As many Cipher Mysteries regulars will know, the two reasons I focused my Voynich Manuscript research on the 15th century were (a) the Voynichese ‘4o’ sign reappears in a number of (far less sophisticated) 15th century cipher alphabets, thus pointing to a post-1400 date; while (b), as John Matthews Manly pointed out in 1931, the manuscript’s 15th century quire numbers strongly imply a pre-1500 date. (Though it was nice that the radiocarbon dating didn’t contradict this, the evidence was actually there all along. *sigh*)

All the same, numerous aspects of the codicology and palaeography of the Voynich Manuscript remain unresolved: for example, my presentation at next month’s Villa Mondragone Voynich centenary conference will revolve (at great speed) around quire numbers. Fascinatingly, a whole lot of interesting quire-number-related stuff has emerged over the last few weeks, thanks to French Voynich blogger Thomas Sauvaget.

You see, Thomas decided a while back to see whether he could dig up examples of Voynich-like features in scans of manuscripts available online, i.e. zodiac month names, gallows characters, the odd ij mark on f57v, and (of course) the quire numbers.

While trawling through St Gallen’s online manuscript collection, Thomas found something I’d missed when looking there (shame on me, but probably because I was looking for quire numbers at the bottom of pages) – a ‘pm9’ [primus] in the top margin of f176r of Cod[ex] Sang[allensis] 839 that is pretty similar to the ‘pm9’ used to number the Voynich Manuscript’s first quire. (The jpeg at the top shows the two overlaid).

Now… Cod Sang 839 [a copy of Nicolas Oresme’s five books of commentary on Aristotle’s Physics] was a copy made in 1459 by the same (according to Scherrer’s 1875 catalogue) scribe who wrote Cod Sang 840 in 1459 and Cod Sang 841 in 1462. Yet the ‘pm9’ appears not in the text, nor even in the scribe’s colophon, but in a table of contents added later, in a different hand.

Thomas concludes (from the back-to-front shape of the ‘4’ digit) that this table-of-contents scribe was not the same person who added the quire numbers to the Voynich: and that’s perfectly reasonable. Yet at the same time, it remains a pretty strong match, which I think in and of itself broadly points to the conclusion Thomas ultimately comes to (which I’ll get to further below).

Incidentally, Cod Sang 841 has an ownership note added by a Johannes [Hans] Lippis:

Johanes Lippis possessor h. libri bin uff Gais gsin und do hand mir die Heren das buch geben und hand es mir geschenkt.”

It was far from clear to me exactly what this was saying, so I passed it over to the ever-careful Philip Neal, who very kindly and lucidly translated it as follows:-

“I, Johannes Lippis, owner of this book, was at Gais, and there the lords gave me the book and made a present of it to me.”

This seems to be consistent with the Johannes Lippis mentioned as a lawyer in a 1441 charter, who was perhaps representing the St Gallen abbey’s local interest in the town of Gais. Might it have been some kind of sweetener or (dare I say it) bribe? Possibly! Even so, it also seems unlikely to me that Lippis was given all three as a gift, while his clunky text seems rather at odds with the person patiently trawling through Oresme’s commentary to produce an index.

I strongly suspect that all three manuscripts ended up at St Gall simply because they were from a single local hand, and that a fairly senior librarian in St Gall probably added the table of contents. However, you’ll have to make your own mind up in the absence of any better evidence – I emailed St Gallen’s manuscript cataloguer to ask about this, but didn’t get a definitive enough reply either way to confirm or deny this.

Anyway, Thomas carried on searching and found yet more pm9 marginalia in a 1467 music book by Hugo Spechtshart in Esslingen in Southern Germany, this time along with Voynich-like abbreviations for secundus, tertius and quartus… though once again, not as quire numbers.

Putting all the pieces together, Thomas thinks that they all point to a ‘Lake Constance hypothesis’: that the quire numbers were examples of an abbreviatory style that flourished 1450-1500 on the various edges of Lake Constance, where we now see Southern Germany, Switzerland (St Gallen isn’t far away at all), Austria, and even Liechtenstein (pretty much).

Al perfectly reasonable. Of course, rewind the clock 550 years and Switzerland was actually the Confederacy, with the conflict with the Habsburgs in the Swabian War (1499) yet to come. I’m not entirely certain, but it seems that the angsty neighbours around Lake Constance circa 1460 were:-
* the Prince-Bishopric of Constance to the North
* Thurgau to the West
* the Prince-Abbacy of St Gall to the South West
* the Federation of Three Leagues (i.e. the League of the Ten Jurisdictions, the League of God’s House, and the Grey League) to the South-East

[All of which sounds to me more like the turbulent political setting for an Iain M. Banks ‘Culture’ space opera novel, but there you go.]

Heaven only knows where all the archives for these ended up! Good luck to Thomas trying to find them! Myself, I’m following another (far simpler) research lead entirely… but more on that later! 😉

I thought it would be a good idea to post up as many of the different research threads relating to Quire 20’s (‘Q20’) original bifolio nesting / ordering in a single place as I could. However, be warned that there are… quite a lot of them.

Ornate Gallows

There is only a single ornate (swirly) gallows in Quire 20. Yet oddly, it’s to be found not at the start of the quire (as you might expect), but instead at the top of f105r (i.e. the front of the third folio in):

So, if your basic assumption about Q20 is that its bifolios are in the correct order, then it would seem that this ornate gallows poses you a problem: it ‘feels’ like it’s in the wrong place.

However, as we’ll see, there are plenty of other types of evidence we can look at, and – annoyingly, but probably unsurprisingly – they all yield a slightly different spin on the same basic question of ordering.

Wladimir’s Wormholes

In a very interesting recent post, Wladimir Dulov noted various patterns of wormholes on Q20, particularly on f114, f115 and f116. One cluster of wormholes starts large on f116 (the end page), becomes slightly smaller on f115, and smaller still on f114: this seems to imply that these were made when the bifolios were in their current (final) nesting order.

As an aside, book-worms are actually woodworms, and so don’t – as Rene Zandbergen has pointed out – like eating vellum. Wormholes in vellum typically mean that the book had had a wooden cover which the worms had eaten through first, before carrying on munching into the vellum (then stopping after a couple of pages).

Incidentally, I’ve long suspected (from the curious quire numbering style and the careful vellum repairs) that the Voynich Manuscript may well have spent time in a Swiss monastery library (and, I’ve argued, probably not too far from Lake Constance): and my guess is that this was probably where it had a wooden cover added. (Perhaps even in a chained library [“Kettenbibliothek”] such as Schaffhausen.)

So far, so wormy. But Wladimir’s nice point is that there is also a second set of wormholes on f114 and f115, which doesn’t go through to f116. In fact, f114 and f115 have an abundance of wormholes (not just the ones Wladimir mentions) not visible on f116, or indeed on any other Q20 page.

