Earlier this year, I proposed that the VMs might possibly have brought by Guillaume Pellicier from Venice to Guillaume Rondelet in Montpellier, and listed a short bibliography of titles that would be worth consulting to check this out. A few days ago, I found one of them on the Internet:

Correspondance politique de Guillaume Pellicier, ambassadeur de France à Venise 1540-1542, publiée sous les auspices de la Commission des archives diplomatiques par Alexandre Tausserat-Radel (1899).

Usefully, pp.700-704 of this contain an (admittedly fairly terse) inventory of Pellicier’s personal library of 332 books. However, only one of these sounds even remotely like a candidate for the VMs:-

Hospitalières de Montpellier, Fonds de l’Hôpital général, B. lU; copie.
323. Liber de astronomia., gr., script.,continens lib. XX

Unfortunately, Pellicier seems amply Greek-savvy not to have misdescribed the VMs as a “greek” text, so this seems rather like a dead end. Oh well!

pp.710-721 contains the text “Vita Guillelmi Pellicier, episcopi Monspeliensis, ad virum eruditissimum Bernardum Monfalconiuiu, Benedictinum“, which includes a little bit about Pellicier’s book-buying on p.713 (penultimate paragraph).

As an aside, it’s also possible that had Rondelet acquired the VMs by other means, a quite different fate might have befallen it. According to this 2006 aricle on Clusius (p.95):- 

Rondelet himself became very worried after the arrest of Pellicier, and according to Joubert, secretly burned those books in his own private library which he thought might land him in trouble with religious inquisitors.

All of which defensive biblioclasm brings to my mind the underground “Bibliotek” memorial in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, located exactly where the infamous Nazi book burnings began – this was nicely evoked near the end of Alan Cumming’s recent BBC Four documentary on the film Cabaret. The plaque reads: “Where books are burned in the end people will burn.”

Voynich researchers often laugh about “dain daiin”, a curious text pattern that often crops up in the Voynich Manuscript’s strange text. But I’ve just noticed an (arguably) even stranger pattern on lines 20 and 21 of page f42r:-

shol chol shoky okol sho chol shol chal
shol chol chol shol ctaiin shos odan

Here, it’s as though Voynichese itself is breaking down while trying to express some awkward low-level concept. If these two lines run on (as you’d expect), the mid-sequence runs “sho chol shol chal shol chol chol shol“. Sorry, but I really don’t buy into the idea that something as artificially structured as this could ever be some kind of repetitive pidgin or Hawaiian-style language (as those in the Voynich linguist camp would suggest): rather, these “words” more closelt resemble machine burblings, the output of some kind of proto-algorithmic process.

To my eyes, there’s a kind of elegant quasi-numerical symmetry to this, as if “sho[l] chol shol / chal / shol chol chol shol” is verbosely enciphering “X I X / or / X I I X“. Might these indeed be heavily enciphered Roman numerals?

I haven’t looked for this beyond f42r, but please leave a comment here if you find further examples elsewhere in the VMs! 🙂

Incidentally, the raw instance counts for chol /shol etc together with a rough percentage (showing how far against raw chance the combination occurs) are:-

• chol – 780 –> 250%
• chor – 501 –> 325%
• shol – 278 –> 216%
• shor – 152 –> 239%
• char – 156 –> 87.5%
• chal – 120 –> 70.6%
• shar –   47 –> 64.1%
• shal –   28 –> 40.1%

That is, if “ch” (5.66%) and “ol” (2.92%) sppeared randomly throughout the VMs, “chol” ought to appear roughly 311 times, whereas it actually appears 780 times – hence 780/311 = 250%. That is, the “chol / chor / shol / shor” set is 2.16x to 3.25x more likely than chance to appear, whereas the “chal / char / shal / shar” set are all less likely than chance to appear.

Having deconstructed the Beinecke’s own Voynich Manuscript page here the other day, I thought I ought to repeat the trick for my own Cipher Mysteries Voynich page, which was similarly in need of a bit of renovation (if not TLC). OK… so I actually rewrote it from scratch.

And now, here it is – Ladies & Gentlemen, for your delectation and delight I bring you… the most genuinely useful webpage on the Voynich Manuscript.

As normal, let me know what I’ve got wrong & I’ll fix it. 😉