A new VMs hypothesis…

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Halfway through Blunt and Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal”, a small lightbulb flickered briefly to life in my tired head. And it was to do with the VMs’ Occitan marginalia, something that has bugged me for years…

To my codicological eyes, the VMs appears to have had a busy time in the 15th century (with three or four inquisitive owners), a very quiet time for most of the 16th century, before an intense flurry of activity circa 1600 (when I think its folios were numbered and the “heavy paint” layer added), which is just about when its semi-documented life at the Rudolfine court begins.

But, like an alcoholic after a particularly mad binge, there’s a whole chunk of time missing in the middle – in fact, about a century’s worth. What happened then? Who owned it? How did the VMs apparently get from Occitania (probably Southern France) to Prague? And – most crucially of all – why did nobody think fit to mention such an intriguing object?

Now: even though in many ways I hate what I call “join-the-dots histories”, when evidence is completely lacking (as is the case here) you really don’t have much choice. Basically, pragmatic hypotheses (which historians need so as to be even remotely strategic about what they look to for evidence) have to come from somewhere: and so here is my (possibly new) suggestion for how the VMs travelled from Northern Italy to Southern France and onwards towards the Rudolfine Imperial court at Prague. It may be rubbish, but it is at least testable rubbish. 🙂

The dots I propose to conveniently join together in a line (along which the VMs might well have travelled) are:-

  • Guillaume Pellicier [or Pellissier, or Pelicier] (c. 1490–1568), Bishop of Montpellier, who was a French diplomat in Venice between 1539 and 1542, from where he brought back Greek, Hebrew and Syriac books. He was also interested in botany; was imprisoned for a while (it’s a long story…); and was a long-time patron and friend of….
  • Guillaume Rondelet [or Rondeletius] (1507-1566), who famously taught medicine and botany at the University of Montpellier, and wrote a definitive book on fish. Rondelet bequeathed his collection of manuscripts to his student…
  • Matthias [de] L’Obel (Lobelius), (1538-1616) a young (but soon to be famous) botanist; he travelled to the North, settling first in Holland, then England, then Holland, and then England again.

From there you can get the VMs to Prague in any number of ways, though many (of course) would like it to have been carried there by Dee & Kelley. While that last part is still in the realms of wishful thinking, I’m more interested here in working out if the Montpellier side of things might be true… but how?

Further reading-wise, here are the lowest hanging fruits of all: HTML text resources.

  • I’ve placed a copy of Rev. Charles Kingsley’s chapter 14 of “Health and Eduction” (1874) “Rondelet, The Huguenot Naturalist” on the Cipher Mysteries website here. By modern standards, the text is a bit cloying, let’s say: but an OK starting point nonetheless.
  • A relatively up-to-date summary of Guillaume Rondelet’s life (in French) is here.

For correspondence, all three men have stuff in various archives: Pellicier’s Venetian correspondence, Rondelet’s (mainly medical) letters were published in his “Opera Omnia Medica” (?), while L’Obel (from whose name we get “Lobelia”, incidentally) similarly has a few letters out there (his patron Baron Zouche, the 16th century apothecary Jean Mouton, etc).

As with most questions about French letters, Gallica has plenty of scans of creaky old books which may (or may not) be useful. Here are some quick links to start with, sorted by date (rather than by usefulness):-

  • 1554: Libri de piscibus marinis, in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt. Rondelet, Guillaume. Matthiam Bonhomme (Lugduni). Online here.
  • 1557: Histoire des plantes, en laquelle est contenue la description entière des herbes… non seulement de celles qui croissent en ce païs, mais aussi des autres estrangères qui viennent en usage de médecine. Dodoens, Rembert (1517-1585). Impr. de J. Loe (Anvers). Online here.
  • 1572: Illustrations de Commentaires de M. Pierre André Matthiole, médecin Senois, sur les six livres de Ped. Dioscoride anazarbeen de la matière médicinale. Mattioli, Pierandrea (1500-1577). Guillaume Rouillé (Lyon). Online here.
  • 1579: Nicolai Dortomanni Arnhemij Libri duo. De causis & effectibus thermarum belilucanarum. / Carmina G. Salmuth, C. Heintzelij, A. Widholtzii. Dortoman, Nicolas. Apud Carolum Pesnot (Lugduni). Online here.
  • 1581: Plantarum seu Stirpium icones. De Lobel, Matthias. C. Plantini (Antuerpiae). Online here.
  • 1841: Notes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de Lyon, 1483-1546. T. 1.  Péricaud, Antoine (1782-1867). impr. de Mougin-Rusand (Lyon). Online here.
  • 1877: Étude historique sur l’École de droit de Montpellier, 1160-1793, d’après les documents originaux,…  Germain, Alexandre-Charles. Boehm et fils (Montpellier). Online here.
  • 1903: Les ambassadeurs français permanents au XVIe siècle. Vindry, Fleury. H. Champion (Paris). Online here. (Text starts on page 5)
  • 1911-1914 Bullaire de l’église de Maguelone. [Volume 1]. Rouquette, Julien (1871-1927). Online here.