This would seem to imply that even though f116 has ended up being bound as the final folio, f115 may well have previously been bound (in a previous binding) as the final folio, with f114 nested just inside it. Additionally, I suspect the absence of matching wormholes on any other Q20 bifolio also weakly implies that at the time when the two outermost bifolios were f114 and f115, none of the other Q20 bifolios was then nested just inside f114. This suggests that the bifolio that was then nested inside f114 might possibly have been the missing Q20 bifolio (f109-f110).

However, from the random bifolio shuffling that seems to have gone on early in the Voynich Manuscript’s life, I’m also fairly certain that when it entered that library, the manuscript was in the form of a set of unbound (or perhaps only very lightly-bound) gatherings. So, even though Wladimir’s wormhole reasoning is sound, I suspect it only takes us back to the manuscript’s wooden cover days, i.e. it doesn’t necessarily tell us about the original bifolio nesting order etc.

All the same, his observation does signal fairly loudly that Q20’s final bifolio order (that we see today) is very likely wrong, giving us confidence that trying to reconstruct the original order is a sensible idea.

Wladimir’s Pre-binding

Wladimir has another interesting observation about Q20. He points out a puncture mark near the bottom of each of the bifolios f103, f104, f105, f106, and f107 (he is unsure from the scans whether or not there is a matching puncture mark on f108, but thinks that there probably is). He describes this as a “pre-binding mark”, where a binder has run a small piece of twine through the bifolios to line them up ready to bind properly.

This would seem to have happened just before the final binding we see today, so it’s quite late on in the overall codicological timeline. However, because there seems to be no evidence of pre-binding elsewhere in the Voynich Manuscript, I can’t help but wonder whether this weakly implies that Q20 was bound separately to the rest of the manuscript.

Vellum Tricks

Back in 2016, I posted about the vellum colour of each of the Q20 bifolios. Here, contrast enhanced, are the vellum colours of f103-f116, f104-f115, f105-f114, f106-f113, f107-f112, and f108-f111:

vellum-comparison-contrast-enhanced

My observation back then was that f103-f116 and f106-f113 seemed different from the others two bifolios: hence it seemed likely to me that the four were cut from a single (large) piece of vellum. It therefore further seemed likely to me that these other four originally sat next to each other.

(Of course, we could do better than my eye by physically sampling DNA from these bifolios and comparing their sequences, but there currently seems to be no appetite for doing this.)

To my mind, this implies that there were probably two quires / gatherings:

  • Q20A – f105-f114, f104-f115, f107-f112, and f108-f111
  • Q20B – f103-f116 (almost certainly on the outside), f106-f113, and perhaps the middle bifolio

Anton and f105

Voynich researcher Anton [Alipov] (whose name you may recognise from voynich.ninja) commented on Wladimir’s brief summary comment of the above, noting that:

Folio 105 is also somewhat excessively trimmed from the bottom which looks strange.

It’s a neat, clean upward cut across the bottom that continues across to the other half of the bifolio. Without close physical examination (Lisa, have you looked at this?), it’s hard to be sure whether this was in the vellum right from Day One, or whether it was cut off at a later date.

As far as I know, the two main things that typically get added at the bottom of pages are quire numbers and ownership marks. So that suggests to me that there may well have been some ownership mark added to the bottom right of f105r (or the bottom left of f105v) which a later owner wanted to remove. (Not all ownership transfers are transactions later owners want to advertise, as the heavily erased Sinapius signature on f1r seems to attest.)

Similarly, the last folio of Quire 19 (i.e. facing f103r) seems to have had a large chunk taken out of it, which is consistent with an ownership mark there also being excised: this possibly suggests that that may have been the last page of a book / section.

(Incidentally, I pointed out in 2010 that I thought that f105v shows more sign of weathering than just about every other page in Q20, which would seem to imply that it spent a good period of time on the back of the quire. However, looking at f105v again now, I’m not really sure what I was seeing back then.)

This might make the bottom part of f105v the likely location for a quire mark (in one binding), and also the bottom part of f105r the likely location for an ownership mark (in the reversed binding). What a codicological mess!

Unusual Glyph Patterns

Despite its ‘language’ similarities to other Currier B pages, Quire 20 also has a number of glyph pattern idiosyncrasies. In a 2010 comment here, Tim Tattrie pointed out:

“lo” as a separate word is only found in f104r, 106r and 108v.

“rl” as a separate word, or word beginning is only found in f104r, 108v and 113r.

“llo” as a series of letters is only found in f104r, 108v,111v, 113v,116r

Looking at these in voynichese.com, there seem to be just as many free-standing “lo” words in Q13 as in Q20, so I’m not quite taken: and the number of “llo” glyph sequences is extremely low (5 matches).

I’d add that most of the places we see “lr” are in Q20: and similarly for “dl”. There are also some instances of “dr” clustered on f105v, and similarly for “dd”. Q20 is also where the Voynichese glyph “x” appears most often. Sean B. Palmer also thought that the only “genuine” occurrence of “aa” in the Voynich Manuscript was on the third line of f115r (which ends “cholor daar oraro”).

Generally, I do think that the glyph content of Q20 words seems a bit more ‘variable’ than Q13 words, but the overall pattern doesn’t seem wildly different. Unless Rene has some stats on this I don’t know?

Repairs to f116

An interesting 2015 blog post by David Jackson takes a look at the holes, waterstains and repairs on Q20’s final folio (f116). He speculates (for several different reasons) that f116 was trimmed down to the bare minimum in response to damage to that page.

Broadly speaking, I’m not completely convinced by his argument: the main waterstain (near the top of the folios) is visible all the way through Q20, and vellum – animal skin – is basically waterproof. I think David highlights some interesting features, but they don’t quite fit together for me the way they do for him.

Contact Transfers

There are a few places in Q20 where we can see colour transfers between adjacent pages:

  • Paint from the top two red paragraph stars on f116r has transferred to the facing page (f115v)
  • Paint from the sixth red star on f113v has transferred past the vellum edge flaw on f114 to f115r
  • There’s a stray red paint spot that appears near the top of f104v and f105r
  • There’s a stray faint paint spot between f114v and f115r (look between stars #10 and #11)
  • Green paint (presumably from Q19?) has ended up on the outer edge of f104r, partly because f103 seems to be about 1cm narrower than f104. (And because f103-f116 is a bifolio, this 1cm different also suggests that the outside edge of f116 was not trimmed down, i.e. that was how that bifolio was originally cut.)

Contact transfers from the paragraph stars highlight the issues of (a) whether the paragraph stars were drawn in the original construction phase, and (b) whether the paragraph stars were painted in the original construction phase – because if they were, then f115v originally faced f116r and f113v faced f115r (with f114 optionally in the middle).

Lisa Fagin Davis’ Scribes

As far as Lisa Fagin Davis’ well-known (and much-cited) scribal analysis of the Voynich Manuscript goes, Quire 20’s palaeography might seem to be one of its less interesting features. She writes (p.17):

The entire Quire is written by Scribe 3 with the exception of folio 115r, where the first twelve lines were written by Scribe 2.

