If you hadn’t already heard, a Voynich Manuscript-themed virtual conference has recently been announced for 30th November to 1st December 2022: and its organisers have put out a call for papers.
Me, I have at least twenty ideas for topics, all of which I think could/should/would move the state of research forward. But my plan is actually to write up as many of them as I can in posts here, and let people freely take them to develop as their own, or (my preference) to form impromptu collaborations (via the comments section here, or via a thread on voynich.ninja, whatever works for you) to jointly pitch to the organisers.
I’ll start with what I think is the most obvious topic: DNA gathering analysis. I’ll explain how this works…
Quires vs Gatherings
Though some people like to oppose it, by 2022 Voynich researchers really should have fully accepted the idea that many of the Voynich’s bifolios have, over the centuries, ended up in a different nesting/facing order to their original nesting/facing order. There is so much supporting evidence that points towards this, not least of which is the arbitrary & confused interleaving of Herbal A and Herbal B bifolios.
Consequently, there is essentially zero doubt that the Voynich Manuscript is not in its original ‘alpha’ state. Moreover, good codicological evidence suggests that the original alpha state was not (bound) quires but instead (unbound) gatherings, because the quire numbering seems to have been added after an intermediate shuffling stage.
The big codicological challenge, then, is to work out how bifolios were originally grouped together (into gatherings), and how bifolios within each gathering were nested – i.e. the original ‘alpha’ state of the Voynich Manuscript.
Yet without being able to decrypt its text, we have only secondary clues to work with, such as tiny (and often contested) contact transfers. And because many of the (heavy) paint contact transfers (such as the heavy blue colour) seem to have happened much later in the manuscript’s lifetime, many of the contact transfers probably don’t tell us anything about the original state of the manuscript.
In Chapter 4 “Jumbled Jigsaws” (pp.51-71) of my (2006) book “The Curse of the Voynich”, I did my best to use a whole range of types of clue to reconstruct parts of the original folio nesting/facing order. Even so, this was always an uphill struggle, simply because we collectively had no properly solid physical forensic evidence to move this forward in what you might consider a systematic way.
From Gatherings to Vellum Sheets
However, a completely different way of looking at a manuscript is purely in terms of its material production: how were the pages in a gathering made up?
If a vellum manuscript is not a palimpsest (i.e. using previously-used vellum that has been scraped clean), it would typically have started as a large vellum sheet, which would then have been folded down and cut with a knife or shears or early scissors into the desired form. Given the unusual foldout super-wide folios we see in the Voynich Manuscript, I suspect there is almost no chance that these sheets were pre-cut.
As such, the normal process (e.g. for book-like sections) would have been to fold a sheet in half, then in half again, and then cut along the edges (leaving the gutter fold edge intact) to form a small eight-page gathering. This is almost certainly what happened when the Voynich Manuscript was made, i.e. it was built up over time using a series of eight-page gatherings, each from a single sheet.
It’s also important to remember that vellum was never cheap (and it took most of the fifteenth century for the price of paper to become anything less than a luxury item too). Hence even larger fold-out sheets would have not been immune from this financial pressure: so where possible, what remained of a vellum sheet after a foldout had been removed would typically have had to have been used as a bifolio.
The reason this is important is that where bifolios of a gathering were formed from a single sheet of vellum, they would all necessarily share the same DNA. And so this is where the science-y bit comes in.
Enter the DNA Dragon
Essentially, if you can take a DNA swab (and who in the world hasn’t now done this?) of each of the Voynich Manuscript’s bifolios, you should be able to match them together. There is then a very high probability that these matches would – in almost all cases – tell you what the original gatherings were.
The collection procedure appears – from this 2017 New Scientist article – to be painfully simple: identify the least handled (and text-free and paint-free) parts of each bifolio, and use a rubber eraser to take a small amount of DNA from the surface. Other researchers (most famously Timothy Stinson) are trying to build up horizontal macro-collections of medieval vellum DNA: but because the Voynich Manuscript is not (yet) readable, a micro-collection of the DNA in its bifolios would offer a very different analytical ‘turn’.
Though DNA has famously been used for many types of forensic analysis (there are entire television channels devoted to this), determining the original gathering order of an enciphered manuscript is not yet – as far as I know – one of them. But it could be!
Finally: once the gatherings have been matched, close examination (typically microscopic) to determine the hair / flesh side of each bifolio should help further reduce the possible number of facing permutations within each gathering. Remember, the normal practice throughout the history of vellum was that a folded gathering or quire will almost always end up in a flesh-facing-flesh and skin-facing-skin state.
Why is this Important?
As far as understanding the codicology of an otherwise unreadable document goes, DNA gathering matching would be hugely important: it would give clarity on the construction sequence of every single section of the Voynich Manuscript. This, in turn, would cast a revealing light on contentious issues of document construction and sectioning that have bedeviled researchers for years.
This would include not only the relationship of Herbal A bifolios to Herbal B bifolios (a debate going at least back to Prescott Currier), but also the more modern debates about Q13A vs Q13B, Q20A vs Q20B, and the relationship between Herbal A and the various Pharma A pages.