Books to look at for Guillaume Pellicier (note the various spellings!) would seem to be:-

  1. 1886: Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pelicier évêque de Montpellier, ambassadeur de François Ier à Venise. Henri Auguste Omont. A. Picard, Paris. In the Internet Archive here.
  2. 1891: Inventaire de la bibliotheque de Guillaume Pelicier, eveque de Montpellier (1529-1568). Henri Omont, in Revue des Bibliotheques, I, pp. 161-172. “Inv. used. Montpellier. Clergy, booklist printed”, according to this page on French wills. Gallica has apparently not yet scanned the 1891 edition (while the earliest currently on Google Books is 1897), which is a huge shame as this is the first place I’d like to look… oh well. 🙁
  3. 1899: Correspondance politique de Guillaume Pellicier: ambassadeur de France à Venise 1540-1542. Tausserat-Radel, Alexandre (1858-1921). Paris, F. Alcan.
  4. 1969: La diplomatique francaise vers le milieu du XVIe siecle, d’apres la correspondance de Guillaume Pellicier, eveque de Montpellier, ambassadeur de Francois Ier a Venise 1539-1542. J. Zeller. Slatkine Reprints.
  5. 1986: Les copistes de Guillaume Pellicier, éveque de Montpellier <1490-1567>. Annaclara Cataldi Palau, in Scriptorium 40, pp. 225-237. According to this website, “The author’s research on the Greek manuscripts in the library of Guillaume Pélicier, the French ambassador to Venice between 1539-42, relied heavily upon analysis of the watermarks to supplement other palaeographical and documentary evidence“
  6. 1986: Les vicissitudes de la collection de manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pellicier. Annaclara Cataldi Palau, in Scriptorium 40 (1), pp.32-53
  7. ????: Manoscritti greci della collezione di Guillaume Pellicier, Vescovo di Montpellier (ca. 1490-1568) : “Disiecta membra”. (I don’t know where it’s from, but ULRLS has a copy).

(Incidentally, Annaclara Cataldi Palau is a Professor at King’s College London, whose research interests are “Greek palaeography and history of book production“: so I presume that the last article was placed in the University of London Library system directly by her, in case you can’t find it anywhere else.)

Books which tend to get cited on Guillaume Rondelet are:-

  1. 1582: Vita Gulielmi Rondeletti, L. Joubert [Rondelet’s first biographer], in Opera Latina, 2 (Lyon, 1582), pp. 186-93. [Nancy Siraisi briefly discusses Joubert’s account in her “History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning” (2007), pp.126-127]
  2. 1865: Rondelet et ses Disciples ou la botanique à Montpellier au XVIe siècle. Discours prononcé dans la séance solennelle de rentrée des Facultés et de l’École supérieure de pharmacie de Montpellier, le 15 novembre 1865 par J.-E. Planchon, directeur de l’École de pharmacie. If you’re interested, there’s a copy on AbeBooks for a paltry £363.04: or you can go to the Natural History Museum’s library instead (which is what I plan to do). 🙂
  3. 1899: La botanique en provence au XVIe siecle, II, Pierre Pena et Mathias de Lobel. L. Legré (Marseilles).
  4. 1926: Un manuscrit médical du XVIe siècle, contenant principalement des œuvres de Guillaume Rondelet: Notes bibliographique et biographiques, Suzanne Solente (with E. Jeanselme and Dr. M. Lanselle), in Bulletin de la Societe Francaise d’histoire de la Medecine, 20. pp. 3-36
  5. 1936: Guillaume Rondelet, J. M. Oppenheimer, in Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 4, pp. 817-34.
  6. 1965: Guillaume Rondelet, C. Dulieu, in Clio medica, 1, pp. 89-111.