These twelve lines span four short paragraphs, and look like this:

For our present challenge of reconstruct the bifolio nesting order(s) of Q20, all this really does is suggest that f115r might possibly have been the original start of a quire or a section. But you’d almost certainly need to combine this with more information to form the outlines of a proper argument.

Q20 Titles

In Voynich researcher terminology, a “title” is a short sequence of Voynichese text that is positioned on a page in a slightly anomalous (and non-paragraphy) way. For example, everyone knows that f1r (the very first page of the Voynich Manuscript) has four of these ‘titles’ (on lines 6, 10, 21, and 28), a fact that has given rise to the broadly-held speculation that the paragraphs on f1r with titles might be using them to hold section / chapter / book names (in some way). Page f8r similarly has 3 titles (on lines 8, 13, and 21)

Q20 also has some of these Voynichese titles, according to John Grove’s somewhat ancient list:

  • f105r, line 9
  • f105r, line 36
  • f108v, line 52
  • f114r, line 34

As with the scribal information, it’s hard to be sure what exactly to make of this: but it certainly makes f105r seem like a page of structural interest, title-wise.

Dictionary Distance Metric

Back in 2010, Julian Bunn posted up an interesting page computing distance metrics between folios in terms of how similar their unique word lists were. I emailed him some comments (which he then incorporated into the web-page) on what this had to say specifically about Quire 20. Here’s what I sent:

Having played with Julian’s results a bit […], it appears that while some pages’ recto and verso sides are very similar, others are wildly different. For example, just in the recipe section:-
103    good
104    very bad
105    very good
106    bad
107    excellent
108    excellent
109    (missing)
110    (missing)
111    excellent
112    good
113    excellent
114    excellent
115    very bad
116    n/a

Looking at pages within recipe bifolios, however, yields different results again: for example, even though both f104 and f115 are both “bad” above (and are on the same bifolio), f104v is extremely similar to f115r, while f104r is extremely similar to f115v (which is a bit odd). Furthermore, the closeness between f111v and f108r suggests that these originally formed the central bifolio (but reversed), i.e. that the correct page order across the centre was f111r, f111v, f108r, f108v. However, f105 / f114 seem quite unconnected, as do f106 / f113 and f107 / f112.

Re-reading my comments 12 years later, it’s clear that there’s quite a lot of suggestive information here. For example, even though the two bifolio pairs f105r/f105v and f114r/f114v are close, the disparity between f105 and f114 weakly suggests that their bifolio sat towards the outside of a quire or gathering.

Similarly, the closeness between the two halves of the f104-f115 bifolio suggests that this may possibly have been a central bifolio (though what precisely is going on remains something of a mystery).

Finally, the fact that f106r/f106v aren’t close but their opposite folio half f113r/f113v are very close suggests that there may have been a change of topic or structure somewhere on f106.

What Have I Missed?

I tried to follow Wladimir’s discussion of Quire 20 “gaskets” (as Google Translate put it), but wasn’t really able to (I believe it’s to do with things attached to the spines of individual quires that were used to bind them to a spine but without gluing them). However, I don’t believe this affects the issue of bifolio ordering I’m trying to tackle here.

I’m unaware of any multi-spectral scans of Q20 that we might be able to refer to so that we can compare the vellum used on different bifolios.

Also, I’m unaware if there are any studies that have specifically used page-to-page word list difference metrics (of the kind Julian Bunn did) to exhaustively evaluate all the different nesting permutations, i.e. to suggest what the original nesting order was.

Regardless, if you know of any other analyses of Q20 that might have some impact on the bifolio nesting order, please mention it in the comment section below, thanks very much!

A trawl through newspapers.com’s (paywalled) archive throws up various tidbits to do with fantasy-spinning wife-killer Henry Debosnys. For example, that his defence counsel consisted of Arod K. Dudley of Elizabethtown and Royal Corbin of Plattsburgh; that his brain “weighed fifty-two ounces“; and that on the day of his execution, “he commenced the day with his usual series of noises in imitation of different animals, of which he was a perfect mimic”.

On that same day, he was asked by the Reverend Father Reddington if there was anything he wanted to say. Debosnys’ reply: “I have, I am innocent of the crime. You have made a mistake. The blood on my knife was the blood of a chipmunk.” Just so we have his – completely credible – story of how he didn’t kill his wife on record. Lying bastard.

“Paris green and vinegar”

Perhaps more intriguingly, a short piece in the Citizen-Examiner of Hayneville, Alabama (15th Nov 1882) shows a further side to Debosnys:

He wrote an ordinary letter and handed it, open, to the sheriff and asked him to mail it to the address in New York. It became incidentally mislaid, and several days afterwards the sheriff was astounded, on reverting to it, to find another complete letter in green ink, written between the lines. It showed the prisoner and the correspondent to be members of a communits [sic] society, and suggested plans of escape, threatening the sheriff and asking aid. It was discovered afterward that the miscreant had procured by some means Paris green and vinegar, which formed a liquid whose traces were at first invisible, and by the lapse of time developed these characters.

Monsieur Keff

There’s also an intriguing account courtesy of a French journalist that appeared in the Post-Star (Glens Falls, NY) on 07 Jul 1883, which Cheri Farnsworth quotes a slightly fuller version of (from the New York Sun) on pp.84-86 (but somewhat scoffs at, it has to be said):

I am positive that the so-called Henry DeBosnys was my comrade Keff. I see him still, a good-sized fellow, with long, black hair, a smooth, fat, always carefully shaved face emerging from a high white cravat, a very emphatic talker and elocutionist, especially when he recited his own verses. watching lovingly in the meantime the skillful blackening up of an old Marseillaise pipe which he seemed to have been born smoking. For five years, we met in Paris during the regular six weeks’ vacation of the provincial colleges in which he was a teacher, the university not allowing him a stay of more than one scholastic year, whether in the north, the east, the west, the south, Corsica, or even Algeria, because he always ran into debt and kept company with tipplers. I have still in my panoply the pretty pocket pistol with a damascened butt which I lent him three times to blow out what he used to call his brains, in consequence of three distinct failures in hunting rich heiresses. Keff showed me the last time I saw him the following letter:

“MR. KEFF: I’ve just found among my daughter’s papers two letters, one which is in very poor poetry, signed by you, and states that you are ready to elope with my Giuseppa on the horse of a certain Mazeppa, whom I suspect to be a licensed vendor of Bastia. The other is signed by a Mr. Peyrodal, a druggist’s clerk, now with his family at Cette. I warn you both that I give you two weeks to come and marry my daughter Giuseppa. So much the worse for the one who arrives second in the race. He is a dead man. With much respect,
BRASCATELLI D’ISTRIA,
Non-commissioned officer in the gendarmerie of Bastia.”

