As with just about all historical research, simply wanting to find things out isn’t enough: you really have to have a plan to guide you. And while I can see an awful lot of people who want to crack the Voynich Manuscript, I can’t currently see many who are trying to do so guided by anything that could be described as a plan.
Me and plans? We go a long way back. I’ve spent a long time trying to understand the Voynich’s drawings; a long time trying to understand its heavily structured writing; a long time trying to understand its codicology and development; a long time trying to find historical precedents (in terms of both visual and structural parallels); and a long time trying to reconstruct its path “from vellum to Prague“. But I think it’s fair to say that these different trees have all yielded small, stony fruit.
So it’s time for a new angle, a new direction of attack: this post describes my new plan that I’ve spent a few months figuring out. Make of it what you will (but wish me luck).
Quire 13 = Quire 13A + Quire 13B
When I first started looking for balneological parallels to the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (Quire 13) back in the early 2000s, I found nothing remotely resembling it. Q13’s mix of balneo plus strange tubing plus strange body-function pieces seemed a world away from the (generally plaintext, generally unremarkable) documents of the first half of the 15th century (which are often little more than Latin “Rules of the Baths”).
However, since 2006 my codicological understanding of what happened to Q13 (i.e. to leave it how we see it now) has come a long way. It’s not enough to grasp (as per my discussion in Curse 2006) that Q13’s bifolios ended up misnested (and this certainly happened early on, even before Q13’s 15th century quire number was added). Rather, to make sense of Q13, you have to see that it was originally formed from two separate gatherings – my late friend Glen Claston called these Q13A and Q13B – that were then shuffled together into a single oversized gathering, and then (mis-)bound into an oversized quire.
For Glen (actually Tim Rayhel), Q13A was the three “medical – biological – Galenic” bifolios, while Q13B comprised the two “Balneological” bifolios. You may disagree about the precise nesting Q13A had in its original ‘alpha’ state, but I think Q13B’s nesting order looks pretty rock solid, with f78v-f81r in the centre and f84-f75 (i.e. reversed relative to its position in Q13’s final ‘omega’ state) wrapped around it.
Ultimately, the huge takeaways from this for anyone searching for a balneological match are (a) the balneological section (in Q13B) is only half as big as you might otherwise think (i.e. Q13), (b) the source document for Q13B probably ‘travels’ with (i.e. “was typically copied alongside”) medical documents, and (c) it’s probably a ‘pure’ balneo text that we’re looking for.
Also: because we’re apparently missing a (folio-numbered) bifolio from Q13, it could well be that what we’re looking at with Q13B is only two thirds of a balneological ‘book’. However – and I think this is important – because we have an illustration that seems to run across a gathering’s centrefold, we can be reasonably sure that if so, we’re looking at the eight contiguous middle pages of a twelve-page document.
So we now have a lot more (and better) information about what we should be looking for in a balneological match (which we would hope to use as part of a known-plaintext attack on Q13B).
It should therefore be no surprise that my new plan is to search for a pre-1460 balneological source document where the central section matches the general structure of Q13B. I predict that this will be unillustrated, will not have been widely copied, and will typically be found bound alongside medical manuscripts.
I’m also expecting to have my search biased towards Northern Italian balneo sources (much as in 2006, I still suspect the Voynichese “4o” ligature was a Northern Italian palaeographic ‘tell’, one that was appropriated by numerous Northern Italian cipher keys 1440-1460), though I’ll initially cast my research net wider.
Constructing a Bibliography
Having said that, a key part of any historical research plan is working out an active bibliography (i.e. finding all the related scholarly works that have already done a significant part of the heavy digging), and then (somehow) getting access to them.
An excellent help in this regard proved to be the (open access) article “Le thermalisme médiéval et le gouvernement des corps : d’une recreatio corporis à une regula balnei ?” by Marilyn Nicoud, in Le thermalisme, by John Scheid, Marilyn Nicoud, Didier Boisseuil, et al. (pp.79-104).
Nicoud highlights numerous different sources on thermal baths, including a letter by Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolo Niccoli: and many different attitudes towards them, ranging from sexual indignation to Pope Pius II’s long sojourns to thermal baths in the 1460s, to mentions of thermal baths in the Datini correspondence (from the famous Merchant of Prato). [Interestingly, “The Duke and the Stars” by Monica Azzolini speaks approvingly of Nicoud as a kind of historiographical fellow-traveller.]