I’ll return to Lobelius another day (I’m still reeling from all the above). As it is, I’ve already jeopardised my membership of the Bloggers Union by including too much useful information in a single post. :-O

Review of “The Illustrated Herbal”…

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It’s an oldie, but a goodie: first published in 1979, Wilfrid Blunt and Sandra Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal” (particularly the revised 1994 edition) is a must-buy first read for any Voynich Manuscript would-be herbal decipherer – if only to make plain by how much its herbal pages differ from other contemporary herbals.

Of course, Blunt has sneaked a few pictures from the VMs in there (pp. 88-91); and though he cites Alfred Werner’s (1963) observation that one page in the water section is like “a plumber’s dream“, he quickly cautions that “…’Heath Robinson nightmare’ might seem more appropriate” (which is fair enough). But as for commenting on the plants themselves, Blunt is content to pass them by at some speed, in much the same way that Eric Sams fled from the ciphertext. You’ll just have to find your own answers, I guess.

What did I learn? A new way of looking at plants began to emerge from around 1380, which a handful of artists were plugged into – but which most plainly weren’t. For example, even Giotto wasn’t au fait with it (though he “painted birds and other animals with a tolerable naturalism, [he] still made trees like outsize herbs”, p.57), but Leonardo (circa 1500) certainly was (and I would add Van Eyck too). As far as herbals go, if you look at Rinio’s Liber de Simplicibus (1419) [which John Ruskin adored], or even Serapion the Younger’s Herbolario volgare (better known as the Carrara herbal, MS Egerton 2020) (1390-1400), I think there’s something ‘graphic’ about the rendering, that we might today recognise as a “draughtsman-like aesthetic”. But far, far beneath the soaring flights of these stunning, draw-what-you-see masterpieces, the pedestrian copy-what-you-know world of medieval herbals stumbled on regardless.

Voynich Manuscript f17r and f17v, side-by-side
Medieval and modern, on the front and back of the same folio!

In the big scheme of things, I would say that what we see in the Voynich herbal pages is annoying because it fails to fit in either of these two easy pigeonholes – neither the high flyers nor the low achievers. And so the VMs actually has a chasm on each side: and because it contains occasional flashes of both medievalism and modernity, it – doubly annoyingly – lets people read either (or indeed both!) of those into what they see. Yet in order for those flashes of modernity to be present at all, it has to postdate 1380, and must have had an author who was at least aware of both levels: while its overall drawing style matches 15th century stylistic conventions far, far more closely than it does 16th century ones. But there you go.

Blunt and Raphael’s work is built on two lifetimes’ worth of herbal scholarship and reflection: and, nicely, is happy to adopt a light tone when it suits the needs of the passage. This seems to happen particularly when quoting Charles Singer from the 1920s, such as Singer’s description of the Leiden manuscript as “a futile work, with its unrecognisable figures and incomprehensible vocabulary” (the VMs isn’t completely alone, then).

At the end of reading “The Illustrated Herbal”, I came away with my head buzzing with stuff, but none it about where the VMs’ herbals came from – Blunt’s Wittgensteinian “if you can’t say anything useful, stay silent” position on the VMs’ plants has a lot to commend it. No, what I was most inspired by was his discussion of the transmission of ideas about herbals during the 16th century: but I’ll have to return to that in another post (shortly)…

Review of “The Mercurial Emperor”…

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Peter Marshall’s (2006) “The Mercurial Emperor: The Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague” takes a sideways look at everyone’s favourite mad Holy Roman Emperor, by using those around him as a kind of slightly wonky mirror. The choice of who makes the cut is a bit arbitrary in places: John Dee (who never came close to gaining Rudolf’s favour) gets rather more coverage than I think justified, however much some Voynicheros happen to like him. 😉

By using the Imperial court to cast light on the man in the middle, it is reminiscent (and perhaps consciously so?) of John Christanson’s “On Tycho’s Island”, which does much the same thing for Tycho Brahe (who features here too, of course).