[…] Keff said he was going to San Domingo, and proposed to join the army there. “I am sure,” he said, “It is my true calling in this world. When young I fought like a lion near Colonel de Montagnac when we attacked Lidi-Brahim’s [sic] marabout. I even remember that I fled wonderfully quick with Major Courby de Cognord and his forty hussars, and wrote on that affair a magnificent piece of poetry.” “What nonsense, man!” [I said] “At that time you were only twelve years of age, and at Charlemagne college with me.” “You must be mistaken; I was at Lidi-Brahim, for I wrote verses about it.” I did not insist, knowing well that it was his hobby to think that he had been a witness of whatever he wrote verses about. I have not heard of him since.

Well, Farnsworth’s scoffing notwithstanding, I think you have to admit this perpetually-heiress-chasing mad-fantasist Keff does sound a great deal like our Henry Debosnys.

At the same time, I’d add that the (actual) battle of Sidi-Brahim was in September 1845, which (if Keff was, as the correspondent writes, 12 years old at the time) would make Keff’s birth year 1833.

Pierre Keff

Looking at the Keff surname, it turns out that there is a whole cluster of Keffs from Alsace-Lorraine. Because of Alsace’s close connections with Germany, a register of people from Alsace was drawn up in February and September 1872 (just after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871), which still exists and has been digitized. Of these Keffs, two in particular stand out:

  • Pierre Keff, b. 12 May 1833 in Chateaurouge, who in September 1872 was living in Toulon
  • Jean Keff, b. 25 July 1841 in Bouzonville, who in September 1872 was living in Toulon

Jean Keff appears in FamilySearch as having been born on 25 July 1841 in Bouzonville to Pierre Keff and Catherine Andre. Separately, FamilySearch lists the same-named couple (without ever connecting the dots) as having been the parents of:

  • Madeleine Keff (born and died in January 1844 in Bouzonville)
  • Elisabeth Keff (b. 11 April 1843 in Bouzonville, and who was living in Paris in 1872)
  • Joseph Keff (b. 30 April 1845 in Bouzonville, baptized 1 May 1845, died 19 Jan 1846)

A Jean Keff (again, with the same parents) married a Reine Lichtenberger (daughter of Michel Lichtenberger and Reine Keser, born in 25 Sep 1836 in Oberentzen) on 18 Feb 1865 in Paris (district 19e). Though I should add that by the time of the 1872 register, Reine Keff was listed as a “femme separee” living in Paris.

As far as Pierre Keff goes: Chateau-Rouge is a commune in Moselle, right on the modern French-German border (i.e. we’re not interested in the Parisian Metro station here). And we have a marriage record for a Pierre Keff (with the same parents) marrying a Catherine Birschens (born in Pays-Bas, daughter of Jean Birschens and Marie Scharbantger) on 02 Aug 1862 in Paris (district 19e).

According to Caroline Seckel’s Ancestry tree, a Catherine Birschens was born in 2 May 1835 in Waldbillig, Echternach, Grevenmacher, Luxembourg to Jean Berchen and Anne Marie Charpentier: although she is marked down as having been married to an “unknown spouse”, it seems a solid bet that this is the same person.

As always with genealogy, it’s not 100% certain but I think it’s safe to say there would seem to be strong evidence from all this that Pierre Keff and Jean Keff were brothers, with Elisabeth Keff their sister.

Putting this together with the Parisian journalist’s recollection of Keff’s having been 12 years old in 1845, it seems reasonably likely to me that the heiress-chasing fantasist he recalled from Paris was in fact Pierre Keff (b. 12 May 1833).

What Happened to Pierre Keff?

That, alas, would seem to be a very much harder question to answer. There seems to be no immigration record of any Keff going to America, or of any Keff naturalization etc. So it seemed likely to me that the best place to search would be French archival records. So I looked at Gallica, and found a hit from 5th May 1872 in Le Petit journal des tribunaux. This was a really awful slice of history, which I’ll give in French and then translate:

Jean Keff a quitté sa femme et ses enfants pour vivre en concubinage avec la veuve Bon. En allant chercher cette femme à l’atelier où elle travaillait, Jean Keff evait vu une jeune fille nommée Henriette, ouvrière du même atelier, et il conçut le projet d’abuser de cette jeune fille.

Se faisant passer pour mari et femme, Keff et la veuve Bon parvinrent à se faire confier la jeune Henriette sous prétexte d’une partie à Grenelle. Ils avaient promis que la jeune fille serait ramenée avant dix heures du soir. Cette promesse ne fut pas tenue et ils firent coucher la jeune fille dans laur logis. Pendant la nuit, eurent lieu des tentatives doieuses auxquels put heureusement résister la jeune Henriette.

C’est à l’occasion de ces faits que Jean Keff, Pierre Keff at la veuve Bon comparaissaient devant le jury sous l’accusation de tentative de voil, de complicité du même crime at d’attentat à la pudeur. L’affaire a eu lieu à huis clos.

Déclarées coupables sans circonstances atténuantes, ils ont été tous trois condamnés à la peine des travaux forcés à perpetuité.

Au sortir de l’audience, Jean keff a voulu se frapper avec un couteau qu’il était parvenu à dissimuler ; mais il a été aussitôt désarmé.

My translation (free and easy, of course you can translate it better):

Jean Keff left his wife and children and moved in with the widow of M. Bon. While going to look for this woman in the workshop where she worked, Jean Keff saw a young girl named Henriette, who worked at the same place, and conceived a plan to rape her.

Passing themselves off as husband and wife, Keff and the widow Bon managed to get the young Henriette into their trust under the pretext of a game at Grenelle. Their promise that the girl would be brought back before 10pm was not kept, and they made the young girl sleep in their home. During the night, various dubious attempts [at sexual assault] took place which fortunately the young Henriette was able to resist.

It was in respect of the above events that Jean Keff, Pierre Keff and the widow Bon appeared before the jury on charges of attempted deception, complicity and indecent assault. The case took place behind closed doors. Found guilty without extenuating circumstances, all three were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Coming out of the hearing, Jean Keff attempted to stab himself with a knife he had managed to conceal on his person; but he was immediately disarmed.

The three convicts appealed to the Supreme Court.

(There’s also a report in Le Petite Presse of 3rd May 1872 covering the same trial.)

In the appeal hearing of 30 May 1872, the court rejected the appeals of Jean Keff and Marie Ratier (la veuve Bon), but upheld Pierre Keff’s appeal because of a procedural error in his interrogation. However, the court insisted Pierre Keff should be immediately rearrested, reinterrogated (properly this time) and re-tried for the same offence.

So… What Happened Next?

If both Jean Keff and Pierre Keff were in Toulon in September 1872, it seems likely to me that they were both in the Bagne of Toulon (1748-1873), the gigantic prison made (in-)famous by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. So it would seem likely that Pierre Keff’s retrial happened, and that Pierre was then sent to the Bagne with his brother for a similar life imprisonment.

We know that Henry Debosnys’ body was found to be covered in (what seemed like) shocking tattoos (typical of prisons), and that he was also thought to be expert in escaping from prisons. So this would seem to be the point where the two bigger narratives might somehow overlap and merge into one, right?