In terms of the actual treatise author Nicoud mentions, one might helpfully pick out a reasonable starting list:
- Gentile da Foligno (died 1348) – [though Gentile seems somewhat early for us]
- Francesco Casini da Siena, who around 1399-1401 wrote a huge treatise on Tuscan baths dedicated to Gian Galeazzo Visconti
- Jerome of Viterbi, who wrote a treatise on thermal baths of his region dedicated to Pope Innocent VI
- Benedetto Reguardati (one of Francesco Sforza’s most highly regarded doctors) wrote down the rules of the Bormio thermal baths, plus various other small books
- Ugolino da Montecatini wrote a treatise on thermal baths at the start of the 15th century (in Tuscan, unusually)
- Antonio Guainerio (died 1458) wrote a treatise on the thermal baths of Acqui Terme. (I remember reading about him in Thorndike, he also wrote a “tractatus de venenis” i.e. on poisons)
- Michele Savonarola
See also Marilyn Nicoud, “Les Medecins Italiens et le bain thermal a la fin du moyen age” (Medievales 43, automne 2002, pp.13-40) on JSTOR, which mentions Florence Biblioteca nazionale XV. 189 and BnF nouv. acq. Lat. 211.
Of course, it goes without saying that many of the books cited by Nicoud are out of my meagre book budget price range. But it’s a starting point, and the British Library has recently reopened so… lots to do here.
In the meantime, here are some early rough notes, which I plan to expand into separate blog posts over the next few months.
Benedetto Reguardati / Benedictus de Nursia
De sanitate conservanda, to Astorgius episcopus Anconitanus. Salzburg St. Peter M 1 265, 15c, ff. 3-93 (Kr III 42)
De conservatione sanitatis. Paris BN lat. 14028, 15c (Kr III 233) [same as “De sanitate conservanda”]
Ugolino da Montecatini
De balneorum Italiae proprietatibus ac virtutibus (1417) – AKA Tractatus de balneis
Paris BN n.a. lat 211, 15c, ff. 54-70 (Kr III 277)
Tractatus de Balneis. Traduzione a cura di M. G. Nardi. 1950
Antonio Guainerio
The Bodleian helpfully lists a number of manuscripts from this Pavian doctor, many of which were later printed as incunabula and early books:
- “De aegritudinibus propriis mulierum”
- “De arthetica”
- “De febribus”
- “De peste”
- “De uenenis”
Michele Savonarola
His Wikipedia article lists a number of his works, including “De balneis”.
See also: Crisciani, Chiara and Gabriella Zuccolin. Michele Savonarola, Medicina e cultura di corte, Micrologus’ Library. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. This includes a chapter by Marilyn Nicoud (of course) on his De Balneis.
See also: Arnaldo Segarizzi, Della vita e delle opere di Michele Savonarola medico padovano del secolo XV (Padua: Fratelli Gallina, 1900)… errrm… if you can find a copy of it. (Google’s copy appears to have disappeared, oddly.)
Good luck.
Just for the record, though, I’d note that you’re intending to build your theory on a series of unproven ideas – that the section is speaking about baths and bathing is still just an idea. You’re quite right, I think, that none of the Latins’ balneo material offers close comparison for the drawings.
I also agree that a plan is good. My own is to let the manuscript tell me what it’s about, not vice versa. 🙂
Diane: good luck with your plan, keep listening hard.
I am very glad to see you writing about the VM again, Nick! And then a topic I like a lot, subsections of Q13 🙂
Even though I think Q13a is a visual metaphor for something other than the bathing of the body, I also believe it must be based on balneological imagery. To claim no relation with something like the Balneis at all would be rather stubborn. So whatever this relation between Q13a and balneology may be, I think your work will be valuable.
Will you be focusing on illustrated manuscripts eventually? Or do you assume the possibility that the VM itself illustrated a textual source about bathing?
Thanks Nick – so far it has worked pretty well. I have managed to understand the system of construction underlying the plant-pictures, identified quite a few, found that the classifications relate to habits recorded in the Yemen and in documents of the Cairo geniza – thanks to recent scholarly studies of the antidotaries and so on. It has helped me confirm that the map is a map and read it. And allowed me to date the periods during which the images underwent revision and/or recensions, with the final version of the map reflecting the state of both cartographic and political developments between 1290 and about 1330. The astronomical matter is going pretty well, and at present I’m treating folio 67v which – as so much else does – offers support for Georg Baresch’s account of the manuscript’s compilation and where he plainly believed the information had been gathered.