The biggest winners from reconstructing the manuscript’s alpha state would be researchers looking to find meaning and structure in the text. As it is, they’re trying to infer patterns from a document that appears to have been arbitrarily shuffled multiple times in its history. Along these lines, there’s a chance we might be able to use this to uncover a block-level match between a section and an external (unencrypted) text, which is something I have long proposed as a possible way in to the cipher system.
There is also a strong likelihood that folio numbers might well be encrypted (e.g. in the top line of text) – historically, many complicated cipher systems have been decrypted by first identifying their underlying number system, so this too is an entirely possible direct outcome of this kind of research. It would additionally make sense for anyone trying to understand the different scribal hands to be able to situate those contributions relative to the manuscript’s alpha state rather than to its final (omega) state.
In those few sections where we have already been able to reconstruct the manuscript’s alpha state (e.g. Q9), we have uncovered additional symmetries and patterns that were not obviously visible in the shuffled state. Imagine how much more we would be able to uncover if we could reconstruct the alpha state of the entire manuscript!
So… Why Haven’t You Done This Already, Nick?
I’ve been trying for years, really I have. And through that time this basic proposal has received a ton of negativity and push-back from otherwise smart people (who I think really should have known better).
But the times they are (always) a-changing, so maybe it’s now the right time for someone else completely to try knocking at broadly this same door. And if they do, perhaps they’ll find it already open and waiting for them. A moment’s thought should highlight that there’s certainly a great deal – in fact, an almost uniquely large amount – of new, basic stuff to be learnt about the Voynich Manuscript’s construction here.
Yet at the same I would caution that if you look at the list of proposed topic areas for the conference, this kind of physical analysis doesn’t really fit the organisers’ submission model at all. After first submitting a 1-2-page abstract by 30th June 2022, allowing only five weeks after acceptance (20th July 2022) to write a 5-9 page paper seems a bit hasty and superficial, as if the organisers aren’t actually expecting anybody to submit anything particularly worthwhile. But perhaps they have their specific reasons, what do I know?
(But then again, maybe you’d be best off phoning your aunt who works at the History Channel and get an in with a TV documentary-making company. If film-makers can squeeze nine series out of “The Curse of Oak Island”, you’d have thought they’d be all over this like a rash, right? Right?)
Nick,
So good to see a post from you again.
One small demur. Really more just an ‘umm’.
It’s no shock that the manuscript might have been bound from what had been various gatherings. You only need to look at the oldest libraries such as that in Sinai to see that binding was quite a separate decision, and gatherings could lie around unbound for years – in fact for centuries. So no problem there.
But the compilation stage does raise questions. If, as I’d cheerfully agree, our present manuscript is compiled from matter gained, earlier, from more than one exemplar. I’d also agree that the ‘ordinary’ quires now on the top of the stack, (and from which a disproportionate number of the samples were taken) had been inscribed in the early 1400s, then you have the separate question of whether their current order wasn’t the deliberate choice of whoever had them bound? Imagine you’ve booked a trip from England to Greece that goes first to east Africa and Egypt. If you have an Atlas that treats those regions in a different order, you might well rip them out and re-arrange them to suit your needs.
I guess that my background has trained me to consider every change made part of an object’s history and ‘fixing’ those changes to return it to an ideal ‘original’ state is bad practice. You seem to assume any alteration from an ur-order is the result of mess, accident, error or ignorance.
All I want to say is – not necessarily. After all, the map speaks to one environment and images drawn and painted on its reverse to another. They aren’t from separate pieces of vellum.
I was afraid you’d fallen silent for some reason common to you, Velinksa, Mr. Petersen and various other Voynich bloggers. It’s very good to know that concern was unfounded.
second thoughts
” you might well rip them out and re-arrange them to suit your needs”. I don’t believe you would. But a person making a compilation of matter for their own needs might have done so, especially if what they were cannibalising and selecting material were from matter being trashed, as happened in times of war and as printers would do later (post-1440).
@Nick yes, to know the original folio sequence would be very helpful. I can add one more benefit we could derive from this knowledge. If the block sequence would change vs current state, what we expect, but the folio sequence inside the blocks would still be preserved, this would be a strong indication for the assertion, that the bookbinder of the omega version still knew the script content and implemented a kind of re-compilation. Here, the order of the imageless pages was more crucial, as for the others the motivation to put them together could simply be the similar imagery. Interesting e. g. the imageless folio 76r between pages including small images.
Naturally, I can’t agree with the statement “we can’t read VMS” in the presented generality – ~10 pages/passages you can read in English and Aramaic on my website, the newest decryption (passage 3 from 1r) in English only so far, the Aramaic readers I ask for patience…
Might be, you know, that my decryption of 1r uncovers that the script begins with the words: “where the beginning there was the word”. That’s a good starting sentence for a religious script, as we learn from John 1,1 (whoever John was). The sentence is ascribed to John by the scribe too, by the way – no surprise. But, should 1r be the starting folio of both alpha & omega sequence, some people claim that regardless of the text knowledge (I share this opinion because of the text), then we had one indication more that the key/alphabet or at least the content was known as long as this re-binding took place.
A couple massively tangential comments:
1) If you think about the structure of a typical episode of _Curse of Oak Island_, roughly the first third is their bringing in the…I’ll be kind and say “theorist”…of the week and talking about their ideas. Then they go off and dig holes and play with big construction equipment because the difference between men and boys is the prices of their toys, and their target audience wants to stay in touch with their inner Bob the Builder. I haven’t seen the Confederate gold spinoff, but my impression is that it’s pretty much the same thing but with diving. The cipher aspect of the Oak Island mystery is fairly tangential (and mostly doesn’t go beyond simple substitution ciphers).