Even though Marshall does sometimes feel compelled to thicken up his text with Wikipedificatory asides, overall you can’t help but enjoy the ride – it’s a basically good book. What you end up with is a feeling for Rudolf’s overall character arc, from his ultra-stiff Spanish upbringing, through the alchemical / astronomical / allegorical golden years, to the slow-motion showdown with his bluff soldier brother Matthias (which Rudolf lost, if you didn’t already know).

For me, the biggest takeaway I got from the book came from the raking light it cast onto Rudolf’s relationship with art. His collection of paintings was not, as Warburgian historians formerly liked to believe, imbued with Neoplatonist symbolic power, their artists digging deep into the cultural psyche to tease out deeper archetypes from myth and legend, which only heroic modern ‘symbologists’ (*ack* *spit*) could ever decode. Oh, no: it’s far worse than that; and perhaps worse even than Charles Hope’s art historical cynicism would put it. I think Rudolf’s all-star proto-Mannerist painters spent their time constructing his Imperial Internet pr0n browser: the vision that is conjured up for me is of them feverishly thumbing through their emblem books (etc) finding stories that prominently featured young women, and then ‘artfully’ arranging them on the canvas for maximum fleshly exposure. Shame on me for even thinking it, but ultimately Rudolf’s gallery reeks more of “Beavis and Butthead Win The Lotto” than anything else. Uh huh, huh. *sigh*

But I digress. 🙂

Marshall’s book did have one complete laugh-out-loud moment for me, which made my wife chuckle too (no mean feat). The engraving on p.151 depicts Nostradamus in a magic circle, conjuring up a procession of future kings of France for Catherine de Medicis in a “magic mirror” (not much to do with Rudolf II, but a fun picture all the same). I looked at it and thought – that’s not a mirror, that’s a bloody big plasma TV he’s got there. But perhaps you disagree?

Nostradamus showing off his widescreen TV to the Queen of France

Enjoy! 😉

Anaphoric clock in Kansas City…

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As I mentioned recently, I’m working my way through James E. Morrison’s book “The Astrolabe”: seeing so many astrolabes at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford was good fun, but I still want to get all the maths and celestial mechanics straight in my head – I’m never really happy until I get Art and Science in some kind of balance. Curiously, I worked for a camera company (/*you know who you are*/) not so long ago where stereographic projection (as used in astrolabes) is central to its business: isn’t it strange by how little maths has changed over the millennia?

But before the astrolabe, there was a set of objects known as anaphoric clocks (as mentioned by Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book IX, Chap. 8, 8-15): the Tower of the Winds in Athens is generally believed to have had one of these. These are deceptively simple objects, comprising a wire framework top layer (known as a “spider”) to represent the hours of the day, and a backlayer containing both a stereographic projection of the night sky and a circle of peg holes marking the sun’s position as it moves through the zodiacal year.  (All basically as per Morrison, “The Astrolabe”, pp. 33-34).

And now Kansas City is host to a brand new (and really quite funky) anaphoric clock, thanks to local artist Laura DeAngelis (with help from Peregrine Honig), as well as the advice and calculations of Jim “Mr Astrolabe” Morrison himself. If you happen to be in Kansas City unexpectedly (for example, if you click your heels, Dorothy), why not have a look for yourself? The anaphoric clock is in the Oppenstein Brothers Memorial Park, and I think it’s just fabulous (but I would, wouldn’t I?)

“Mappamundi” novel, cover announced…

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Cover for Christopher Harris\' forthcoming Voynich-themed novel \I’ve had a nice email from Chris Harris, whose upcoming Voynich Manuscript-themed novel “Mappamundi” (which I mentioned here in June) is due for publication on 29th January 2009. Published by Dedalus, it’s a non-Byzantine sequel to his earlier Byzantine trilogy (if that makes sense): a teeny weeny version of the cover is on the right here.

