In a 2017 post, I listed the copies of Nicole Oresme’s (1368) “Treatise of the Sphere” (“Traité de l’espere“) that are still extant:
* BNF MS Franc. 1350 (ff. 1r-38v) [formerly owned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683)]
* BNF MS Franc. 2240 (ff. 61r-95v) [ARLIMA description]
* BNF MS Franc. 7487
* BNF nouv. acq. 10045 (ff. 1-39) [ARLIMA description]
* BORDEAUX, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 0531 ff. 90r-127r [1454-1458]
* FIRENZE, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 1604 [end 14th century]
* LEIDEN, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS Vossius gall. f° 010, ff. 1r-31v [15th century]
* OXFORD, St. John’s College, MS 164, ff. 1r-32r [around 1364-1373]
* VATICANO (CITTA DEL), Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, MS Reg. lat. 1337, ff. 29r-44v [last quarter of the 15th century]
According to Mackley (2012), the earliest of these is Oxford SJC MS 164, because “[t]he ornate illustrations and marginalia, as well as horoscope tables personal to Charles and his family, suggest that [this] manuscript belonged to Charles himself.” (pp.4-5).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my next challenge here is to find whether any historian has constructed a cladistic tree for these nine Treatise of the Sphere manuscripts.
Simultaneously, I’m still strongly considering my 2017 suggestion that the person most likely to have helped diffuse Oresme’s ideas out of France was Blasius of Parma (who was in Paris for a while prior to 1388). So the follow-on question there would be: can we determine which of these nine manuscripts was closest to the one copied by Blasius to take back with him to Italy? Might Blasius’ copy have in fact formed part of this tree?
Clearly, some good basic historical legwork needs to be done here.
The Importance of Oresme’s Treatise
Before proceeding any further, I think it should be said that Oresme’s treatise isn’t just yet another summary / translation of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera (e.g. BN Lat 7267, 7363 and 7400, as Rene Zandbergen once pointed out here). Even though his treatise follows the general sequence previously set out by Sacrobosco, Oresme is quite scathing about some of Sacrobosco’s claims (e.g. his estimate of the Earth’s diameter). [There’s more technical discussion of this in “Nicole Oresme et les Voyages Circumterrestres”, by M. Lejbowicz.]
More generally, in “Heaven and the Sphaera Mundi in the Middle Ages” (2000), Edgar Laird points out that Oresme’s account marked a turning point in the history of accounts of the spheres. This is because Oresme tried to force a definitive split between that which can be physically studied and that which should be treated as simply religious speculation: (p.25)
We also expect that at this point Oresme will explain what theology can contribute to the study of the sphere, but he writes instead, ‘Then some say that above it [i.e., the ninth sphere] there is an immobile heaven, then a heaven of crystal, and then the empyrean heaven in which is the throne of Solomon, and such things as pertain to neither physics nor astronomy. Therefore it will be sufficient for us to speak only of the nine spheres mentioned above’.
Oresme’s writings therefore mark him out as something of a rationalist (though pitching him as a ‘proto-scientist’ would be a modern back-projection). All the same, despite his small treatise’s similarities to previous works, it has to be said that there is something intensely new going on in the commentaries, thoughts and glosses he stitched through it.
As always (even with Copernicus), Oresme pulls his horse up before accidentally jumping over the Heresy puissance wall. But I’m sure the direction he was heading in was clear to many of his readers at the time.
Towards a Cladistic Tree…?
Almost certainly, the definitive work here is Lillian Margaret McCarthy “Maistre Nicole Oresme, ‘Traitié de l’espere’“, critical edition, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1943.
…and unfortunately that’s where this post stops, because I can’t see how to get access to it. The University of Toronto has lots of digitized dissertations from 1950 onwards online here, but 1943 is just before their cut-off date.
So… does any Cipher Mysteries reader have any suggestions as to how I can get a copy of this?
The University of Toronto Libraries have (several) copies https://search.library.utoronto.ca/details?3504862 and in my experience, the easiest way is to write them an e-mail and ask them for a copy (of the relevant pages), I suppose I don’t have to remind you to ask for prices first
Helmut: I don’t even have so much as a table of contents, so I’d prefer to see the whole thing rather than play manuscript ‘Battleships’. 😉
I’ve contacted the library (thanks Jennie!) and am now contacting the UofT’s Archive service to see if I can request this dissertation be digitized and made available online.
Nick – apropos of spheres in general.