What are the odds that Pierre Keff escaped from the Bagne, and fled to America under an assumed name, leaving his – errrm – miserable life in France behind him? Actually, it turns out that this is fairly unlikely, because few people escaped Le Bagne. (If anyone has access to Docteur Raoulx’s (1929) “Le Bagne de Toulon“, a (small) roll-call of escapees is apparently on pages 17-20.)

All the same, given that it was 1873 when Le Bagne was closed, the Keff brothers were almost certainly then moved on to other prisons: so it could well be from a different prison that one (or indeed both) escaped. But I haven’t found any record of this.

Huge kudos to anyone who can find evidence that Pierre Keff escaped from prison, because despite my best efforts I’ve basically run out of runway here. 🙁

Mary Celestine

One last brief thing: because Debosnys talks of “Mrs Celestine”, I wondered whether ‘Celestine’ might have in fact been his previous wife’s surname rather than her first name. And a quick search of Ancestry revealed that in 1870 there was indeed a Mary Celestine (age 30, born in Pennsylvania) working as a teacher in Philadelphia Ward 27 District 89, and apparently living with lots of other teachers and children. Given that the lady at the top of the page seems to have a job title “Lady Superioress”, my guess is that this was a small Catholic boarding school.

So: might Mary Celestine have actually been a nun at an earlier stage in her life? After everything else I’ve found out today, that wouldn’t surprise me one little bit. Perhaps we shall see.

Apparently it’s Voynich Art History trivia weekend here at Cipher Mysteries. First up is this and this, both prints of Master E.S.’s “The Visitation” that I found recently:

Master ES (German, active ca. 1450–67) The Visitation, 15th century German
Engraving; sheet: 6 3/16 x 4 11/16 in. (15.7 x 12 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1922 (22.83.2)

Though classily executed, this is clearly (I think) in the same family as Diebold Lauber’s couples and the Voynich Manuscript Virgo roundel couple.

Ex Libris

I also stumbled upon this nice ex libris at the front of a book owned by Auxiliary Bishop Melchior Fattlin of Constance (1490-1548) (and show me a blogger who doesn’t get a guilty kick out of occasionally linking to catholic-hierarchy.org and I’ll show you a big fat liar):

While eerily reminding me of the Voynich Aries zodiac roundel, this also makes me wonder whether the surname “Fattlin” might have some goat- or sheep-related meaning etc.

Banderoles

The other thing I’m wondering about today is banderoles (aka “speech scrolls”). These started as ornate scrolls filled with text in drawings and paintings, more or less equivalent to modern speech bubbles (e.g. the former by the angel Gabriel, the latter by Garfield).

In the 15th century, these were a favourite of the Master of the Banderoles (active 1450-1475), who Wikipedia rather sniffily describes as a “crude” and “clumsy” copyist of Master E.S. and Rogier van der Weyden.

Here’s a much nicer example from Paris, BnF, lat. 11978, roughly 1450-1472:

Why am I interested in banderoles? Because I can’t see anything that better describes the lines of text spiralling out both from the inverted T-O map and the wolkenband on Voynich Manuscript f68v3.

Codicologically, my suspicion here is that the drawing f68v3 came from was itself derived from a French (specifically Parisian) original, but that that predecessor had only had the four seasons’ banderoles added. The extra four banderoles seem to have been added here as an additional construction layer. That is, I suspect that if you looked under a microscope at the boundaries where the extra four banderoles join on to the wolkenband, you would see the marks where the wolkenband was drawn but then erased to add in the extra four banderoles.

Having said that, I haven’t yet found a single fifteenth century astronomical drawing with banderole-style annotation. Perhaps this is something we should be looking for.

If a device could be constructed to reclaim the effort – by which I mean purely physical effort – put into constructing Voynich decryption non-theories, I reckon it could probably power Grimsby (population “88,243 in 2011”, according to Wikipedia) indefinitely. Add in the additional effort expended to construct ad hominems against people who are deemed to be opponents of said non-theories, and you could probably power Cleethorpes (population “nearly 40,000 in 2011”) too.

Sadly, such advanced energy-harvesting technology remains beyond even Silicon Valley’s greatest egos minds, so for now the best we can do is to throw some more theories onto the fire to keep us Northern Hemisphereans warm through the (oddly late) winter chill.

Ata Team Alberta

A four-year-long “family project” (the Ardiç family, i.e. Ahmet Ardiç, Alp Erkan Ardiç, Ozan Ardiç, etc) calling itself “Ata Team Alberta” (ATA) claims (in a YouTube video) that it “has deciphered and translated over 30% [of] the manuscript”, and has submitted “a formal paper of the philological study […] to an academic journal in John Hopkins University.”

The team claims that Voynichese is nothing more than a kind of “Turkic language”, written in a “poetic” style that often displays “phonemic orthography”: they mention f33 as being particularly “rhythmically matching”. Well… anyone who wants to have a look at what they’ve done can fast-forward to 5:02 in the video, which is where their tricksy character correspondence tables start to appear.

Incidentally, when mildly pressed by the Toronto Metro, Lisa Fagin Davis assessed Ata Team Alberta’s efforts as “one of the few solutions I’ve seen that is consistent, is repeatable, and results in sensical text”. Which is, of course, a somewhat peccable (if perhaps slightly maculate) opinion to be holding.

According to this news report, Ahmet is now flying to Turkey to consult with Old Turkic specialists (presumably because all the young specialists are busy). Perhaps he’ll have more to say when he returns.

Gerone Wright

According to Gerone Wright, “it was almost as if I believed in myself that if I studied this text long enough, I would actually know what it means“. And so here’s Gerone telling everyone in the world (via the magic of YouTube) how the Voynich Manuscript is all chemistry, stem cells, genetics, and stuff: and even how some of Q13’s diagrams illustrate ovaries, fallopian tubes and fibroids (etc). Almost, anyway:

The point of including this video here is not that it casts any obvious light on the Voynich Manuscript, but rather that (a) most broadly similar YouTube Voynich theory videos seem to have been done by confused men sitting on cheap sofas in badly-lit sitting rooms wearing only their tighty whities (and that’s not really something that has ‘shareable’ written all over it), and (b) unlike almost everyone in (a), at least Gerone seems to be vaguely aware that what is powering his particular decryption is not so much cryptologic or historical smarts as intense self-belief. Which alone is a rare insight to be blessed with.

Viktor V. Mykhaylov

After sixteen years of effort (yes, four times as much as those Ata Team Alberta wimps), Viktor Mykhaylov of New York has written a book about his Voynich decryption, entitled: Mystery of Senzar. And once again there’s a freshly-minted 2018-vintage YouTube video:

Sample translation of f1r: “Do you graze a goddess-cow? Where? Is this the former deity of the Sun?” And before long: “Have you born this goddess – Eye?”