In the case of the Voynich Mss,, there’s no hole digging or swamp draining or coffer dam building to be done. The cipher aspects are fairly central and would need to be made comprehensible to a non-technical lay audience in a way that was engaging without oversimplifying and held their interest/kept the ratings up. Heck, it’s not just the cipher aspects — how do you do (what the channel’s target audience would consider) a gripping hour (OK, 44 minutes excluding commercials) on palaeography?
2) When we were talking about this recently, that segued into Glen Claston and the Beale Ciphers. In looking for additional info on Glen after that conversation, I stumbled across a Ripper theory book (short version: typical occult conspiracy theory; Mary Kelly wasn’t actually killed and moved to Canada and took the last name Claston, and the author was trying to track down American Clastons and stumbled across Glen [who wasn’t actually one anyways]) that talks about Glen (heavily paraphrasing your obit) and the Voynich (for no obvious reason) and discusses the author’s correspondence with Glen: https://books.google.com/books?id=s8GrDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT272&lpg=PT272&dq=%22claston%22+%22jack+the+ripper%22&source=bl&ots=s8gDcNAfiC&sig=ACfU3U2J2I79wAV0ZB-ktqTcg8kP3ff6hQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjgnJSCpfb2AhXuct8KHa38CCgQ6AF6BAgTEAM#v=onepage&q=%22claston%22%20%22jack%20the%20ripper%22&f=false
3) I’d be just as interested in the DNA *on* f43v — given that we have a Y-chromosome DNA sequence for Richard III, that could confirm my Blackadder theory posted to the Ninja 🙂
Hi Karl: I have a copy of that book (of course I do) – essentially, the author contacted Tim because Tim knew tons about Jack the Ripper (of course he did), Tim handed the guy a really interesting lead on a plate, but the author then kind of wasted his chance, going down loads of (unconnected) rabbit warrens. It was most interesting for the author’s account of contacting Tim… but probably not hugely interesting beyond that. Oh well! 🙁
It’ll be Baldrick’s DNA, you know it will. Or a rat’s. 😉
Hi, Nick:
Unfortunately, I think you are asking too much of the current technology to get the differentiation of individual parchment source cows from each other.
At a high level, the amount of DNA needed is high because of the likely relation of the cows to each other, the eraser crumb collection technique is not currently good enough for consistent DNA amounts for analysis, and the greatest technological advances are currently in the protein analysis end, rather than DNA which will not distinguish individuals. But this will change, it will just take time. Also note that the most recent work had data collected from 2017-2019 and wasn’t published until 2021 — so I think the time available is just too short — even if there was a decent chance at getting useful results.
I have provided an expanded explanation at https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3764.html.
That being said, please don’t let this criticism discourage you and I’m looking forward to the rest of the suggested paper topics.
Nick, do you mean we can be fairly certain that the VM was originally unbound, and the current binding was in fact the first one?
Karl’s right about gripping tv.
I’ve been fascinated by the CREWS project videos – and thought there was a fair parallel between that sort of work and manuscript studies. Now I’ve checked their view numbers, though, I see they’re about one-hundredth of a ‘puppy-hates-the-bath’ vid. 🙁
now taking down my ‘ideal Conference’ post.
People interested in scripts and able to cope with the ‘non-anchorperson’ delivery might like
Writing around the Ancient Mediterranean: Practices and Adaptations – Introduction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSzXdTotE1g
… and the relationship between Herbal A and the various Pharma A pages.
Nick . Both Herbal B and Pharma A must be considered.
Moreover, these two plants are located on different pages of a single sheet.
https://vk.com/id304788998?z=photo304788998_457239184%2Falbum304788998_00%2Frev
Vladimir D: I agree that Herbal B and Pharma A must eventually be considered, but I think that the three big distinct corpora within the Voynich Manuscript are Herbal A, Q13 and Q20. Until we have a really solid grasp of the relationship of Herbal A and Pharma A, I’m not comfortable including Pharma A, and I don’t think Herbal B alone is a strong enough corpus compared to Q13 and Q20.
Also: the plant image you uploaded doesn’t seem to be loading, can you please check this?
Koen Gheuens: I believe that to be the case – if you look at Ray Clemens’ “The Voynich Manuscript” pp.25-26, it says: “Close examination of the sewing-hole pattern of each folded section indicates that a few extra sewing holes are present, but apparently they are random, as none of these holes is placed regularly enough to indicate a different arrangement of folios or placement of supports. Some of these extra holes may have been stabbed by mistake while setting up the text for sewing; others may be merely evidence of insect damage.”
Michelle Lewis: there’s some brief discussion of this in Ray Clemens’ “The Voynich Manuscript” p.27: “The BioArCH (Biology, Archaeology, and Chemistry) team at the University of York performed protein analysis on the parchment based on what is called “amino acid sequencing”. This analytical technique yields information about the proteins present in a material as well as the species of animal used to make the parchment. The team obtained ten samples (using the “crumbs” obtained by rubbing a vinyl eraser over a small area of a page), and all show that leaves of the Voynich Manuscript are made from calfskin.”
