“Love In Idleness” and the VMs…

by ⋅ 18 Comments

This week is “Shakespeare Week” at my son’s school: his year have been allocated A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so get to do their lessons in costume for a day. All of which yielded an ideal family opportunity to break out one of those tediously aspirational The-Bard-For-Kidz boxed sets and run through a heavily abridged version with him to see which character he’d like to play (i.e. which outfit we’d be rapidly constructing). And so Puck it was. 🙂

In business school terms, Oberon and Puck come across to me as an idealized (i.e. pragmatic yet dysfunctional) CEO and CTO pair, i.e. where Puck trolls around the wood trying to implement Oberon’s barking mad strategies. Specifically, Puck drops a tincture of “Love In Idleness” into the eyes of those asleep, confident in the knowledge that they will fall in love with the first person (or indeed donkey) they see when they wake up. With hilarious (and/or dramatic) consequences, etc.

Shakespeare is full of folksy herbal stuff like this: in fact, you don’t have to look very far these days to find academics who argue that the witches in Macbeth were talking about not literally about “eye of newt”, “toe of frog”, and “wool of bat”, but referentially to ‘eye’ plants (such as daisies!), buttercups, and holly leaves respectively, as a humorously winking aside to the audience. If correct, this pitches the witches closer to pantomime dames (such as Nana Knickerbocker, my son’s favourite) than to Cruella De Vil… but I digress!

gigglebiz_nanaknicker_150

Anyway, it turns out that ‘Love In Idleness’ is actually viola tricolor, the purple wild pansy (from which modern pansies were cultivated in the 19th century), A.K.A. ‘heartsease’ and hundreds of other names. Which, of course, is the cue for a picture of the plant on Voynich Manuscript page f9v, for which numerous people have suggested viola tricolor as a good match:-

f9v-viola-detail

As normal, the unsympathetically-applied blue paint looks as though it was added by a later owner’s young child: yet what is strange here is why three of the leaves seems to have had yellow paint added instead (which is what my annoying red arrows are pointing at). If you contrast-enhance the bottom-right flower, you can see this quite clearly:-

f9v-viola-closeup-enhanced

Why was this so? I don’t know, but perhaps that’s not a bad question to be asking. Is that enough random digressions for one day? Probably! 🙂

Rene Z’s bifolio surprise…

by ⋅ 91 Comments

Here’s something neat and slightly unexpected from long-time Voynich Manuscript researcher (and Voynich theory über-skeptic) Rene Zandbergen I think you’ll probably appreciate.

Arguably the least-discussed subject in the VMs is the set of tiny plant drawings in the two ‘pharma’ (pharmacological) sections, which somehow usually manage to fly beneath most researchers’ radars. Yet it has been known for decades that a good number of these plant drawings recapitulate or copy plant drawings in the main herbal sections (though as I recall these are more or less all Herbal A plants, please correct me if I’m wrong) – mapping these correspondences properly is an interesting challenge in its own right, but one to which nobody (as far as I can see) has really stepped up in the last decade.

And so it is that the general indifference to the pharma section forms the backdrop to Rene’s latest observation, which is this: that the pair of roots depicted on the two (now separated) halves of the Herbal A f18v-f23r bifolio recur side-by-side at the bottom of f102r2 in the pharma section. Here’s what the f18v-f23r bifolio would look like if you took out the bifolios currently bound between them (ignore the green mark in the middle from f22v, that’s just my lazy editing):-

f18v-f23r-bifolio-small

…and here’s what the pair of roots at the bottom of f102r2 look like. Somewhat familiar, eh?

f102r2-detail-small

Actually, I think it’s fair to say that this is extremely familar.

Now, it should be obvious that that you can (depending on how strong a piece of evidence you think the above amounts to, and what other observations you think are relevant) build all kinds of inferential chains on top of this. Cautious soul that he is, Rene concludes: “the colours of the two herbal pages were perhaps not applied when the bifolio was laying open like this“, basically because the two green paints are so different, which is similar to my observation in yesterday’s post about the two blues in Q9. He continues: “I don’t even think that the colours were applied by the same person who made the outline drawings, not deriving from these drawings though.”

Regardless, the pretty-much-unavoidable codicological starting point would seem to be that f18v and f23r originally sat side-by-side, and hence almost certainly sat at the centre of a herbal gathering / quire. It also seems likely that the two green paints were applied after other bifolios had been inserted between f18v and f23r (though not necessarily in their final binding order, or at the same time).