Aye, indeed. Mykhaylov describes his decryption as follows:

The Manuscript was written in ancient forgotten Senzar language, like mix of Vedic Sanskrit and Devanagari, which was before them – Proto-language. The Manuscript was written in November-December 1417, in Vilnius, by Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Rus-Ukraine, Lithuania, Zhemaytia, Mlodovlakhia (Moldova), Gregory (Gavryil) Tsamblak (Samvlah), and his monks specially for the Queen of Bavaria and Bohemia Sophia, who was the wife of King Wenceslavs IV. This Manuscript was written because Queen Sophia considered herself a goddess Ra.

Metropolitan Samvlah by order of Grand Duke Vytautas, and King of Poland Jagiello, was the head of the largest delegation (about 300 participants) to the Cathedral in Constants. Among all participants were the ambassadors from Saladin – Ayyubid dynasty – An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub.

All of which may be oddly familiar to those who remember John Stojko (“Letters to God’s eye: The Voynich manuscript for the first time deciphered and translated into English”, 1978), who similarly proposed that Voynichese was some kind of proto-language from Ukraine. (I vaguely recall that Stojko lived and died in New York state as well, but I’m not 100% sure of this.) Incidentally, the “Cathedral in Constants” Mykhaylov is referring to here is actually the Council of Constance (1414-1418).

(And yes, I know that Saladin lived from 1137 to 1193. But let’s not bicker over mere details, OK?)

But then Mykhaylov goes and spoils it somewhat by skiing so far off-piste that nobody else can reach him:

Thanks to reading this Manuscript, I received the key to understanding and explaining the origin of all religions, and their names, that existed and now exist, the origin of all tribes and civilizations, and their names, those that existed and now exist, the origin of all languages that were used and that are used now on Earth. I will display all this information in my books, on which I am now working.

Oh well! 🙁

I thought I’d post up a quick thought that came to me just now while looking at Fribourg Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire Ms. L 309 (which is yet another volkskalender, naturally). There, the page for January (f2r) begins as follows (top left):

Here, underlined in green (by me), you can see the first two big feasts of the year – 1st January (“Circumcisio Domini”) and 6th January (“Epiphania Domini”). You can also see (beneath the green arrow) the famous “Cisiojanus” mnemonic, one syllable per day.

Cisiojanus

I first posted about “Cisiojanus” back in 2009, after Steve Herbelin had suggested that the circular diagram on Voynich Manuscript page f67r2 might possibly contain at least some of it in its text. What’s particularly interesting here is that while the usual version of the mnemonic begins…

  1. cí → circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision
  2. si → (continuation)
  3. o → (continuation)
  4. ján(a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  5. us(a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  6. ep → epiphanias, Epiphany
  7. í → (continuation)
  8. si → (null)
  9. bi → (null)

…what we see in Ms L 309 is subtly different…

  1. cí → circumcisio domini, the Feast of the Circumcision
  2. si → (continuation)
  3. o → (continuation)
  4. ján(a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  5. us(a reminder that this is the couplet for January)
  6. ep → epiphanias, Epiphany
  7. í → (continuation)
  8. er → erhard, short for St. Erhard of Regensburg (whose feast day is 8th January)
  9. hard → (continuation)

What seems to me to have happened here is that the Cisiojanus mnemonic had, in a previous version of the same calendar, been adapted for a south-western German audience. That is, the otherwise meaningless “si-bi” syllable pair in the original version had been replaced by “er-hard” to include the local saint’s name, so that his 8th January feast day would be remembered and celebrated in the couplet. And yet the scribe copying this particular manuscript didn’t seem to know who St Erhard was (he was an Irish missionary to Bavaria, who later became “auxiliary bishop of Ratisbon and possibly the abbot of Ebersheimmunstet Abbey“), because he miscopied the feast name as “Erhandi”. *sigh*

As background, the Fribourg description for Ms L 309 says that it came from “Sud-ouest de l’Allemagne“, and that the calendar section (starting on f2r) was “Très probablement du diocèse de Constance ou de Bâle; une main cursive du XVe s. a introduit dans les mois d’octobre et novembre des célébrations typiquement lausannoises (par exemple la dédicace de Lausanne au 20 oct. et S. Himier au 12 nov.).” So if this is correct, it would seem that we can loosely map the transmission path from this document from south-east Germany (where Regensburg is, in Bavaria) to south / south-west Germany, purely on the basis of the Cisiojanus adaptation.

Hence what I’m starting to think is that, zodiac crossbowmen aside, there may well be a large number of internal local features – e.g. local adaptations to the Cisiojanus mnemonic, along with local feasts and many others – that we could sensibly use to determine the transmission paths and relationships between Volkskalender B documents. It’ll need a little more consideration, for sure, but this could very easily be moving in the right kind of direction.

And finally… Voynich labels, perhaps?

Doubtless this has been suggested before (though a brief check revealed nothing)… but could it be that the Voynich zodiac labels actually hold nothing more than the syllables of a Cisiojanus mnemonic? If so, then as long as you have the right month – and the right local adaptation of the mnemonic, of course – a modern codebreaker might possibly be able to use the zodiac labels on that page as a “block paradigm” match (though you’d also need some good guesses about the correct order and direction of the circular rings of labels to follow).

For example: even though the Voynich Pisces zodiac page has “marc / mars” written over it, I suspect that the month accompanying it is in fact more likely (based on those places where Volkskalender B zodiac roundels accompany months) to be February. In which case, one version (given on the German Cisiojanus Wikipedia page) of the February Cisiojanus rhyme is:

brí pur blásus ag dór ¦ febru áp scolástica válent
júli cónjungé ¦ tunc pétrum mátthiam índe

Don’t say I don’t spoil you with good stuff. 🙂

Back in 2012, I got (briefly) excited by the hypothesis that the marginalia on f116v of the Voynich Manuscript might well have been added in the library of a monastery not too far from Lake Constance, inbetween Switzerland and Southern Germany (and not too far from Rudolf II’s Imperial Court at Prague, where the manuscript appears to have ended up).

And then a few days later I got excited all over again by the follow-on hypothesis that this Swiss library may have been part of a Franciscan monastery. If the “bearer” who brought the Voynich Manuscript to Rudolf’s court (and to whom Rudolf paid the wondrous sum of 400 ducats) was himself/herself a Franciscan friar/nun, that might help explain its attribution to Franciscan monk Roger Bacon.

It’s a plausible story, sure, though not necessarily a highly probable one for the moment. But all the same, this might possibly give us a good idea for a brand new kind of haystack to rake through…

Franciscan Monasteries in Switzerland

St. Francis famously exhorted his followers to study in ways whereby “the spirit of prayer and devotion was not extinguished”: which makes it likely that just about every Franciscan monastery and friary we could consider would contain a library of some sort.

