Search Results: Voynich

It’s well-known that the distribution of Voynichese page-initial (and indeed paragraph-initial) glyphs is, unlike the rest of the text, strongly dominated by gallows characters. But what is less widely known is that something really fishy is going on with the distribution of all the other line-initial glyphs too.

As far as I know, nobody has yet given this behaviour the in-depth attention it properly deserves, which is why I think it would make a good subject for a paper. Though it perhaps needs a catchier name than “Line-Initial But Not Paragraph-Initial Glyph” (LIBNPIG) statistics (so please feel free to come up with a better name or acronym).

Though you might reasonably ask: isn’t this just another side of the whole constellation of LAAFU (“line as a functional unit”) behaviours?

Well, yes and no. “LAAFU” is a shorthand mainly used by some Voynich researchers to signal their despair at the unknowableness of why certain glyphs seem to ‘prefer’ different positions within a line. So yes, LIBNPIG behaviour is a kind of LAAFU behaviour: but no, that doesn’t mean it can’t be understood. (Or at least carefully quantified and tortured on a statistical rack.)

LIBNPIG Observations

How do we know that something funky is going on with LIBNPIGs?

LIBNPIG ‘tells’ are perhaps most visible in Q20 (Quire #20). For example, even though EVA daiin is common in Currier A pages (you may recall that it’s one of the ‘Big Three’ A-words – daiin / chol / chor), it’s far less common in Currier B pages: however, when it does occur in Q20, it is frequently in a LIBNPIG position. In fact, this is true of all word-initial EVA d- words in Q20, which you can see here (scroll to the bottom).

Similarly, if you look at EVA s- words (ignoring sh- words, which is a particularly annoying EVA artifact, *sigh*) in Q20, you should also see that these appear far more often line-initially than they should.

Is that all? No. The same is true of EVA y- words in Q20 too, but this pattern is additionally true in Herbal B pages. Note that this also seems to be true of some Herbal A pages, but EVA y- words in Herbal A appear to work quite differently to my eyes. (Though I’d advise looking for yourself, & form your own opinion.)

Curiously, even though paragraph-initial words so strongly favour gallows characters, LIBNPIG words seem to abhor gallows characters, a behaviour which is in itself quite suggestive and/or mysterious.

Conversely, if you go looking for LIBNPIG EVA ch- and sh- words, I believe you’re far more likely to instead find them clustering at the second word on a line. Note that Emma May Smith (with Marco Ponzi) looked at this back in 2017, though more from a word-based perspective (even though the first two words on a line in Q20 are often fairly odd-looking). The concern for me is more that these behaviours mean that Voynich word dictionaries (and indeed all word analyses) based on line-initial words are unreliable.

So, what is going on in Q20 (in particular) that is making LIBNPIG words prefer d- / s- / y- so much? I guess this really is the starting point of the paper I’m suggesting here.

Vertical keys?

The notion that the first column of glyphs might have some kind of special meaning is far from new. In fact, there is evidence suggesting this in the manuscript itself on page f66r, where you can clearly see a column of glyphs (though admittedly there is also a column of freestanding words to its left). This is a curious item to find in a manuscript.

But might all (or, at least, many) pages of Voynichese text contain vertical keys inserted as a single line-initial glyph at the start of lines? Philip Neal speculated about this possibility many years ago, causing me to (occasionally) refer to these as “vertical Neal keys”. A vertical key might conceivably be used for many things, such as inserting an (enciphered) page title, or even a folio number or page number: though it’s easy to argue that the relatively narrow range of glyphs we see appearing here probably rule this out.

In “The Curse of the Voynich” (2006), I speculated instead that a glyph inserted at the start of a line might form part of some kind of transposition cipher. The suggestion there was that a second glyph (say, a k-gallows) might act as a token to use the glyph (or some function of that glyph) inserted at the start of the same line. This would be a fairly simple crypto ‘hack’ that would make codebreakers’ jobs difficult.

There are many other possible accounts one can devise. For example, it’s possible that the first glyph on a non-paragraph-initial might function as a kind of catchword, to link the end of one line with the start of the next. Alternatively, it might be telling the reader how to join the text at the end of the preceding line with the text at the start of the current line. Or it might have some kind of crypto token function (e.g. selecting a dictionary). Or it might be a numbering scheme. Or it might be a marker for some funky line transposition scheme. Or a null. Or… one of a hundred other things (if not more).

If all these speculations seem somewhat ungrounded, it’s almost certainly because the basic groundwork to build a sensible discussion of LIBNPIG behaviour upon hasn’t yet been done. Which is your job. 🙂

LIBNPIG Groundwork

What needs doing? For a start, you’d need to build up a solid statistical comparison of paragraph-initial glyphs and LIBNPIG glyphs, along with paragraph-second glyphs and LSBNPS (line-second-but-not-paragraph-second) glyphs, for paragraph text in each of Herbal A, Herbal B, Q13 and Q20 (I would suggest).

With those results in hand, there are some basic hypotheses you might want to try testing:

• Is there any statistical correlation between a LIBNPIG glyph and the glyph immediately following it? Oddly, it seems that nobody has yet tried to test this – yet if there isn’t (as visually seems to be the case), then I think it’s safe to say that something is provably wrong with all naive text readings.
• Is there a correlation between a LIBNPIG glyph and the previous line’s end-glyph?
• Is there a correlation between a LIBNPIG glyph and the following word’s start glyph?
• Do paragraph-initial second words behave the same way as LIBNPIG second words?
• Might LIBNPIG glyphs simply be nulls? Might they be chosen just to look nice? Or do they have some genuinely meaningful content?
• How does all this work for paragraph text in each of the major sections of the Voynich Manuscript? e.g. Herbal A, Herbal B, Q13, Q20
• (I’m sure you can devise plenty of your own hypotheses here!)