From that, if I dared and thought a suggestion welcome, I might suggest your investigation of ‘balneology’ not exclude so much of the medieval world.
But I don’t think it would be welcome, and so will not.
I really do wish you the best of luck.
I’m thinking that Diane, may have conveniently overlooked Nick Pelling’s pointing generally to an apparent mix-up and subsequent miscategorisation of quires as defined by the Glen Claston Q13B balnelogical nymph sketches and unconnected Q13A general section material which comprise less titillating subject matter. There is of course an obvious separation between the two image category comparisons depicted and it seems to me that this was the moderator’s main thrust. This being opposed to Diane having taken yet another opportunity to exprress her negative views on anything that may hint of Italian or European origins for VM. Hope I’m mistaken of course!….
Koen Gheuens: here’s the tricky part – when (long ago) I went looking for illustrated balneological manuscripts from this time frame, I found almost none (bar the Pozzuoli trees of mss in Kauffmann etc). So I’m starting this attack with a very low expectation of finding illustrated balneo manuscripts.
Having said that, my new angle (as follow-on posts should demonstrate) is that I think we can codicologically reconstruct the order of eight consecutive pages to give us a rough estimate of the size of the text for each individual bath-related subsection, derived from an original source manuscript that was probably only a little larger. With (a large amount of) luck, we’ll find that source manuscript, to give us a balneo Rosetta Stone. 😉
I like Diane’s “plan” the best but look forward to Nick’s line of attack as sure to produce interesting observations.
I kind of liked the Latin abbreviation theory which made some news several years ago but I’m certain, without bothering to look up the articles, that Nick shot sufficient holes in that particular solution Zeppelin as to send it crashing to the ground.
The manuscript stands before us. It is real, genuine and DOES have meaning..
For that reason, the key WILL be found.
About Ugolino’s De Balneis, there is a copy in mss. 488 from the library of the University of Pavia. There is a digitised version, but unfortunately it is not available online, it seems: http://www.bibliotecauniversitariapavia.it/risorse-elettroniche/libri-digitalizzati/manoscritti-aldini-digitalizzati/
According to a biography I read online (https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ugolino-caccini_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/) there is also a copy in the Laurentian Library in Florence, but I doubt that is even digitised, let alone available online.
If you plan an attack with known plain text, then I would also try an attack with the Regimen Sanitatis. There is also a “Capitulum quartum De balneo” (page 168 to 174 ).
http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/mwille2/VMS/regimem_sanitatis_corpus.txt
https://celt.ucc.ie/published/L600009B/index.html
Stefano Guidoni: thanks! I’ve previously mentioned MS Aldini 488 here – https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/10/10/pathology-voynich-priority – and in more detail here – https://ciphermysteries.com/2019/12/01/pavia-ms-aldini-488-collectio-de-balneis . I’m currently starting to write up a description of Antonio Guayneri’s de balneis, which should appear on Cipher Mysteries before too long.
If you want to help, I’m currently hunting for MS Turin 1200 (dated 1451), which could well be the earliest extant copy of his de balneis…
bi3mw: once I’m through with Antonio Guayneri, I’ll have a look at that too, thanks…
NP: certainly got to admire your verve nerve and overall logical appraisal of the Q13 conundrum and how to crack it by your own manner, means and on your own terms. With your usual nonchalant aura of self confidence, you’ve put all your not inconsiderable talents toward certain thought provoking elements of the puzzle directly aimed at the desired outcome. One can’t help but note that you’ve also by-passed some rather bothersome limitations and time constraint issues of late medieval times inventive capabilities, eg., engineering design concepts for free standing bathing pools and accompanying delivery systems, along with elaborate white ceramic fittings, amongst other miscellaneous gadgety etc. Of course such petty time period issues will undoubtedly resolve without need for any tiresome debates and of course the porcelan was probably imported from China or Japan..
@Nick
Maybe you are looking for this one.