Which reminds me… an article at the back of this month’s History Today (yes, that issue) made a rather striking claim: that historical fiction steps in to fill the gap left by historians, who have become unable to answer the basic question “What happened?” because they are so hogtied by postmodern notions of relative truth. Hmmm… as with all great lies, there’s a kernel of truth in there. My own take is that there are now so many types of history – archival, social, urban, intellectual, cultural, moral, religious, Marxist, propagandist, technological, political, codicological, forensic, etc – each with their own types of problematic, enquiry, methodology and even truth, that it can be hard to blend them together to tell a complete story. And while it is true that historical fiction offers the hope of a reconstructed holistic history, so too does the best historical scholarship.

Ultimately, I think that history is like a shattered cup, whose shards offer historians multiple ways of piecing them back together: and that once in a while, with just a little luck, we might by doing so glimpse a hitherto unseen Grail, tentatively reconstructed through our persistence and industry. Perhaps this is the romance of History (whichever subfield of it you happen to subscribe to), where novelists dramatize not just the texture of historical events, but the process of historical discovery too – is the romance in the history, or in the historian?

Voynich miscellany, once again…

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Do you fancy a little personal journal with a front cover loosely inspired by the VMs (the plant at the top of page f18r, to be precise)? If you do, someone called “Black Pepper” has put her design on CafePress… just in case you have $14 to burn. Alternatively, here’s a Voynich Manuscript-themed screensaver from Amaranth Publishing for a mere $2.

And here’s Thomas Maska’s Avallaen font, inspired by Voynichese lettering: he made it for his conlang [constructed language], also called Avallaen, supposedly “spoken by approximately 35 million people on the northern end of Escerna, a massive volcanic continent in the N’ra Teoi (Great North Sea).” I quite like the way the digits are formed from gallows with different numbers of bars. Oh, and don’t forget, ägloinniyüvoih pōvlen üevs erüs.

Onwards to the fine arts: and I’d have liked to show you an image of Danielle Rante’s mixed-media drawing called “Voynich Secret History” here (this won the 2008 Ohio Arts Council Professional Award), but she didn’t return my email. Oh well!

And there was a 2005 piece similarly called “Voynich Secret History” (though this was a 4-5 minute film by artist Katherine Parker). Her interests include:” the redemption of kitsch, archetypes, and Märchen (German fairytales)“. Yes, I’d say most of the stuff that’s written on the VMs does read like almost-unredeemably-kitsch German fairytales, so perhaps she’s touching on a deeper truth here. 🙂  Her description of the film is that “Dormant plants, winter snow, steam, and drawings based on the Voynich Manuscript are metaphors for latent, hidden and lost knowledge“. All of which sounds rather pleasant, & perhaps one day I’ll see that too…

Enjoy! 🙂

John Dee events in 2008…

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Word just in from my friend Peter Nockolds, concerning some John Dee Anniversary events…

Magus John Dee died 400 years ago, either this year or next, and to mark this there are a series of events in Mortlake Parish Church where he was buried (although the grave isn’t marked). These begin with a talk tomorrow evening, Tuesday 23rd, at 8 by Benjamin Woolley. Author of ‘The Queen’s Conjourer, the Art and Magic of Dr Dee’. The talk is entitled ‘Cosmos in a Cottage’, and is an attempt to reconstruct something [like] Dee’s house in Mortlake, drawing on a variety of sources.  […]

The Church, St Mary the Virgin, is in Mortlake High Street, about five minutes walk from Mortlake Station (Network South East) and is on the 209 bus route from Hammersmith. Admission is £7 with proceeds to the Mortlake Tower Appeal

And according to http://www.wherecanwego.com/Search/ViewEvent.aspx?e=215740 , there are three more Dee-themed lectures on the Tuesdays following:-

  • Sept 30th – Elizabeth Callingham Garton – The man who invented the British Empire
  • Oct 7th – Robin Cousins – In the Footsteps of John Dee
  • Oct 14th – Nicholas Dakin – The Confidential Life of Doctor Dee

“Tickets are £7 or £25 for 4 in advance – ring Anne Reeves 020 8876 6616”

A nice day out in Oxford…

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TVE, the Spanish national TV company, wanted to interview me about my History Today telescope article. For visual props, they requested a 17th century telescope and a copy of Girolamo Sirtori’s book – fair enough. A quick search of COPAC revealed eight copies across the UK: but what jumped out at me from the list was that there was a copy at the Museum of the History of Science (“the MHS”) in Oxford, which I knew had a fair few telescopes – and so I suggested the interview be carried out there. Plus, I’d wanted to go there for years and years. 🙂

All of which is how I ended up having a nice day out in Oxford. Though the MHS has all kinds of historical scientific gubbins (particularly the basement, which vividly brought to mind Thomas Dolby and Magnus Pyke singing “all my tubes and wires and careful notes / and antiquated notions“), you can’t help but notice its collection is dominated by astrolabes, astrolabes, and more astrolabes. Did I mention they have a beautiful spherical astrolabe too? You get the basic idea: it’s Astrolabe City.