This much is well-known: however, what has happened in the five years since then is that there has been an explosion in techniques (and commercial companies) amplifying captured DNA to make ever smaller samples viable DNA sources, e.g. for capturing DNA from the back of (licked gum) postage stamps.
My understanding is also that testing for equivalence between two DNA samples (which is all that is needed for DNA gathering analysis) is one or more orders of magnitude simpler than performing full DNA sequencing on those samples: so I’m more optimistic than you that this is already possible with “crumb” testing. It is also notable that the Beinecke has already allowed the Unversity of York team to sample the proteins by this identical method, so it would be somewhat strange for them to turn a near-identical request down for doing the same thing.
I’m not saying you’re wrong here: rather, it seems to be that I see more reasons for short-term optimism than you do. 🙂
This is a Russian social network. Now you probably need a VPN. The posted link opens for me.
Nick. Here is a temporary link to “Blogger”
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihZ-o6cCQ34IF6EzoZfv_36y0djoJnwWysOMs5hWprF5y1eODr9bOQuH3ekXuUe94xsWp5OII_UyCNSQmp-kUzbAcMJ1LJxoA5dNld1iUl72cy0OQ2Gyt0LSbPsHzoE9BfeQwP2CF4nyQEhffLPbtehSAFKQvIN7CK-iBJdJPNyTXAsxNYFvtsMZ1E0Q/s1196/89V289V188R.jpg
Nick,
The test I’ve been very keen to see done is a full list of the pigments with their chemical analysis and specialists’ commentary. So important for knowing where a ms was made. The list of colours noted by d’Imperio includes what sounds like a kind of crayon. There are non-destructive tests available especially XRF.
You know, it really is heartening to realise that earlier commentators knew what they were talking about. Steele said in 1928 that the material was (non-uterine) vellum, and the tests done at York confirms it is calves’ skin. Kraus reported ‘near consensus’ on a date c.1400 in 1963, and so much later the Uni of Arizona’s carbon-14 test confirms it. I keep wondering how much further along we’d be if there’d been no William Friedman – or is that blasphemy 🙂
When there’s enough ~15th century calfskin vellum sequenced to do a bovine mss equivalent of “23andMe” I’d settle for narrowing down the geographical area of origin of the vellum. Sounds like we’re not there technically to start building that kind of database.
Karl: 23andMoo sounds like a winner to me. 😉
Every scientist should read the text of the manuscript and then know where the cow was grazing. In which meadow and pasture did she move. What a barn she even milked. How much milk she milked. And what she ate for hay.
So read the text. This is important for every scientist. Then he finds out where the cow was grazing. Who wrote the text.
This is just such a small piece of advice. But it is certainly important for every scientist.
Hi, Nick,
DNA sampling on each bifolium wouldn’t tell us anything other than how many animals were slaughtered to make the parchment. There is absolutely no way to ascertain which bifolia were originally nested using this method. Once a whole skin is cut into bifolia, those bifolia might be shuffled in numerous ways before being nested into quires. In fact, there is lots of evidence from other medieval manuscripts that bifolia were chosen with care and intent for quires, not just randomly pulled from a pile. Just because a set of bifolia were nested and sewn does not imply that they came from the same animal. While it would be interesting to calculate how many animal skins were used, I don’t see this as being worth the money or risk of damage/wear to the MS, however slight. And, as I’ve said before, such sampling would tell us absolutely nothing about the place of origin of the manuscript, since we have so few data points for comparison. Maybe someday, when there is an ENORMOUS dataset. As for XRF testing on pigments (as commented above), that, too, won’t allow us to draw any meaningful conclusions about the place of origin. Raw material for pigments traveled extensively through trade and commerce, from Africa and Afghanistan all the way to Scandinavia and Ireland. Now there’s definitely something to be said for imaging each page using multi-spectral imagery across the whole spectrum, as that might allow for faded or damaged text to be “read.” Other that that, I think that scientific analyses have taken us as far as we can currently go.
Lisa Fagin Davis: I think you’re (again) being unnecessarily pessimistic about using DNA sampling to try – and I definitely mean “try” – to reconstruct the original gatherings.
As you know, we have abundant evidence from the textual structures, from the hand-writing, and even from what appears to be an evolving writing system that what we are looking at in the Voynich Manuscript was constructed by a number of individuals, over a period of time, in a series of stages – and that the bifolios originally produced in this manner were than reordered (and from what we see in Q13, at least part of this was by someone who was unable to read the text), leaving the manuscript in, frankly, a bit of a mess.
We also know that large parts of the manuscript – specifically the foldouts – were cut to very custom shapes, so I think there is more reason than not to suspect that the people making up the Voynich cut the bifolios down themselves from vellum sheets. The vellum sheets themselves are unusually finished, so this aspect too seems to have had a custom angle, suggesting a kind of conscious control over the medium that is at least a little unusual.
The hypothesis that gatherings were formed from these vellum sheets as part of the primary construction phase is therefore entirely reasonable: as you know, pretty much every book on vellum quire construction describes folding a vellum sheet over, yielding the classic flesh-to-flesh / skin-to-skin arrangement, which seems to run completely opposite to your description here. The only word you use to argue against the weight of the literature is saying that “those bifolios might be shuffled”. The literature says that we should expect them not to be shuffled.