De balneis Puteolanis
from Petrus de Ebulo
Posted 1195-1197
https://www.geschichtsquellen.de/werk/3957
Koen, when you say that “To claim no relation with something like the Balneis at all would be rather stubborn” I wonder if you know that to associate the ‘ladies’ with the Balneis is a relatively recent develoopment in this study and one which was never an end result of research into the images, but more an subjective interpretation which assumed (a) that the ‘ladies’ in the month-folios may be read non-literally but those in Q. 13 should not; (b) that the ‘water’ should be read as water suitable for bathing rather than e.g. amniotic fluid as Newbold imagined and (c) that not only the manuscript’s manufacture is quite possibly Italian, but all the content too and (d) that whatever is found in the manuscript must derive from the textual traditions of medieval western Europe. Only if all those premises are adopted, and the images interpreted pretty carelessly is it reasonable to consider none but Latin Europe’s very few texts about baths and bathing.
On a lighter note, there used to be game of ‘I… you… they’ which went something like this: ‘I am skeptical’; ‘you are determined’, ‘they are pig-headed’. 🙂
Diane: D’Imperio certainly suggested as a possibility “a system of therapeutic baths; this was a common theme of medieval medicine”. Sergio Toresella was certainly happy to discuss possible connections to “De Balneis Puteolanis” in 1997 or before, because that is when it first pops up in the [email protected] archives. I personally am not steered by your premise (a), (b), (c) or indeed (d), so I can only suspect that the chain of reasoning you offer (built on top of them) may not be as convincing as you think it is.
The “I you they” game is something I have long called “semantically irregular verbs”, e.g. I reason, you flounder, he guesses, they dream.
Nick, I was sorry to see discouraging remarks made about attempting to reconstruct the original order of disordered folios; it seems a pretty normal and practical part of any codicological study. Mis-ordering is often a problem.
Also, I wonder if you saw Marco Ponzi’s post about Fontana? Marco didn’t seem to know that Philip Neal had investigated Fontana’s works about – what – twenty years ago because he doesn’t mention the precedent. Nonetheless, it was a fascinating post and I also wonder if Fontana’s ‘snake’ or ‘mirror’ is attested in practical use, either as an aid to memory or as method for encipherment.
About your ‘baths’ idea. A constant difficulty in the way the Voynich images have been approached is that moderns tend to suppose all images are either exercises in personal expression – in which case any other response is purely subjective – or else wysiwyg literal. So much older imagery is (so to speak) a shorthand or encoded reference to things which contemporaries would recognise that I think it’s a good idea to spend some time on that question before deciding how the maker expected an image would be read.
There are a few – a very few – historical records of medieval Europe’s plumbing systems, but it does not strike me as probable that anyone interested in drawing a plumbing system would bother adding ugly female figures. Conversely, anyone interested in drawing ugly female figures would hardly care about accuracy in details of plumbing. And of course to draw ugly bodies was utterly contrary to the Renaissance ethos, so you have quite a task. I don’t envy you.
PS – have you any idea where the idea arose that the manuscript is just ‘random notes’? I’d like to read the research which resulted in that conclusion. Or is it another case of confident assertion replacing the tedious process of historical research? If I recall, it may have been Elmar Vogt (maybe) who repeated that statement, but I’m not certain.
As far as I can see the idea that the manuscript is just ‘random notes’ came from me and has been discussed just on Voynich Ninja again
I’ve often wondered whether Canadian computer neural scientist Geoffrey Hinton ever expressed any interest in great uncle Wilfrid’s ugly duckling, he off course being of Boole lineage and all, a recent recipient of the coveted Alan Turing award no less. He would have to be pretty well schmicked up on the possibilty of VM manuscript’s script’s glyph text having perhaps being derived from his great great grandfather George Boole’s concept of artificial intelligence being transcribed into a modern translatable language form. If anyone out there cares to comment on my layman’s guess that there maybe something to be gained from input by this impressive fellow I’d love to hear it.
Helmut Winkler: the suggestion that the Voynich Manuscript is a student notebook (e.g. parallels with 15th century iatromathematical hausbuchen) is far from new (indeed, I suspect that this is what the person who added the Occitan/French zodiac month names circa 1500 suspected).
However, your specific assertion of randomness (or, more strictly, your strong denial of order) does seem to be fairly unique to you, where it does not overlap theories that deny the possibility of all meaning (e.g. Rich SantaColoma, or Brumbaugh’s later articles).
You also deny the possibility that more than one person wrote it, and so clearly wish to bracket out not only Lisa Fagin Davis’ palaeography but also Currier’s two hands (in fact, Currier suspected that more than two scribes were involved, but was hampered by the bad reproductions he was working with).