After the interview, I went downstairs to the MHS library to look at their copy of Sirtori’s book for myself (I’d only ever seen scans of it). I also played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with Gemma Wright, the Head Librarian: I showed her my copy of Jim Morrison’s very cool book “The Astrolabe”, while she showed me the MHS’ copy of John Lamprey’s 2007 English edition of Stoeffler’s Elucidatio (also very neat, a snip at $50 + S&H). Errrm… I’m not quite sure why I’m making myself look like “ubergeek of the week” here, so perhaps I ought to stop…

As an aside: though the steak & ale pie in The White Horse (the pub opposite the MHS) was OK, their Dark Star “Sunburst” was epic – just like being in a beer festival (only without a covers band playing “Mustang Sally” too loud, thank goodness). Just in case you ever happen to be thirsty in Oxford! 😉

Edith Sherwood’s Voynich plants…

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A few years ago, people Googling for “Voynich” started to see a sponsored “AdWord” link on the right hand side provocatively posing the question of whether there might be some link between the Voynich Manuscript and Leonardo da Vinci, and pointing them to www.edithsherwood.com.

Naturally, I pointed out that this hypothesis was a load of rubbish, primarily because Leonardo was left-handed, and the VMs was written by someone right-handed – a pretty good prima facie reason to dismiss the claim. Edith also relied on a particularly partial reading of the month names in the zodiac section (one of them when mirrored looks a bit like “lionardo”): but failed to notice not only that they all read like Occitan month names (which there is absolutely no reason to think that a young Florentine like Leonardo would have used), but also that they were plainly written by someone else.

Still, unlike the majority of Voynich theory proponents out there, she is at least looking in the right century and (I believe) in the right physical milieu (and possibly even the right town, in a roundabout kind of way): and for that I am grateful. No, don’t be like that: I really am. honestly.

Since then, Edith’s website has had some ups and downs (of which being hacked by some kind of Russan spam harvester and having its mail inboxes overflow were probably some of the downs). But over the last month, she has returned to it and begun to fill it with many additional pages detailing her and her daughter’s thoughts on actual plants apparently matching the drawings in the VMs. They refer to some of Mr Dana Scott’s botanical identifications (but repeatedly refer to him as a her, which Dana doubtless finds irritating), though largely propose their own matches.

Unfortunately, at such a large historical distance, finding botanical equivalents is a hugely hazardous way of trying to move forward: and the secondary claim to have localized the VMs’ production to Italy and/or the Mediterranean from the resulting set of highly contentious / non-obvious plants is simply not methodologically sound, however they try to spin it.

Though many people have taken this same tack over the years, that doesn’t make it a sound methodology: in fact, the consistent lack of progress achieved by it is very probably a clear indicator that doing so is in fact brutally unsound.

What is going on? I think that what we see expressed in the herbal drawings is not metaphor (a symbolic equivalent to or conceptual parallel of an original object) so much as metonymy (where component parts stand in for the whole). One classic example linguists give of this is the way Cockney geezers call a car a motor (or, in its gloriously glottal-stopperish glory, a “mo’er”), where a key component (“the motor”) is sufficient to stand in for the whole (“the car”). You may also recall this from Alexei Sayle’s “‘‘allo John go’ a new mo’er… / I keep tropical fish / in my underpants” [etc etc]).

Despite all that, the possibility remains that Edith and Erica might have managed to make some good observations. As I’m not a botanist, all I can say is that I think their reading of colours in the VMs is once again codicologically naive (because there seem to be plenty of reasons to conclude that most of the strong “heavy” colours in the VMs were not added by the original author): which would unfortunately seem to point in the opposite direction.