Furthermore, if you look at f23v (i.e. the verso side of f23r), you can see where the tails of the “39” quire number’s two long downstrokes have gone over from the bottom of f24v (the last page of the quire). This indicates to me that the f18v / f23r bifolio was already nested just inside the f17 / f24 bifolio when the quire numbers were added: and when combined with the new idea that f18v-f23r was probably the central bifolio of its original gathering, I think the implication is that (unless Q3 was originally composed of just two bifolios, which seems somewhat unlikely) Q3’s quire number was added after the bifolios had been reordered / scrambled / misordered. OK, it’s pretty much the same thing I argued in “The Curse” (pp.62-68): but it’s nice to see the same ideas coming out from a different angle.

q3-quire-mark

However, the range of green paints is a bit troubling. Even though I’ve just now looked at all the greens in Q3, I’m struggling to reconstruct a sensible codicological sequence: but perhaps the reason for this will turn out to be that there isn’t one to be found. Could it be that a significant amount of Herbal grouping data could be inferred simply by spectroscopically analysing the various green paints used, and looking for recto/verso matches? Glen Claston will doubtless argue otherwise, but the chances that a verso page and a recto page with precisely the same green paint were facing each other at the time they were painted must surely be pretty good, right?

So, Rene: another good find, cheers! 🙂

The balneological Panteo…

by ⋅ 18 Comments

A nice email arrived from Paul Ferguson, pinging me about Giovanni Antonio Panteo/Pantheo (i.e. not the Giovanni Agostino Panteo who wrote the Voarchadumia as mentioned here before) and his book on baths & spas that is listed in the STC as Annotationes ex trium dierum confabulationibus (printed in Venice 1505).  According to The Story of Verona (1902), this balneological Panteo was “an author of various works in Latin, and a friend of all the learned men of his day“. His book begins:-

Annotationes Ioannis Antonii Panthei Veronensis ex trium dierum confabulationibus ad Andream Bandam iurisconsultum: […] in quo quidem opere eruditus lector multa cognoscet: quae hactenus a doctis viris desiderata sunt. De thermis Caldarianis: quae in agro sunt Veronensi…

There are a fair few copies around: for example, in addition to its other textual artefacts 🙂 , the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds one. Back in 1998, Christies sold one for £1,495, but a cheaper option is to get a microfilm copy (from NYU’s Reel #491). 

Panteo’s original manuscript has been dated to 1488, and is held in Verona as MS 2072 (about a page down):-

Giovanni Antonio Panteo, De thermis Calarianis; Andrea Banda, Sylva Caldariana suo Pantheo. Manoscritto cartaceo, ultimo decennio del secolo XV; mm.300 x 200; ff.150; scrittura corsiva e littera antiqua, inchiostri bruno e rosa; iniziali miniate decorate, tre grandi disegni a penna colorati; legatura recente in cuoio. Ms. 2072

The description given there says that this is a humanistic manuscript, and that it contains three large coloured diagrams “of great interest for the attention and documentary realism with which they represented the characters, landscapes and architectural details: the unknown artist was probably aware of the stories of Saint Orsola that just in those years (between 1490 and 1495) Carpaccio painted in Venice.” However, it’s not clear if those three drawings were reproduced in the Venetian book version: or if they were, how well they transferred across.

Of course, the reason this is relevant to Cipher Mysteries is because of the baths depicted in the Voynich Manuscript: for if the vellum radiocarbon date (1404-1438) is a reliable indicator of when the VMs was written down, then we should arguably be looking closely at 15th century texts on balneology to try to place these into their historical context. This is because the 15th century saw the medicinal cult of the hot springs’ rise to prominence, as well as its fall – by 1500, people believed (according to Arnold Klebs’ book, which I discussed here) that spas and baths were the source of syphilis, causing interest in them to rapidly wane.

Unfortunately, the impression I get is that balneological historians tend not to look very hard at this period: far more effort seems to have been invested on stemmatic analysis of the many manuscripts of The Baths of Pozzuoli than on compiling synthetic accounts of the development arc of balneology in the 15th century. Please let me know of any books that buck this apparent trend!