And finally, I argue – as per Ray Clemens’ “Voynich Manuscript” – that the original gatherings were very likely not sewn, which is quite different from how you represent this here.
If the DNA can predict likely gatherings, we also have a large number of secondary clues and features that we can use to sanity check those predicted gatherings. So we’re not really whistling in the dark there. I therefore think we still have a lot of scientific progress to make.
Ms. Fagin Davis’ pessimism is a mute point Nick, re her seeming lack of interest in any DNA feasability pursuits or the viability of parsing etc,. Passing the buck seems more likely in my view, based on her steadfast (stubborn) loyalty to Bienecke with it’s current delemma on where the future lies for their B 408 prize; most uncertain as things unravel with confused mainstream VM punters and the minnows as well.
Of course we all know that the Voynich bifolia are not in their original order, that’s obvious for numerous reasons. It would be fantastic if physical evidence could actually help us put the bifolia back in their original order but so far it hasn’t, at least not in any significant way.
I have studied hundreds of medieval manuscripts over the last thirty years, and I can point you towards many examples of quires that are still in their original state but that can be shown to be comprised of bifolia from different animals or, conversely, where bifolia from different quires can be shown to have been cut from the same skin. Here’s a blogpost I wrote about one example:
https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2021/02/04/reverse-engineering-the-codex/
Anyone who says definitively that quires are always comprised of bifolia from the same animal is guessing. It just isn’t true. It is not supported by the evidence. I agree with you, however, that other evidence (such as offsets, stains, wormholes) *might* be able to be combined with DNA evidence to at least *partially* reconstruct *SOME* of the originally-nested bifolia.
might…partially…some…
If I were the conservateur who had to make the decision, that just wouldn’t be enough certainty to take the risk. And it IS a risk, even using the new low-abrasion techniques.
One last thought – it is not at all certain that the Voynich quires would have been arranged hairside-facing-hairside and fleshside-facing-fleshside. The reason quires were constructed that way in other manuscripts is aesthetic, because often the hair side is darker than the flesh side and if hairside faces hairside, the opening of the manuscript (verso facing recto) is more aesthetically pleasing. Before around 1200, when manuscripts tend to be much larger than the VMS, parchment tends to be thicker and with a significant hair/flesh color and texture contrast. By the time the VMS was made, this arrangement was not necessarily followed. With parchment as supple as the VMS leaves are, it is extremely difficult to distinguish hair and flesh sides for most leaves. There are some leaves where you can see hair follicles, but that’s pretty rare. And with the VMS in particular, the rule wouldn’t have had to be followed because the color of the hair and flesh sides is so similar.
My point with all of this isn’t to be a buzzkill or argue against progress, but the risk-reward ratio here just doesn’t make the case. I’d put my money on MSI to open new avenues for discovery. But it’s all moot for now since there are a lot of folks at the Beinecke who would need to approve any kind of scientific testing or imaging on the VMS, from the conservator to the curator to the Library Director, insurance team, budget director, and probably some lawyers.
Lisa Fagin-Davis,
I defer to your knowledge of the trade in pigments.
My point was rather that a technical analysis of the pigments would be informative because (as you know) certain regions/traditions preferred mineral over vegetable pigments and vice versa.
Some recent studies have also located (largely through XRF) particular distribution-patterns for specific minerals’ use and particular combinations, even identifying the source and the period of that source’s exploitation though we hardly need the last.
From my point of view, having specifications for the full palette would be very helpful indeed.
Lisa Fagin Davis: you’re still arguing by exception, when the majority case – and there is, for the Voynich Manuscript, no obvious physical reason to doubt the majority case – is for the original gatherings to have been formed from straightforward vellum sheets. When I examined the Voynich Manuscript back in 2006, there was only a single bifolio (I think it was in the Herbal A section) that struck me as in any way different from the rest (it was noticeably thicker than the rest): I also didn’t see any evidence of palimpsest / reuse, and I’m sure you’d have mentioned this if you’d seen it.
As far as the conservators go, they’ve already allowed crumbs to be collected from ten vellum sheets by the University of York team, so repeating that same process for all the leaves seems a fairly small step up from their existing position. Compared to the process of cutting strips off for the radiocarbon dating, erasing crumbs (and then amplifying the DNA) is barely intrusive at all.
I can’t help but suspect that your argument for aesthetic arrangement is more about muddying the waters here than about actually arguing for a genuine position: from my perspective, there seems every reason to expect that the bifolios were originally folded and cut down from the same set of – unusually prepared – vellum sheets, just the way everyone bar you would seem to expect.
You talk about a “risk-reward ratio” where you’re bigging up the risk (the curators have already allowed precisely the same crumb procedure) while pooh poohing the reward (you can’t see any possible value in trying to know something really fundamental about the physical makeup of the original gatherings, even though this is basically what you do pretty much every day with your love of fragmentology), while also bigging up the uncertainty of the process (basically, that because we can’t 100% guarantee that the gatherings were formed in that way, we shouldn’t even bother looking).
This isn’t “buzzkill”, this is just plain and simple academic trolling.
I’m not trolling you, Nick, I’m trying to be realistic.
