Antonio Guayneri’s De Balneis, transcribed…

My last post discussed the various copies of Antonio Guayneri’s De Balneis still extant: since then, I have (with the kind help of Stefano Guidoni) managed to get phone scans of MS Torino 1200 (with the shelfmark H.II.16). I also found a nice site with solid information about Guayneri, including his epitaph from the Church of San Michele in Pavia, where he and his wife were buried:

Hippocrates medicae basis Galienus et Isach
Et quod Avicenna scivit humatur ibi
Haec est Antonius Guaynerius abditus arca
Philosophus medicae maximus artis honor
Famaque qua celebris par sibi nullus erat
Par sibi sola fuit veritate et nomine coniux
Antonia ut thalami sic tumulique comes
Hos Deus ad coelos exutos corpore traxit
Ne superis tantus abesset honor

Anyway, once I was able to see that the various versions of Guayneri’s text were broadly the same as each other (i.e. with only moderate differences), I transcribed the easiest one to read – which was the one that appears in the 1553 Giunta Venetian print edition – and placed my transcription on the Cipher Foundation site.

Naturally, this is where I started trying to make a breezy (i.e. Thorndike-style) translation of Guayneri’s five chapters, with the help of online translators and my schoolboy Latin: but given that I’m not in any way a full-on Latinist, a lot sits well beyond my abilities. 🙁

Rough Summary of Guayneri’s Five Chapters

Nonetheless, here’s a rough outline of the stuff I could make out:

• Chapter 1 is a load of wretched pseudo-historical patron-facing waffle. (Sorry, but it is.)
• Chapter 2 talks (after more waffle) about how the virtues of the waters change in May from limpid to green. This is like a lake in Macedonia that was reported by Pliny to change its virtues around the heliacal rising of Sirius (i.e. August-ish);
• Chapter 3 talks about how the Marquis of Mantua’s numerous medical conditions were sorted out by going to the baths, and how good the baths are for gout, gammy knees, swellings, and even for a paralyzed hand. There’s a fountain in the corner of a stone wall that enabled people to have a shower: this shower even cured one man of his tinnitus. Oh, and it’s good for catarrh, asthma, colic, constipation. Oh, and it also helps urinary problems, kidney stones, menstruation, and with conception. Oh, and it’s also good for long-standing headaches, paralysis, convulsions, trembling, lethargy, colds, loss of smell, loss of taste, gum softening, chronic coughs, asthma, stomach problems, dropsy, worms, sciatica, gout, and skin infections.
• Chapter 4 is just too tangled and difficult for me to make out, sorry. 🙁
• Chapter 5 includes some abbreviated recipes for remedies, which are also way beyond my school Latin: “Vel facias fic. recip. ol ei myrti.olei masti. ann drach.j pulueris myrtillorum: cypres. bistor. masti. terrae sigil. ana. scrup.ij ceraeparum: & fiat vnguentum.“, for example, and “Vel facias sic. recip. vnguenti al. Gal. vnc.ij.camphorae & hoc vbi magna affuerit flamma. drach. ij. sanda. ru. spodij ro. ann vnc. 5. incorporentur simul parum aceti commiscendo : & hepati vnctio fiat.“, as well as the much fruitier” Syrupi item aceto. drach.ij.vel de ribes, de succo acetosae de acetositate citri : de lymonibus, de agresta, vel consimilis cum.drach.iij.aquae endi exhibere in aurora multum confert” It also describes how to make and administer clysters effectively. The author once again reminds you that you should go to these baths in May when their powers are at their strongest.

Thoughts, Nick?

Well, even if Chapter 4’s Latin is a bit too messy for me to properly summarise, I think it’s overall pretty clear that even though this is an interesting first-half-of-the-fifteenth-century balneological text, the chances of a structural mapping between it and the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13B section seem painfully close to zero. So I think we can probably rule this out as a 15th century source text. (There are several more I’ll be moving onto, this was only the first one on my list.)

At the same time, I will be unsurprised if the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13B turns out to have a broadly similar mix of balneology, patron-facing bumf, and annoyingly abbreviated recipes. So it certainly feels like I’m knocking on the right kind of door here, even if nobody was home on this particular occasion.

Triolets, Rondeaux, and Christine de Pisan

As an aside, Byron Deveson recently suggested in a comment here that the poem-like section in Q13 might possibly be a triolet, a (roughly-eight-line) repetitive poem form from the late Middle Ages.

A quick search revealed that it wasn’t technically called a triolet until nearer the end of the 15th century: and that before that it was a format only used for French language poems, and better known as a “rondel”.

Perhaps the most famous rondel poet was Christine de Pisan: though born in the Republic of Venice, she ended up in France with her father (who was an astrologer for Charles VI). She became a full-time French-language poet, often adapting the rondel’s 7-line or 8-line format to suit the needs of the poem at hand:

Dure chose est a soustenir
Quant cuer pleure et la bouche chante;
Et de faire dueil se tenir
Dure chose est a soustenir.
Faire le fault qui soustenir.
Veult honneur qui mesdisans hante,
Dure chose est a soustenir

(Translated rather nicely as)

Life’s a bitch, moving on with things,
Crying heart, with the songs so haunting,
Seeking help in what mourning brings.
Life’s a bitch, moving on with things.
Meeting needs, working hard, moody swings,
Honor’s mine, though the gossip’s daunting.
Life’s a bitch, moving on with things

Might this be what we see in the Voynich? Possibly, but it would (a) require the plaintext to be French, and (b) require a complicated enciphering system that was able to encipher the same plaintext in multiple quite different ways.

It’s perhaps (as I suggested a couple of years ago) more likely to be the poem by Claudian (370AD-404AD) (“Fons, Antenoreae vitam qui porrigis urbi, / Fataque vicinis noxia pellis aquis“) quoted by Ioannis et Iacobi de Dondis Patavinorum in their balneological work (also in Giunta). There, the first section runs like this:

Fons, Antenoreae vitam qui porrigis urbi
fataque vicinis noxia pellis aquis,
cum tua vel mutis tribuant miracula vocem,
cum tibi plebeius carmina dictet honos
et sit nulla manus, cuius non pollice ductae
testentur memores prospera vota notae:
nonne reus Musis pariter Nymphisque tenebor,
si tacitus soli praetereare mihi?
ludibrium quid enim fas est a vate relinqui
hunc qui tot populis pervolat ora locum?

Which the Loeb Classics translate as:

Fount that prolongest life for the dwellers in Antenor’s city, banishing by thy neighbouring waters all harmful fates, seeing that thy marvels stir utterance even in the dumb, that a people’s love bids poets to honour thee in song, and that there is no hand whose fingers have not traced for thee some lines in thankful witness of prayers granted, shall I not be held guilty alike by the Muses and the Nymphs if I alone sing not thy praises? How can a spot whose fame is on so many lips rightly be passed over by me in slighting silence?

Still, a fair few fifteenth century balneological texts to go yet…