I wonder if any of your readers could enlighten me about the meaning of the overdotted ‘3’ in a diagram from Michael Scot’s translation of al-Bitruji’s Kitab al-Hay’ah? If they can also explain the sense of its ‘gate’ emblem, below and left of the diagram proper, that would be marvellous. What I’m wondering is whether it means ‘distance between point’ (you may notice a faint resemblance between its ends and details on that stone you mentioned recently)
Here’s a link to the diagram as included in a recent post of mine
https: //voynichrevisionist.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/stars-scots-trans-of-al-bitruji-made-1217 jpg?w=300&h=294
or if that’s too fussy, here’s a link to the post itself, in which is a link to the manuscript.
https //voynichrevisionist com/2020/02/05/skies-above-chronological-strata-pt-1/
I might add that I’ve already asked a couple of colleagues, and a couple of historians of science and astronomy – all are now curious about whether anyone else can help.
Thanks
The “gate” emblem is a Nota symbol. The double-cee shape with a line over it is an early-medieval way of writing the letter “a” (omega is sometimes written that way too, but in this case it is “a”).
So to break it down, to make it easier to intepret it… you have N (the fence-like shape), T (the upright shape on its right-hand side), the “o” (obvious), and the “a” above it.
He’s putting emphasis on either the diagram above or the paragraph to the right, but since the text underneath the Nota symbol is erased, it’s hard to tell which.
The symbol above the 3 indicates that it is an ordinal. It is the third diagram. Ordinals were written in many different ways (with a, with o, with m, with 9, the “us” abbreviation). You can see examples of ordinals in the VMS quire numbers.
If you go to folio 9r a couple of pages later, you will see the number 4 with the same symbol above it, to represent the 4th drawing. The same with the one following, which is the 5th drawing.
Easy.
JKP – thank you so much!
(mind if I cite your source when passing this on?)
My source?
My source was the manuscript you linked.
JKP –
The manuscript was my source for the problem; I meant the source from which you learned that a ‘3’ with dots-and-bar meant #3. I hoped it might help answer a few other questions – such as the period and geographic range over which we find that habit. Surprising how few sources mention ordinal number. But if you made the suggestion as your personal impression, that’s fine. It was very kind of you to respond.
Diane, this symbol has been used in manuscripts since early medieval times. The questions you asked me are fairly basic and I’m surprised your colleagues couldn’t answer your questions.
And there is no need to dismiss my opinion as a “personal impression” because the information I gave you is correct and based on studying thousands of manuscripts.
Now, I’ll re-state the information I already gave you in a slightly different way, so you can comprehend the relationship between the symbol in the diagram as it relates to the same shape in the NOTA symbol below it, where it is used in a slightly different way (it’s a symbol, not a letter in the modern sense).
.
The symbol you asked about traditionally represents a vowel. It is not always a SPECIFIC vowel. This is how scribal conventions worked in the Middle Ages. They are based on context, but they are not random or obscure. Their meaning is usually quite clear.
In early medieval manuscripts, if this double-cee shape was within the word and normal-sized, it was typically an “a”. It could be written as two cee characters closely coupled or two cees with a bar. If it was superscripted and written next to a “q” it usually represented what we think of as “u” (the concept of “u” was not quite the same as it is now, but the analogy is close enough). In even older documents, it was omega (many Latin scribal conventions are adapted from Greek).
In the manuscript you linked the symbol in the diagram is setting the number apart as an ordinal. The REASON this was done was to distinguish it from the other numbers labeling parts of the geometric drawings. This way you know that the number with the symbol means something else. In this case it is the number of the diagram. Each one is sequentially numbered.
You don’t have to take my word for it, you can simply look at the preceding and following diagrams and you will see that each one has a numeral, they are in order, and the ordinal symbol is on each of the diagrams in succession. So it only takes a few moments to verify that I am correct.
Now… the NOTA symbol is not quite as easy to recognize.
I can forgive your colleagues for not recognizing this one because USUALLY it is stretched in the vertical direction. There is a reason for this, margins are narrow. In this case it is stretched in the horizontal direction and so the “gate” part is very wide and if the person seeing it is unfamiliar with the sheer variety of NOTA symbols, they might not see it for what it is unless someone points it out. In this case the double-cee symbol is the vowel “a”, since the “o” is clearly written as an “o”. As I said before, the “gate” is a stretched N and the T is the end of the gate. This is a normal way to write it.
I can also easily prove that I am right about the NOTA symbol. I have examples. If you won’t take my word for it, say so and I will post them on my blog.
You really don’t take me seriously enough, D.N. Your colleagues missed two rather basic symbols that I not only identified for you, but took the TIME to EXPLAIN so you could 1) see the relationship between them and 2) recognize them in the future. That’s more than most people would do.