Here’s how it works:
1) animal is slaughtered and skinned
2) skin is transformed into parchment by known methods
3) that large sheet is cut into smaller sheets, depending on the size of the manuscript being produced
4) the smaller sheets are folded, ruled, and otherwise prepared for writing
5) the process is repeated in the parchment workshop to create the intended number of sheets
6) the scribe grabs a few sheets from a pile to work with on the current gathering
7) those sheets may, or may not, have come from the same animal.
This is how scriptoria work. Parchment is prepared in one place, and the scribes work in a different space. They’re different skillsets.
My point is that if we were to be able to identify which bifolia come from the same animal, that isn’t enough evidence to conclude that those bifolia were originally part of the same quire. They might be, but they just as plainly might not. That evidence will itself muddy the waters. I would love to know the correct original order of bifolia as much as anyone else. But DNA isn’t going to get us there.
I know everyone wants to believe that DNA evidence can solve these types of problems, but it won’t. It won’t tell us where the manuscript was produced (not there is a MUCH larger dataset). It won’t tell us the original order of bifolia. And it won’t tell us who handled the manuscript over the last 600 years.
Nick, Lisa – forgive me, I shouldn’t tease central-European-Voynich theorists, but can’t resist this one.
“The red pigment in a manuscript by Von Ems was found to be made from rhubarb, which is the first time this colorant has been detected from illuminated manuscripts.”
from – Giacomo Chiari, David Scott, ‘Pigment analysis: Potentialities and problems’,
Periodico di Mineralogia 73 (January 2004) pp.227-237.
Lisa Fagin Davis: the scriptoria of your mind seem to be particularly rigid and only loosely related to the one that produced the Voynich Manuscript.
You assert (without proof, but centrally to your argument) that bifolia were taken from a pile of pre-cut bifolia, and then artfully nested flesh-to-flesh to replicate the praxis of previous centuries. It’s possible that some scriptoria worked like this (perhaps monastic scriptoria), but from my reading I think this would not have been the usual case in 15th century scriptoria.
For a start, many commissions were to duplicate an existing ms, and mss were rarely the same size as each other. Different (business) logic applied to monastic scriptoria and secular scriptoria.
What we see in the Voynich points – I believe – to custom vellum (second-rate material with a first-rate finish) and custom finishing (highly unusual foldouts) and custom content (unknown alphabet + drawings). I fail to see how this matches the highly-regimented scriptorium you conjure up even slightly, all the signs point elsewhere.
Finally: I’m arguing here for a very narrow application of DNA to gathering analysis, so please don’t keep conflating this with other speculative DNA applications, it makes your response look weak.
I counted at least 9 types of threads for stitching notebooks and attaching the cover. You can find it in my blog for 2021. vladimirdulov blogspot com/2021/
They were used at various stages of the manuscript repair. The oldest thread seems to have been yarn. Its remnants are clearly visible on 50-55 and 51-54 of the bifolio and some others, as well as on the spine of the manuscript block with the cover removed.
Gaskets were placed in the same way in several steps. For example, the ROS pad is even damaged by a worm.
Having made an analysis of the threads and gaskets, we can clarify the chronology of the history of the manuscript.
I will support the point of view that sheets of parchment already with drawings (some with text, and some without text) lay for a long time without being stapled into a book.
This follows from the following examples.
There are 2 bifolios linked in q1.
Sheet 17r is the Quire cover and has a vertical dark mark on the spine.
Similar trace on 67f2. The misplacement of the label q9 with this trail indicates that this quire is not properly stitched together. And taking into account that the holes on the bend 67r1 and 67r2 do not correspond to the supports of the block of the book, I believe that this clamshell is from a different book altogether.
Q13 has a personal vertical (reduced) dimension different from other quires. www voynich ninja/attachment php?aid=5417
The Q20 had pre-stitched pages to keep order.
Don’t examine the parchment. This is useless. Unnecessary work. Nick writes: unknown alphabet, letters. Unknown pictures. So every scientist should work there properly. Why should anyone be interested in a cow? According to the cattle, you won’t find anything. As I write here, it is useless work.
Another thing that is certainly important for scientists. So when it is written in the manuscript. I’m Eliška from Rožmberk. So every scientist will look at where Elička lived. And then he finds out that Eliška lived in the castle, Rožmberk. (Rosen mountain). The Rosenberg family had many castles. He was very rich. According to this, every scientist should successfully conclude that he also had many cows, calves, pigs, chickens and ducks. He certainly had enough parchment. Ink too.
Otherwise, as Nick writes. About an unknown font. So I can’t understand what’s unknown about that scripture. The letters are well visible in the manuscript. So why the unknown?
The same goes for pictures. Can’t you see what’s drawn there? So that’s definitely bad. The pictures are very clear and distinct. But what they mean is written in the text.
So it is important to pay attention to the text and not the parchment.
Friends leave the parchment alone. This is useless work.
Colleague Lisa is right. He seems to know enough. He advises you well. Of course I have to praise her. Which I don’t do so often.
Looking for DNA is certainly a great thing, maybe it helps, maybe not.
Maybe we should take a look at what it was like back then.
According to records, it was like that:
In a city of 20,000 inhabitants, 8 cattle were needed per day. At that size, herds of cattle were driven from all over to the city. The reason was that there would be no fodder for this number in the surrounding countryside for a long period of time. Today, the problem is solved by supplementary fodder such as soya from South America, maize from America etc.