Anyway, what is interesting is that there is actually a recent monograph on this balneological Panteo: “Prime ricerche su Giovanni Antonio Panteo” (2003 or 2006?) by Guglielmo Bottari, published in Messina by the Centro interdipartimentale di studi umanistici, ISBN 8887541272. 185 p., [2] c. di tav. : ill. ; 22 cm. Not many out there, but 40 euros buys you a copy here. Perhaps that might have more to say about this matter, and possibly even a copy of the coloured drawings in MS 2072 (which would be nice). 🙂

* * * * * *

Update: Paul Ferguson very kindly (and swiftly) passed on a link to a low-resolution scan of an illustration from Panteo’s manuscript featuring debating humanists, baths, and swallowtail merlons – thanks very much for that! 🙂

panteo-illustration

The Birth of the Illuminati…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

OK, even though there’s a whole lot of Voynich-related stuff backed up here, I felt I really had to pass on this link to an excellent page on the birth of the Illuminati conspiracy before I do anything else.

Though I already knew a little bit about nutty Adam Weishaupt and his Bavarian Order of the Illuminati (with all its speculative Freemasonesque ceremonies and faux classical code names for initiates), what I didn’t know before reading this is why anybody ever thought the Illuminati were smart enough to dress themselves, let alone control the destinies of nations. So really, where did that all come from? How did the Illuminati make the leap from effete pseudo-Masons to political puppetmasters?

Of course, the answer is that they never did: rather, the perception that they did sprang from a well-respected Scottish Professor of Natural Philosophy called John Robison. His sensational (1797) book “Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe” proposed that the big, unanswerable madnesses of the day (mainly the French Revolution, but plenty of other stuff besides) had all been deliberately orchestrated by a shadowy international cabal – the Illuminati. History was bunk: conspiracy was all: read all about it, then get over it. Thus The National Enquirer was born (in spirit, at least).

Yet behind the scenes, the real story playing out here was that since 1785 Robison had suffered from “a mysterious medical condition, a severe and painful spasm of the groin“, which “seemed to emanate from behind his testicles“: and so he dosed himself up heavily on opium, making him “vulnerable to melancholy, confusion and paranoia“. Good job he didn’t have the option of taking ecstasy, otherwise we’d all now think the French Revolution was some kind of over-enthusiastic love-in. 😉

Even so, the excitement over his whole account might well have waned just as quickly as it had waxed, had it not been for the multi-language publication soon afterwards of Jesuit Abbé Augustin de Barruel’s huge “Memoires pour Servir a l’Histoire de Jacobinisme”. Even more than Robison’s paranoid opus majus, Barruel’s slab-like book was like a relentless encyclopaedia of Illuminati denunciations: the French Revolution had been ‘foreseen, premeditated, plotted, planned, resolved; everything that happened was the result of the deepest wickedness, because everything was prepared and managed by men who alone held the threads of long-settled conspiracies’. Basically, Dan Brown on acid. 🙂

Actually, Barruel was furious at the way the Revolution had unceremoniously chucked the Jesuits out of France: and so the blackest irony of the whole story is that to channel this anger, he co-opted the form and substance of all the anti-Jesuit propaganda of the previous two centuries to slander the Illuminati (where Weishaupt himself was a former Jesuit)… thus the slandered became the slanderer.

In the end, the whole story boils down to a set of conspiracy Top Trumps cards to play with how you like: to me, the unavoidable conclusion is that Weishaupt, Robison and Barruel were all wildly delusional in different ways – but the bizarre Illuminati mythology meme that emerged from them only came about because their respective political, pharmacological and religious delusions somehow overlapped and intertwined, and in doing so took on a composite mad life of its own. Really, you couldn’t make it up, eh Dan? 🙂

Parchminers, scriveners, lymners, bookbinders, stationers…

by ⋅ 39 Comments

Since the recent Austrian Voynich Manuscript documentary (where the age of the VMs’ vellum was tested using radiocarbon dating), there has been debate about how vellum was created, stocked, sold, stored and used in and around the 15th century. The #1 issue is that if uncut pieces of vellum were routinely held for long periods (years? decades? centuries?), Voynich theories that require a later use dating still stand. Conversely, if you acknowledge that the manuscript itself displays many of the attributes of a copy, Voynich theories that require an earlier creation dating still stand. In which case, hard science would appear to have gone fairly soft on us.

However, simply relying on the possibility of storage is historically imprecise (if not actually woolly): we might well do better to try to understand the medieval parchment ‘ecology’ – that is, the set of trade, guild, and use behaviours associated with parchment – and see how parchment worked within (and for) the broader economy.

