/857
Words in white are common, words in blue are uncommon (less than 20 occurrences in the manuscript).
Looks like the recipe in f115r’s paragraph 9 contains the first two words from folio f28r, “pchodar shod”, which are both uncommon.
You can find these queries in the experimental section of the http://www.voynichese.com site.
Bdid1dr
I realise that the inclusion of kapok (which I certainly did identify as a plant that is pictured in MS Beinecke 408) must seem as if it is an argument in favour of a New World origin for the botanical folios, but the fact is that the tropical west African plants appear to be responsible for the first introduction of kapok to Asia, and if my medieval sources are to be trusted, kapok was already brought overland through the Black Sea from the east a good while before Columbus set sail. So I stand by my id, and by a date for the MS not later than 1440 AD.
PS ‘quo che dite’ – purely phonetic. The sonorous version of a pun.
An online reference which will give the same sort of information:
Kit Anderson, Live Oaks and Ceibas in the Landscapes of Louisiana and Guatemala. Uni of Texas Press (2003)
pp.64-5
Hi Job,
Thank you very much for your work. Is it possible to add support of spaces in the query? The purpose is to be able to search for occurrences of particular word sequences.
Anton,
Spaces are currently unsupported due to performance reasons. It may sound strange, but the Voynichese site operates on pre-rendered queries – all possible queries have been rendered in advanced.
The introduction of spaces blows up the query complexity, making this approach infeasible.
However, it’s possible to add an advanced query option that does what you want – it will be slower since the browser will need to render the overlays on the fly, but at least you’ll get a fully customizable search.
If you want to file a request in the issues tracker, you’ll be notified once it’s available:
http://www.voynichese.com/issues
Job:
Thanks for your reply. Didn’t know that it’s all pre-rendered. In this light, the simpler way is just to parse the raw files, I suppose.