Now you might have the DNA, and now?
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
I would like to see some clarity from the folks who had it before Voynich. It was there for 300+ years, right? I think its just a notion that no one knew about it. I have never heard any official responses in this regard, except for the fellow on the “The Unexplained Files”, decidedly non-commital.
Matt
Matthew,
Are you speaking about the Jesuit community? The only solidly-documented connections for the manuscript are all closely connected to the Jesuit community, first in Prague and then in Rome. The person whose name is inscribed on it was evidently one of the Prague community’s foster-children. He was apprenticed by them to a chemist-physician who was one of those who attended the emperor from time to time. When his mentor-and-master died, this ‘Master Pepper’ followed in his footsteps and having been fortunate enough to cure Rudolf at some time, was rewarded with a (fairly nominal) title. From there, it was once believed, the manuscript as a whole went to another lay person closely connected to the Prague Jesuits (Georg Baresch), who – again with a member of the Jesuits – got in touch with Athansius Kircher (S.J.) in Rome. after Baresch’s death, Marcus Marci ( another of that community) sent it to Kircher who had known about material in it for at least 30 years by then. Correspondence in which Kircher is gently urged to help Baresch never mentions any imperial connection. Neither does Baresch, nor the head of the Prague community to which everyone was fairly closely linked in one way or another. For its having been so much as seen by Rudolf or any courtier, we have only one bit of third-hand hearsay which the person reporting it declines to endorse. Without it we should have to read the evidence as meaning that the manuscript’s parts had either been bought or inherited by Sinapius; then passed to a fellow physician-chemist, Baresch; thence to Marci who may have actually been meant to inherit it, since Baresch never claimed to own it and Marci says he had ‘always meant’ Kircher to have it. Many of the Prague Jesuits – the order was a scholarly one in those days – had studied in Rome and I’ve often wondered whether the material hadn’t been copied from works then in the Roman or in the Prague universities. But “no evidence = no case” is the best motto and there’s no documentary evidence or corroborative evidence for that. None for the ‘Rudolf’ rumour either, just as a cold matter of fact.
There’s a lot of speculative writing as e.g. that the images are European-alchemy-magical which depends, at bottom, on no more than giving the ‘Rudolf’ rumour undue credit. I make a point of the fact that it is no more than third-hand gossip for that reason; I think it has led generations of researchers into looking under the wrong lamp-post. Funny thing is, though, that so few follow through and assert that Voynichese is some local Bohemian dialect.
@Matthias
Anything about history is best looked up on Rene Zandbergen’s site.
He specialises in the history of the Voynich.
http://www.voynich.nu/
DN,
No, not specifically the Jesuits. Anyone in the church who might know. The comment in HP Kraus’s autobiography by Vatican librarian Rusysschaert, made clear he knew the manuscipt existed. This however is far from a formal claim, definitely in the region of heresay. How did he know it existed, and what did he know about it are not an unreasonable expectations. Those interested can in fact look it up at Renes Voynich site, under “History of the Manuscipt”. The autobiography is still available used as well.
I very much like Rene and his work, though not impossible we have disagreements about things, I do not think this is one of them.
I should say, I dont know whether Rene thinks there is more to be found at the Vatican, only that he agreed the mention in Kraus merited investigation. There was in fact a Jesuit priest who talked about the VMs in the Unexplained Files, whose name I cannot recall. Nothing hugely important, though given the lack of any commentary from his higher superiors in the church, it became to me, defacto, the opinion of the church. (of course not entirely as you may guess)
Matt
@Agasul,
It would be more appropriate to suggest that Matthew *also* consider Rene’s interpretation of the evidence.
A researcher must weigh the balance of opinion and of evidence for him/herself before deciding where they stand. Suggesting that there is only one opinion required and that everyone should conform to it, isn’t how scholarship works.
DN,
I don’t expect anyone to conform to my ideas, and I have read and considered pretty much all of Rene’s. If he differs with me on this, that would be more than ok.
It should be noted though, that we can only assume that Kircher et al, were talking about the MS408 in their letters to each other. The missing pages (and any potential commentary about them) are still missing. This is one of the reasons I am making this suggestion.
Matt
@D.N.O’Donovan
The reason why I first suggested Rene’s site is that everything is clearly laid out and in one place. Whereas on other websites a lot of things are fragmented and have to be put together first.
To keep it simple, for someone who has only recently come across the Voynich manuscript, it is the best first port of call.
This is not meant to be a criticism of their sites. That’s how I see it.
@Matt Lewis,
about the letters involving Kircher, this can be taken step by step. The best known Marci letter from 1665 was found in the MS. Both the MS and this letter are definitely genuine, for different reasons. The letter refers back to an inheritance, and in a book published in 1662 Marci explains that he inherited the alchemical library of one G. Barschius. Now there is also a letter from Barschius to Kircher talking about a book in unknown writing, with plants and stars. Marci furthermore wrote that the earlier owner (who left it to him as part of an inheritance) wrote to Kircher before. So far it all matches.
Then in this letter from Barschius, he writes that he heard from Moretus, that an earlier letter sent in 1637 must have reached Kircher. And in the diary of Moretus we find a letter from Kircher answering to a question about an illegible manuscript.