JKP –
I’m sorry to disagree with you when, as you say, you’ve been kind enough to respond as most Voynicheros might not, the point isn’t whether *I* believe *you* – but about whether things asserted can, or can’t be verified.
Since your views are, so far, without any supporting evidence, they remain for now your personal opinion.
I have no reason to think your opinion wasn’t honestly given. I find your remarks easy to believe.
What I find more difficult to believe is that you taught yourself Latin, and comparative palaeography and history and linguistics and cryptography and so on. This is what is implied if you admit no debt to any precedents, or other sources save the primary documents. That’s difficult to believe.
But I’m not interested in belief. I like evidence and your opinion is evidence of one person’s view. Looks like the right view to me – but what do I know?
Diane, I don’t see why that is difficult to believe.
I have some urgent deadlines right now. As soon as the projects are handed over to the clients, I will post examples on my blog. I can 100% verify what you call “personal opinion”.
Hello Nick
I am a recent follower of your wonderful blog. I still have nothing to say about the mysteries that have already been treated here, so i left for you and the readers, a link to another mystery that you may not know. If you already wrote here on the blog about this subject, please tell me when you did it so that I can read
https://russianicons.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/a-cappadocian-mystery/
Off and running again you are. Good to see.
The original connection to Oresme, relevant to the VMs cosmos, is through BNF 565 fol. 23. The second match to the VMs cosmos is the de Metz illustration in Harley 334. The common factor that interests me is that both were produced in Paris: the Oresme illustration c 1410, the de Metz illustration in the 2nd quarter of the 15th Century.
There have been some difficulties in viewing other examples of “Oresme’s” cosmic images, beyond BNF Fr. 1082. No such difficulties with de Metz. The structure of those those cosmic representations runs the geocentric gamut. So it seems that the details of an illustration are not so much determined by the ‘authorial’ source as they are by the source of production.
Harley 334 also has a drawing of a ‘woman in a fish’s mouth’ much like that on VMs f79v.
The production dates for both BNF Fr. 565 and Harley 334 are within, or partly within the averaged Carbon-14 dates for the VMs parchment. Of course there are reasons to investigate this further, but hitting all three just by falling of a log makes for an interesting start.
Out*of*the*blue: the problem here, as I see it, is that we haven’t explored (or indeed even seen) all these Oresme manuscripts, so it is hazardous to try to draw the kind of holistic conclusion you’re aiming at here. But we are moving (slowly) in the right direction, I hope. 🙂
I agree, and as you know, VMs investigation can go in more than one direction at a time. Having the “Oresme data” will be very informative. At the same time, problematic accessibility to the various manuscripts can stall progress indefinitely. Meanwhile, why not look at areas where access to information is better?
There are a fair number of cosmic representations in books attributed to Gautier / Gossuin de Metz. Examining the images shows a fair amount of internal structural variation, implying that there was little copying from one to another.
Last I saw, there were two ‘Oresme’ representations of the cosmos, out of three examined sources and the two illustrations though similar do have clear differences, such as the presence / absence of stars.
This presence of structural variation implies for de Metz, suggests for Oresme, that cosmic structure comes from the production source not from a prior textual source.
The ‘de Metz’ cosmos in Harley 334, and the ‘Oresme’ cosmos in BNF Fr. 565 not only share the same uncommon cosmic structure [inverted T-O earth, surrounded by stars, enclosed in a circular cosmic boundary], they also share strong visual similarities, except for the cosmic boundary. In addition to these similarities, provenance places the production of both of these illustrations in Paris, potentially within a single life-span.
And all that is required for VMs relevance is that the VMs artist knew the nature of these two illustrations. Where’s the hazard? Whether aiming at a conclusion or putting forth a suggestion, the provenance is there to be followed and when potential connections exist, they should be investigated further. Just think how much farther and faster provenance could take VMs investigations, if the VMs critter (f80v) turns out to be a modified version of the Golden Fleece set into an Agnus Dei structure [lamb / cosmic boundary / droplets] like that (uniquely?) found in the “Apocalypse of S Jean” (BNF Fr. 13096) from the library of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy.
As promised in my earlier comment, I have posted examples on my blog of how to interpret the symbols in BL Harley MS 1 (which was a bit of a feat since I had an extra-heavy workload this week AND am recovering from a particularly bad case of the flu).
Hopefully the diagrams will help those who are still unfamiliar with their meaning. I also included info on why they might be relevant to the VMS since these are subjects of interest to everyone in the VMS community.
.
And my apologies to Nick for mentioning my blog on yours (I prefer not to do that), but I think you can understand under the circumstances that O’Donovan’s questions needed to be answered again in a different way, with diagrams.