An accessible starting point for this is the first chapter of Cyprian Blagden’s (1960) “The stationers’ company: a history, 1403-1959”. According to this, the word stationarius (“stationer”) is mentioned in Oxford and Cambridge in the 13th century, and in London and York in the early 14th century, and denoted a permanent stall-holder (and so “stationary”, though we now spell it as “stationery”) rather than a hawker or peddler: the word quickly became associated with the book trade. The main people involved in 14th century book production in London were:-

  • parchminer – supplied the parchment
  • scrivener – wrote the text
  • lymner – added the illustrations
  • bookbinder – sewed gatherings into quires, and bound quires and covers into books
  • stationer – “arranged for the manufacture of a book to a customer’s order” (p.21)

Of course, these were the trades most directly affected by the introduction of printing: but interestingly, Blagden notes that “even parchminers and text-writers were only gradually squeezed out of the book business” (p.23), and that there was “no evidence of unemployment or of organized opposition” (p.23) to mechanical printing presses in England (unlike in Toulouse in 1477).

Some Voynich theorists have posited that the parchment trade suddenly collapsed, so that old vellum was readily available many years later. Well… it’s true that paper eventually killed the parchment trade, just as video eventually killed the traditional radio star: but the suggestions that circa 1450 parchminers ‘suddenly’ found themselves with warehouses full of uncut parchment that would subsequently sit around unsold for decades or centuries seems just plain wrong. As paper manufacturing slowly evolved (and as madly expensive incunabula gave way to quite expensive books, and as the later gradually became affordable), parchment usage did experience a slow decline – but I can’t see obvious evidence of any rapid ‘phase change’ or ‘parchment catastrophe event’.

For sure, we’re still waiting for the raw radiocarbon dating values so that we can validate the headline dating calculation (and make a sensible assessment of the various uncertainties that would be implicit in it) in a transparent kind of way. But if the date range is basically as claimed, I’m finding it grasp to glimpse the economic mechanism by which sufficient uncut parchment to make the VMs would be stored for even a decade, let alone 50, 100, or 150 years. The numbers don’t seem to add up… all in all, a tricky history challenge.

Coming soon to your TV: “The Voynich Channel”?

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Stephen Chrisomalis, “anthropologist, linguist, historian, and all-around numbers guy” (oh, and author of the soon-to-be-released “Numerical Notation: A Comparative History“), recently blogged about being interviewed as a talking head for a Canadian TV documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, a show that will apparently be hosted by none other than (as he delicately puts it) “WILLIAM FREAKIN’ SHATNER“.

Chrisomalis seems pretty well clued up on the structural properties of Voynichese (which is nice to see), but somehow omitted any mention of whether the documentary makers asked him about the VMs’ curious quire numbers (“abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals”, technically speaking), which appear to be a unique historical feature of the codex. I mean, he is Mr ‘History Of Numbers’, right? D’oh!

No more significant details about the documentary itself as yet… but given that documentary makers are excited enough to be wheeling in Captain Bloomin’ Kirk, it seems pretty safe to conclude that the Voynich Manuscript has suddenly become the lowest-hanging fruit upon the giant TV tree of enigmas. Expect a blizzard of TV Voynich documentaries to air around December 2010 – OK, perhaps not quite enough to make up an entire “Voynich Channel“, but a relatively cornucopic amount nonetheless. 🙂

Hmmm… the image of countless documentary teams being scrambled worldwide to film the VMs brings to my mind Nina Hagen’s #1 “99 Luftballons“, whose lyrics hinge on the idea that a set of toy balloons could trigger a nuclear armageddon. When does reaction become overreaction?

99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a super hero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

🙂

Bert Hall’s 1979 article…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

The ever-reliable BibliOdyssey blogger has posted up some more manuscript images, this time of Giovanni Fontana’s “Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber”, who you may remember mentioned on Cipher Mysteries and in The Curse (p.129 & p.141). Sadly, my favourite Fontana drawing (the rocket-powered rabbit on a skateboard, folio 37r) is missing from the set, but plenty of other splendid ones make up for that omission. 🙂

BibliOdyssey’s description of Fontana’s book included a reference to a great little paper by University of Toronto history professor Bert Hall to which I’ve been meaning to post a link here for a while: “Writings about Technology ca. 1400-ca. 1600 A.D. and their Cultural Implications” (1979). Hall outlines his own odyssey into the history of science 1400-1600, and how many of the technical / scientific manuscripts from the 15th century he examined effectively fell halfway between drawing and describing:-

When I first began to examine the documents I am discussing, I noticed that the more interested a particular text was in mechanics or architecture, the more likely it was to be profusely illustrated. As I studied them further, I realized that I was approaching them with the wrong presuppositions. I did not have in hand a group of illustrated texts, but rather a group of pictures with running commentaries.