Unfortunately, the part of Moretus’ diary including the year 1637 is lost.
There is a reasonable chance (IMHO) that this could have included one of the cut out pages of the MS.
Rene,
Yes, for the moment anyway, I have no questions about the letters genuiness, as in that the people wrote them, I do believe actually wrote them. Perhaps about some clarity might be requested by the conference as to how many pages are actually missing, as well as any possible ephemera that may have been enclosed and the like before Voynich owned it. As I made clear, I am personally very happy with your work and can’t think of other quibbles. I think what I was and probaly others might have been hesitant about when they saw the letters was its lack of the authors declaring what a peculiar thing it is in general, stylistically. No mention of nymphs doing fantastical things, no rossete clarfication.. I would not look forward to being called any kind of expert on the Ms.(I have been asked by people i have confided in that I know enough to write on the subject, and I should do it. That will wait for another day maybe when I have learned Latin). It seems unusual to me nothing of its equivelance has been found to compare it to…ever. If you look closely there might be possible comparisons in the history of literature. No public bolt of lightning at all seems to struck regarding its strangeness until the first VMs list. I woukd like to know more about the limited group of people who first knew of it in the 1700s, and what kind of comminication they had amongst themselves. I think the bit in Barschiuses letter speculating the author having travelled to the east to find better medicine, others besides me might have had a lightbulb go off in, though I have seen very little talk about that. It would be nice to have someone from “subrosan realms” discuss their knowledge as well. They might not though, as …either there is a fear of how liitle their own knowledge is (like me), or scholars in this realm have dwindled to next to nothing, and like apparently Ruysschaert dont know or havent been informed. Thanks for the reply Rene!
Matt
Matt, as I understand it, Rene reads Baresch’s letter as speculating on both matters – that is, the material’s having been obtained in eastern parts and its being about medicine.
I read it differently, taking it that Baresch is saying emphatically that it is not impossible at all that the material had been gained from eastern parts, but that he guesses it’s about medicine. You have to read that letter as a fired-up response to Kircher’s downright rudeness in refusing to acknowledge what Baresch had sent him (via Moretus) and then refusing to name Baresch or to thank him even at second-remove. In fact, Kircher was an out-and-out snob who over-estimated his own greatness of brain as well as his claim to social superiority. but this weakness in his character is also important. Had there been any known connection between the ms and an emperior in 1632, mentioning the fact would have certainly stimulated Kircher’s interest and seen him less dismissive of the ms. Like so many figures who later took centre stage in Voynich studies, Kircher was afflicted by the sort of unreasonable certainty which comes with milder cases of folie de grandeur. He thought himself right in whatever his imagination suggested *because* he considered himself a superior type of man. William Friedman was the same.
Michelle, as she often does, has provided a careful and considered response to this idea. I do find the response of some others a little baffling. In particular I think it is is odd how someone with no expertise on DNA science can say with such confidence what is or is not possible with such a technique. But I guess time will tell, maybe in 20 or 30 years people will look back and say that clearly DNA technology couldn’t be capable of telling us anything about the Voynich, nevertheless I know where I would put my money. I remember once taking the bus, a number of years ago, and the drive asking me for the exact change as his till lacked change. My response, as I was trying to see if I had the precise money, was “Some day you guys will take cards”. The driver’s response was “It’ll never happen, mate”. Being the argumentative person, that some Voynich researchers have come to know, I replied “Trust me, one day you will take cards”. Needless to say the driver was far from convinced. Now, of course, I can easily pay with my visa debit card for my local bus journey. In fact I would not be surprised if in 10 years it is impossible to buy a bus ticket with cash. I had a similar experience in Marks and Spencer supermarket many years ago. I was bemoaning to a member of staff the fact that Marks and Spencer do not do food deliveries. It so happen that a few local/regional/trainee? managers appeared on the scene at that time. I remember telling them that it will be possible to get food from M&S delivered one day, they were adamant that it wouldn’t. Now, of course, you can get M&S food delivered with Ocado and I believe, now, Deliveroo. The point of these examples isn’t to imply that I am so much more insightful than lots of other people, I have my blindspots as we all do. My point was to illustrate how some people can be very closed minded about what might happen in the future.
@Mark Knowles. You are smart. That is good to see. I’m very glad that’s the case. All the best in your next life.
Josef: And to you too, all the best in your next life and all the lives after that.
I am with Lisa on this I think. It seems in general like the efforts on Yales end have been more than satisfactory. I think many people were thinking with everything that was done with a fairly high degree of effort (scans, etc) that they were nervous it would soon fall without them getting a shot at it. Well, it hasn’t. I do wonder since it is hard to for me to know, whether the Indiana Jones question about what the government did with the Ark, in “Raiders” and who had it, and got the reply, “top people”, to which said pointedly “Who?”, and got the further reply “TOP” people. Who would that be… Tom Cruise? Good one. Anyway the scans are no longer “wretched” as an early commenter offered up. They are damn good, and you have a date to go on. This seems like it should be sufficient to me, unless the manuscript is far more exotic than you guys indicate. At the moment the opinion is generally its still some weird explicable artfact of history. Not something containing the secrets if the universe. If its more than maybe you should call un some *really* top people.