Indeed, some Swiss Franciscan monasteries had very famous libraries: Schaffhausen had a chained library (“Kettenbibliothek”, if you want to search for “Kettenbuch” in German). Here’s what the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana later looked like (a little later) with all its chained books:

chained library

Chaining books actually freed them, by making them available to more people to study: so it’s entirely possible that the Voynich Manuscript had a chained wooden cover for part of its pre-Rudolfine life. Here’s what an individual Kettenbuch from 1484 looks like:-

kettenbuch-cropped

The Schaffhausen Ministerialbibliothek was (if I translate the nice German account of it here correctly) formed in 1540, manuscripts mainly from the Benedictine Allerheiligen (All Saints) monastery library, but also “eight manuscripts and six incunabula” from the Franciscan chained library (formed in 1509). Books (such as Erasmus’ Omnia Opera) were added from 1540 onwards.

How do we know this? Because of a library catalogue (“Chronik der Stadt und Landschaft Schaffhausen”) prepared by Johann Jakob Rüeger (1548-1606) in 1589, then updated in 1596, and apparently printed in 1884-1892 (it seems to have been partially converted into a database on ancestry.com, but I’m don’t have a subscription to that). You can see many individual pages in the extract of a modern book here (with a fair bit on the Schaffhausen Franciscan library on pp.45-47).

Here are some other Swiss Franciscan monasteries that had libraries:

* Fribourg Monastery. According to this page (with links to 13 digital copies of mss from there):-

The library contains about 35,000 volumes, 10,000 of which date from before 1900. The majority of the books can be accessed via a card catalog. The old library can be traced back to Guardian Friedrich von Amberg; 18 of his volumes have been preserved. During the monastery’s golden age in the 15th century, the superiors collected mainly sermon and study literature. The Franciscan Monastery was able to preserve its library on site; it contains 80 medieval and 100 post-medieval volumes of manuscripts (not catalogued), as well as 136 incunabula and 80 post-incunabula.

* Lindau island had a convent of the Third Order of St Francis: this survived the Protestant Reformation by converting to Protestantism.
* Konstanz
* Bellinzona
* Bremgarten (Aargau)
* Königfelden Abbey
* Wesemlin, Lucerne (has the Provinzarchiv der Schweizer Kapuziner, though presumably this was slightly later?)

…and doubtless a fair few others besides.

Clearly, this looks like it could be a substantial set of haystacks to be going through to find a single Voynichian needle. Is there anything out there that can help us?

A Swiss Needle Magnet?

It seems that there might be, in the form of the three-volume Handbuch der Historischen Buchbestände in der Schweitz that lists numerous ancient Swiss libraries, many of which have descriptions of historic catalogues of those libraries.

* Volume #1: Aargau Canton to Jura Canton
* Volume #2: “>Lucerne Canton to Thurgau Canton
* Volume #3: Uri Canton to Zürich Canton

Unfortunately, only volume #2 of this is currently online (I think, but please correct me if I’m wrong!); and many collections that might reasonably be listed are (according to the German Wikipedia page) absent. Moreover, lots of the interesting stuff is in journals such as Helvetia Franciscana that are not currently online, e.g.

* Schweizer, Christian: Kapuziner-Bibliotheken in der Deutschschweiz und Romandie–Bibliothekslandschaften eines Reform-Bettelordens seit dem 16. Jahrhundert in der Schweiz nördlich der Alpen. In: Helvetia Franciscana 30/1 (2001), S.63
* Mayer, Beda: Der Grundstock der Bibliothek des Klosters Wesemlin. In: Helvetia Franciscana 7 (1958), S.189
* Mayer, Bea: Kapuzinerkloster Freiburg, In: Die Kapuzinerklöster Vorderösterreichs. In: Helvetia Franciscana 12, 7. Heft (1976), S. 207-216.

…along with other journals such as Librarium which (thankfully) have been placed online, e.g.

* Kronenberger, Hildegard: Das Kapuzinerkloster Wesemlin in Luzern und seine Bibliothek. In: Librarium 9 (1966), S.2

And the bigger problem is this: because the Voynich Manuscript had without much doubt left its (probably monastic) library by (say) 1613 or so, what we actually would like is a list of pre-1613 Swiss Franciscan monastic inventories to have a look at, based on the small (but likely non-zero) likelihood that one of them might well list a reference to a book resembling the Voynich Manuscript. Yet this was (I think) not at all the challenge the Handbuch der Historischen Buchbestände in der Schweitz was set up to meet at all.

But… are there any of those old inventories from Franciscan monasteries still in existence all? Personally, my head’s still spinning from trying to take in all this stuff, to the point that I’m still a very long way from being able to tell. But perhaps Cipher Mysteries readers will fare better than me (even one would be nice)… good luck!

The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 9. Andreae’s Two Journeys

At a four-hundred-year historical remove, such a hypothesis would normally stand no real chance at all of being testable. However, Andreae was not only a dramatist and a bibliophile, but also a prolific writer who made notes constantly: so we are helped significantly in this by the Latin account he left behind of his life and his travels. There is a scan of a later (printed) edition downloadable here:-
http://archive.org/details/ioannisvalentin00andrgoog

It describes two journeys Andreae took not long before 1611, the time-frame of particular interest to us:

(1) In 1607, having been dismissed from university following a misjudged prank, he travelled to Strasbourg (some 90 kilometres west of Tübingen). Strasbourg was a town with a famous printing history, and was to be where the first (German) edition of Andreae’s book “The Chymical Wedding” would be printed in 1616. From there he went (without much doubt northwards up the Rhine) to Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Mainz, before looping back down to Lauingen (near Augsburg) and back to Tübingen.

(2) From 1608-1610, he was employed as a personal tutor to two young Tübingen noblemen. As such, when plague (I believe) hit Tübingen in 1610, he and his two students hiked south to Ulm, Biberach an der Riß, Constance, Schaffhausen, Berne, Fribourg (in Switzerland), Lausanne, and then Lake Geneva, before returning via Lyons, Paris, Zurich and Basel.

Switzerland had numerous monastic libraries that were dissolved during the Swiss Protestant Revolution, leading to many rare items being sold by book-dealers. I once read a story online about how a book from the chained library in Schaffhausen’s Franciscan monastery was found in someone’s house (and then quickly sold) in the 1590s. However, the same strewing of books happened in Constance and elsewhere.

As a dedicated bibliophile (his own library contained 3000 books, while his friend Christoph Besold’s library contained 6000 books), Andreae’s first call in any given town would almost certainly have been the local book-dealer. This is also the same route that many books ‘liberated’ from monastic libraries took to reach an Emperor.

Of course, the evidence to prove 100% that Andreae saw the Voynich simply isn’t there. But what I think the preceding does prove is that there is a good chance that the man and the book came very close to each other as they each crossed Switzerland.