Codicologically, the Voynich presents numerous (I’d say 40 or more) features that indicate clearly and directly that the manuscript’s final state (i.e. that we see today) was not the original bifolio nesting order, or even the original binding edges. And the more we genuinely learn about it, the more this becomes apparent (e.g. Koen Gheuen’s recent post on the technical ways illustrations differ between Herbal A and Herbal B pages).
If there’s a middle ground between your firm denial of order and the many things that codicology and palaeography have to say about the manuscript, I can’t see it.
Helmut-
I’m always interested to understand how a person has come to form a new opinion about the manuscript, so if you make a paper setting out your evidence and reasoning, perhaps you could put it somewhere like academia.edu. Chat-forums are not the best place for publishing research, I think. i
Is this of any use?
https://www.kbr.be/en/browse-213-manuscripts-from-the-library-of-the-dukes-of-burgundy/
Titel: Libellus de conservanda sanitate : [ms. 10861]
[Gui Parat]
Auteur(s): Guido Paratus (14—14–) – professeur de médecine, médecin à la cour du duc de Milan. Auteur
Bibliografisch adres: [Italie], [1450 ca.]
Materiële beschrijving: 70 f. ; 22 x 15 cm
Materiaal: Parchemin
Bibliografische: referentie
La Librairie de Philippe le Bon : exposition organisée à l’occasion du 500e anniversaire de la mort du duc, 1967, p. 89
Calcoen; LPB (128)
Afkortingen
Digitale versie
https://uurl.kbr.be/1734432
ISBD: Bekijk de ISBD weergave
Nick,
I am reminded me that only six of the 58 (from memory. I can’t find my notes at present) balneis described in Synopsis. Eorum, Quae de Balneis. John Francisco Lombardo Neapolitano of 1566 seemed to be reserved for females. The six baths are: Siluianae p 56. St Georgi p 58. Solis et Lunae p 59. Pugilli p 60. Olei Petrolii p 61. Culinae p 62.
Nick Pelling,
you have forgotten the ‘Anathema si’t, but thank you for the subtle criticism of my positions regarding B. 408, it removes my doubts as to whether I am right.
Diane,
it is very simple, B. 408 is a Sammelhandschrift and if our guesses at the content of the seperate parts are correct, it looks like the notes of a student in the sense of someone who has got his M.A. and is going for a Doctor Medicinae, collected and bound.
Helmut – I’m glad to see that you have changed your mind over the years and now accept that the manuscript displays evidence of the content’s coming from more than one exemplar.
However the traditional ‘guesses’ about the parts are still just guesses and conclusions based on chaining one guess from another may be simple in one sense but hardly make the forming of such definite conclusions easy.
For one thing, you’d need to prove some definite connection between the curriculum offered by a specific university at a specific period in time, and then also prove that the manuscript’s parts reflect that syllabus. You might be able to do it, but I imagine it would take a great deal of work, and even if you took as your model the collection of medicine-related extracts whose description I included in a recent post, you’d still have to face the not-inconsiderable problem which is presented by the plain fact that the majority of the manuscript’s drawings do not accord with the customs of Latin art at, or after, the time our manuscript was made. Nor – after a century – has any place within the stemmata for Latin herbals, has any place been found for the plant-pictures.
I agree that if everything you’re guessing were so, the chain of reasoning would be simple. I don’t believe you have – or can- prove they are. But I wish you luck with your theory and trust you’ll find the work of research constantly interesting.
So you are saying that this part of the Voynich Manuscript encodes balneological complexes, thermal baths? If so, good luck proving that thesis.
I don’t think a lot of people out there have the courage to claim they plan to crack the VM, and surely some people will be triggered since so many before you have failed with the task. I think you are one of the more likely candidates to actually solve it.
I wish you good luck.
joben: to be fair, I don’t actually expect to succeed, but I’m hoping that I’ll learn an extraordinary amount by trying to crack it in such a focused way.
Grzegorz Ostrowski: what I’m saying here is that I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that the two specific bifolios (that seem very likely to have originally been placed next to each other) with connected pools and nymphs are in some way representing thermal bath complexes. I’m not saying anything about anything else.
I’m also not saying it’s true or false, just that it’s a reasonable starting point for focused research.
Diane: curiously, “The Duke and the Stars” (which I recently read) spends a large part of the early chapters trying to reconstruct a 15th century university syllabus (for astrology).
Nick, Thanks for the reference.