Many of the “texts” (and that word is now to be understood as having quotation marks) from Kyeser to Ramelli, including Leonardo, are very nearly “picture-books” of technology with verbal comments. At times, the primacy of the picture is made unmistakably clear, as for example in a German work of the 1430’s [Vienna, Waffensammlung des kunsthistorischen Museums, MS P 5014] which dispenses with text altogether.

Note that MS P 5014 is also mentioned on p.166 of “The Enigmatic Water Wheel” by Bradford P. Blaine, as “a German manuscript of ca. 1437” that contains a drawing of a water-powered mill-arrangement to power a wooden pipe boring machine. Incidentally, the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna is famous for owning (then losing in 2003, and then regaining in 2006) Benvenuto Cellini’s exquisite salt cellar (valued at £36m) – “Waffensammlung” means Weaponry Collection, though I don’t know whether this MS reference is current.

Upcoming crypto talk by Lawren Smithline…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

Just in case you thought my recent list of upcoming talks was too UK-centric, here’s a nice one from the US…

A while back on Cipher Mysteries, I mentioned the 200-year old challenge ciphertext sent to Thomas Jefferson by UPenn maths professor Robert Patterson. But in a PhysOrg.com article (linked from the Daily Grail), there’s news of a lecture being given at the University of Oregon by Lawren Smithline (the person who finally cracked the transposition cipher) at 4pm Tuesday 26th January 2010, in Room 100 of Willamette Hall, 1371 E. 13th Ave., Eugene OR. Free admission.

(As always, please drop me a line if you happen to go along.)

Interesting history talks for early 2010…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Here are some upcoming events that Cipher Mysteries readers might well enjoy:-

  • A nice little bit of codicology to start with: Dr Kathryn M. Rudy, “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer” – 5.30pm, 20th January 2010, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Research Forum South Room. Free.

    “Medieval manuscripts carry signs of use and wear. The priest repeatedly kissed the canon page of the missal, leaving his greasy nose print behind. The devotee regularly touched the image of Mary out of veneration, but inadvertently rubbed the paint off the vellum. Medieval readers of books of hours and prayerbooks – the largest surviving category of late medieval books – often held their manuscripts open for reading by resting their thumbs at the lower corners of the opening. The more often that readers used a text, the darker the thumbprints became.”

  • A talk on the Antikythera Mechanism by Professor Mike Edmunds at the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society – 7pm, Wednesday 26th May 2010, MANDEC, Higher Cambridge Street, Manchester. Free (but “a donation is requested“).

    “What may well be the most extraordinary surviving artefact from the ancient Greek world was discovered just over a century ago. Found in 1900 in a wreck off the coast of the Mediterranean island of Antikythera, the device contains over thirty gear wheels and dates from around 100 B.C. Now known as the Antikythera Mechanism, it is an order of magnitude more complicated than any surviving mechanism from the following millennium, and there is no surviving precursor.”

  • A talk on ‘Cosmography and Cartography in the Renaissance: Their Relationship Revisited‘, by Dr Adam Mosley – 5pm, Thursday 15th April 2010, Warburg Institute, London. (Free)

    This is part of the ‘Maps and Society’ series of lectures at the Warburg: you may remember Adam Mosley from the review here of his “Bearing the Heavens” book on Tycho Brahe’s research community, so should be very interesting!

  • Professor Michael Farthing –  “Nicholas Culpeper: London’s first general practitioner?“ Gideon de Laune Lecture: 6pm, Wednesday 28th April 2010, Apothecaries Hall, London. Not sure whether or not this is only open to Society of Apothecaries members!

Some online herbals…

by ⋅ 7 Comments

Blogger of the visually bizarre BibliOdyssey has a number of nice online herbal scans you might well enjoy: each page has a brief description of the related manuscript and links to other places you can read more about the subject, while each picture links to its own Flickr page (which is handy).

  • ‘Arzneipflanzenbuch‘ [BSB Cod.icon. 26], Augsburg circa 1525. Herbal with lots of eccentric roots (sounds familiar, eh)
  • Hieronymous Braunschweig’s Distillerbuch, Strasburg circa 1500. Distillation manual, with plenty of alchemy, chemistry, botany, medicinal tips, etc.
  • Rembert Dodoens’ Cruydeboek, Belgium 1554. Hugely popular herbal built on Leonhard Fuchs’ equally famous herbal (but with many additions).
  • Tacuinum Sanitatis, 15th century copy owned by the Bibliotheque Rouen. An extremely nice-looking herbal book of medicine with herbal bits, exactly the kind of high quality artefact the Voynich Manuscript plainly isn’t.