The Secret History of the Rosicrucians (c) 2012, 2015 Nick Pelling.
1. Introduction
2. The Three Texts
3. Dating The Fama And The Confessio
4. The Fama’s First Draft
5. So… What Was The Point Of It All?
6. ‘Book M’
7. Another Mysterious Manuscript
8. Stories From The Margins
9. Andreae’s Two Journeys
10. The Limits Of Evidence

The Secret History of the Rosicrucians – 8. Stories From The Margins

Though the Voynich Manuscript was clearly made in the fifteenth century, its historical provenance only goes back as far as the court of Rudolf II. We can tell this because the name of Rudolf’s Imperial Distiller – “Jacobij à Tepenecz” – has been erased from the manuscript’s front page (though this is still visible under UV light).

Johannes Marcus Marci also noted in his 1665 letter that (in Philip Neal’s translation):

Doctor Raphael, the Czech language tutor of King Ferdinand III as they both then were, once told me that the said book belonged to Emperor Rudolph and that he presented 600 ducats to the messenger who brought him the book.

At that time, 600 ducats would have been a large sum of money to be paying for a book that could not be read. (The issue of how to price such a thing dogged both of the antiquarian booksellers who ended up owning it in the 20th century).

It therefore does seem very likely that the Voynich Manuscript first surfaced during Rudolf II’s reign as Holy Roman Emperor. However, extensive research by many people (most notably René Zandbergen) over many years has failed to uncover even a single further piece of evidence attesting to the manuscript’s presumed presence at Rudolf’s Imperial Court.

The most promising approach yet taken was to go through the correspondence of Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600, Rudolf’s Imperial Astronomer) for mentions of anything sounding broadly like the Voynich Manuscript at the Imperial Court. Sadly, nothing emerged from the effort. The only weak inference that can genuinely be drawn from this absence of findings is that the Voynich Manuscript probably arrived at court fairly late in Rudolf’s rule (say, after 1600).

Note also that Rudolf died in 1612, though his brother Matthias had previously imprisoned him in his own castle in Prague in March 1611, marking the actual end of his rule. So March 1611 is arguably the latest date when Rudolf could sensibly have acquired it.

Yet when the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum was radiocarbon-dated in 2009 by the University of Arizona, the final calculated value was 1428 ± 17 years. (I should briefly add that that I have argued that technical problems with one of the four samples taken may mean that this date range is much narrower than it should be).

We therefore have a roughly 150-year gap between the Voynich Manuscript’s likely construction date and its reappearance at Rudolf’s Imperial Court. With no external evidence to work with, we have to rely on what we can infer from the various writing layers added by later owners (i.e. on top of the construction layers of the original document).

For example, there is strong evidence that the Voynich had at least two German-speaking owners – for as Philip Neal has pointed out, the two German-like emendations in the marginalia are in quite different dialects. Additionally, the early-looking “augst” month-name in the Occitan-like zodiac hand suggests a yet further owner whose language was made up of elements of both German and Toulousian Occitan, perhaps in Savoy or South-West Switzerland.

Moreover, the closest match for the Voynich Manuscript’s highly unusual quire numbering scheme was found by Thomas Sauvaget in 2012, in the top margin of f176r of Cod. Sang. 839 (at St Gallen); and then again in a 1467 music book by Hugo Spechtshart from Esslingen.

All of which would seem to imply that the Voynich’s physical trajectory passed from Northern Italy through Savoy to Switzerland, around Lake Constance, and finally to the Imperial Court Prague, perhaps via a bookseller.

Given that Tübingen is a mere 90 kms north of Lake Constance, this points to an intriguing hypothesis: that Andreae and/or his fellow Rosicrucian authors might have seen the Voynich Manuscript in Switzerland while on its way to Prague…

The Secret History of the Rosicrucians (c) 2012, 2015 Nick Pelling.
1. Introduction
2. The Three Texts
3. Dating The Fama And The Confessio
4. The Fama’s First Draft
5. So… What Was The Point Of It All?
6. ‘Book M’
7. Another Mysterious Manuscript
8. Stories From The Margins
9. Andreae’s Two Journeys
10. The Limits Of Evidence

While recently looking into the ‘pm9’ that Thomas Sauvaget found on Cod Sang 839 & trying to understand its relation with Cod Sang 840 and Cod Sang 841, I emailed St Gallen’s manuscript cataloguer Philipp Lenz for a little more information.

Interestingly, his opinion is “that this kind of quire numbering is [not] as extraordinary as you think” and though he unfortunately did not “have the time to look for specific examples of identical quire numbering“, he just happened to have a manuscript on his desk with the same kind of numbering in its text: Cod Sang 688.

Even though Cod Sang 688 has not been fully digitized, Prisca Brülisauer at the St Gallen library hen very kindly emailed me through PDF scans of them: Cod Sang 688 p.174 and Cod Sang 688 p.175.

What did I learn from this? Overall, I get the impression of a good scribe writing fast, thinking and abbreviating to fit the text inside two fairly narrow columns. Given that, I’m pretty sure the scribe isn’t abbreviating the Roman ordinals in a consistent manner or system: though we do (exactly as Philipp Lenz points out) see ‘4t9’ and ‘6t9’, the remainder are abbreviated in a fairly arbitrary manner.

What is also interesting to me is that the tension between Roman numbers and Arabic digits comes out in other ways, such as the ‘iiij’ on p.174 that the scribe has quickly clarified with a 15th century ‘4’ immediately above it. Perhaps Thomas Sauvaget and Philip Neal will have their own comments on these pages too! 🙂

Just so you know, Scherrer’s 1875 St Gallen catalogue dates it to “min. v. J. 1430 […] geschrieben von Fridolin Vischer in Mollis” – Mollis is a Swiss town in the Canton of Glarus, unsurprisingly, not too far from St Gallen. Cod Sang 688 is also linked with Cod Sang 686 and Cod Sang 687.

Oh, and if you’re wondering if there might be a Franciscan connection in all this 🙂 , Cod Sang 686 contains:-

S. 264-265: Epistola lectoris ord. fr. min. Friburg. ad. plebanos in Schoenowe et in Tottenowe de baptismo pueri in utero et Responsum de poenitentia publica. It. Epistola parochi ad abbatem S. Trudberti pro absolutione poenitentis.

The Franciscan Order of Friars Minor in Fribourg did indeed have a library. Bert Roest’s Franciscan library bibliography lists:

Renaud Adam, ‘Peter Falck (ca. 1468-1519) et ses livres: retour sur une passion’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 56 (2006), 253-272.[info on Capuchin library of Fribourg, Switzerland]

Pascal Ladner, ‘Zur Bedeutung der mittelalterlichen Bibliothek des Franziskanerklosters in Freiburg’, in: Zur geistigen Welt der Franziskanerim 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. Die Bibliothek des Franziskanerklosters in Freiburg/Schweiz, ed. Ruedi Imbach & Ernst Tremp, Scrinium Friburgense, 6 (Freiburg/Schweiz, 1995), 11-24.

Romain Jurot, ‘Die Inkunabeln des Franziskanerklosters in Freiburg/Schweiz’,Freiburger Geschichtsblätter 81 (2004),133-217.

Just so you know! 😉