Researching the history of educational method is such hard going, that author deserves admiration for taking it on. One study – forgotten the title for the moment – found that even at university level, in medieval England, few students ever got to read the texts on their syllabus. Their study of Aristotle, for example, would be hearing the lecturer present a precis of what Aristotle had to say about this or that. Easy to forget that if you wanted to read a a book in the days before printing, you had to know it existed, and to know who might have a copy, and to be someone in a position to ask their permission to see it.
Nick, I appreciate your passion as a researcher, but at the same time, I find it difficult to accept this balneological term idea, which I consider to be wrong.
In order to understand the coded meaning of the individual folios of the “biological” parts of the Voynich Manuscript, one should take as an example the way in which Albert Braillè – the creator of the French animated series “Once Upon a Time”, presented the anatomy and functions of the organs of the human body in several different thematic series. And this is also how one should perceive these “little naked women bathing in puddles or containers connected by an intricate network of pipes in the shape of human organs.”
As in this animated series by Albert Braillè, the authors of the Voynich Manuscript used a kind of “modus operandi” with which they inform us living today that knowledge of anatomy at the microscopic level was not alien to them. And this, among other things, is a topic for reflection.
Grzegorz Ostrowski: the codicological evidence strongly suggests that Q13B (the two balneo bifolios I’m specifically interested in here) should be considered separately from Q13A (the rest of Q13). Feel free to hold what views you like on each of Q13A and Q13B individually, but they are quite separate entities.
Nick, Your answer is very interesting, but unfortunately completely not in the subject.
Grzegorz Ostrowski: that’s a coincidence, your comments are interesting but not related to the post.
I really don’t care about being sharp or proving who is right – your portal is one of the best and let it stay that way. I mean only about the merits of the issue – Voynich Manuscript.
Grzegorz Ostrowski: thank you for your kind words about Cipher Mysteries.
In contrast to the countless extravagant (yet flimsily / whimsically supported) claims about the Voynich Manuscript to be found out there, I try to spend my time isolating tiny fragments of the mystery that I can place under some kind of analytical microscope (and then documenting what I find here), which is basically what I’m trying to do with Q13B. For Q13 in general, I’m actually quite sympathetic to holistic arguments (as you doubtless know, many 15th century balneo texts are found bound next to 15th century medical texts, and there is a good amount of overlap): but not so much that I wouldn’t also go looking for a balneo source document for the continuous Q13B section suggested by the codicology.
Nick, if the presumed poems are of eight lines each, then I think it is worth checking them against the Triolet poem form. The Triolet form pre-dates the VM by about a century and it uses repeated lines that could provide a crib.
Nick, the following seems to be relevant but I can’t be sure because I only have a poor OCR copy with many errors.
I bagni di Pozzuoli, poemetto napolitano del sec. XIV; By Pèrcopo, E. (Erasmo), 1860-1928
This mentions Gervase of Tilbury, 12th Century, in connection to balneological poems.
Page 15 “…. attribuisce il poemetto latino, De balneis Putheolorum, a Gervasio de Tilbury; ma vedi su ciò p. 22, n. 3.”
There also seem to be references to the year 1227 and perhaps 1106.
To all of you wanting to understand the pictures of the swimming pools in the Voynich Manuscript I would like to point out that the pictures do not look like some extravagant balneological places in medieval Italy or Hungary. The sketches are depicting open swimming pools, while at the same time they are alluding to the religious significance of water.
I recently came across some interesting information that the Prior Nicholas of the Carthusian Charterhouse Gairach (Jurklošter, Slovenia) bought a house in Laško in 1450, where Carthusian monks were running public baths in an open swimming pool.
For more details visit my blog at voynichslovenianmystery.com
Let me know what you think.
Hi Nick,
Thanks for your great work and persistence.
How about this for a plan:
Looking at the statistical analysis of the letter frequencies you will find that the first 14 characters at the beginning of all chapters (and pages) behave completely different than the rest of the text. Rarely do they repeat at the beginning of other chapters, and if these chapters have the same syllable and letter frequencies.
This points out that the letters at the beginning of each chapter sets the code sequence of a “simple” cipher mechanism which encodes the letters of the following chapter into syllables to give the encrypted text the appearance of a language. The clear text spaces are represented by a letter while the mechanism adds futile spaces to disguise the real word length.
If you are interested in more please contact me.
Regards Dieter
Cvetka, You have a very nice name. Only that. As for the rest, I am not speaking.
Cvetka: don’t worry about Greg, he can be humerous too. Keep on with the open pools, make them freestanding and add 450 years or so, I’m your friend for life.