Ultimately, what we would like to know is what LIBNPIG behaviours tell us about how the start of Voynichese lines have to be parsed – for if there is no statistical correlation between a line-initial glyph and the glyph following it, this cannot be a language behaviour.

Even though we can all see numerous LAAFU behaviours, it seems that few Voynich researchers have yet accepted them solidly enough to affect the way they actually think about Voynichese. But perhaps it is time that this changed: and perhaps LIBNPIG will be the thing that causes them to change how they think.

Here’s a second paper suggestion for the virtual Voynich conference being held later this year: this focuses on creatively visualising the differences between Currier A and Currier B.

A vs B, what?

“Currier A” and “Currier B” are the names Voynich researchers use to denote the main two categories of Voynichese text, in honour of Prescott Currier, the WWII American codebreaker who first made the distinction between the two visible in the 1970s.

Currier himself called the two types of Voynichese “A” and “B”, and described them as “languages”, even though he was aware some people might well misinterpret the term. (Spoiler alert: yes, many people did.) He didn’t do this with a specific theory about the manuscript’s text: it’s essentially an observation that the text on different pages work in very different ways.

Crucially, he identified a series of Voynich glyph groupings that appeared in one “language” but not the other: thanks to the availability of transcriptions, further research in the half century since has identified numerous other patterns and textual behaviours that Currier himself would agree are A/B “tells”.

Interesting vs Insightful

But… this is kind of missing the point of what Voynich researchers should be trying to do. The observation that A and B differ is certainly interesting, but it’s not really insightful: by which I mean the fact that there is a difference doesn’t cast much of a light on what kind of difference that difference is.

For example, if A and B are (say) dialects of the same underlying language (as many people simply believe without proof – though to be fair, the two do share many, many features), then we should really be able to find a way to map between the two. Yet when I tried to do this, I had no obvious luck.

Similarly, if A and B are expressions of entirely different (plaintext) languages, the two should really not have so many glyph structures in common. Yet they plainly do.

Complicating things further is the fact that A and B themselves are simplications of a much more nuanced position. Rene Zandbergen has suggested that there seem to be a number of intermediate stages between “pure” A and “pure” B, which has been taken by some as evidence that the Voynich writing system “evolved” over time. Glen Claston (Tim Rayhel) was adamant that he could largely reconstruct the order of the pages based on the development of the writing system (basically, as it morphed from A to B).

Others have suggested yet more nuanced accounts: for example, I proposed in “The Curse of the Voynich” (2006) that part of the Voynichese writing system might well use a “verbose cipher” mechanism, where groups of glyphs (such as EVA ol / or / al / or / aiin / qo / ee / eee / etc) encipher single letters in the plaintext. This would imply that many of the glyph structures shared between A & B are simply artifacts of what cryptologists call the “covertext”: and hence if we want to look at the differences between A and B in a meaningful way, we would have to specifically look beneath the covertext – something which I suspect few Voynich researchers have traditionally done.

Types of Account

As a result, the A/B division sits atop many types of account for the nature of what A and B share, e.g.

• a shared language
• a shared linguistic heritage
• a shared verbose cipher, etc

It also rest upon many different accounts of what A and B ultimately are, e.g.:

• two related lost / private languages
• a single evolving orthography wrapped around a lost / private language
• a single evolving language
• a single evolving shorthand / cipher system, etc

The difficulty with all of these accounts is that they are often held more for ideological or quasi-religious reasons (i.e. as points of faith, or as assumed start-points) than as “strong hypotheses weakly held”. The uncomfortable truth is that, as far as I know, nobody has yet tried to map out the chains of logical argumentation that move forwards from observational evidence / data to these accounts. Researchers almost always move in the reverse direction, i.e. from account to the evidence, rather than from evidence to explanation.

And when the primary mode of debate is arguing backwards, nobody normally gets anywhere. This seems to be a long-standing difficulty with cipher mysteries (particularly when treasure hunters get involved).

EVA as a Research Template

If Voynich researchers are so heavily invested in a given type of account (e.g. Baxian linguistic accounts, autocopying accounts, etc), how can we ever make progress? Fortunately, we do have a workable template in the success of EVA.

The problem researchers faced was that, historically, different transcriptions of the Voynich were built on very specific readings of Voynichese: the transcriber’s assumptions about how Voynichese worked became necessarily embedded in their transcription. If you were then trying to work with that transcription but disagreed with the transcriber’s assumptions, it would be very frustrating indeed.

EVA was instead designed as a stroke-based alphabet, to try to capture what was on the page without first imposing a heavy-duty model of how it ought to work on top of it. Though EVA too had problems (some more annoying than others), it provided a great way for researchers to collaborate about Voynichese despite their ideological differences about how the Voynichese strokes should be parsed.

With the A/B division, the key component that seems to be missing is a collaborative way of talking about the functional differences between A and B. And so I think the challenge boils down to this: how can we talk about the functional differences between Currier A and Currier B while remaining account-neutral?

Visualising the Differences

To my mind, the primary thing that seems to be missing is a way of visualising the functional differences between A and B. Various types of visualisation strategies suggest themselves:

• Contact tables (e.g. which glyph follows which other glyph), both for normal parsing styles and for verbose parsing groupings – this is a centuries-old codebreaking hack
• Model dramatisation (e.g. internal word structure model diagrams, showing the transition probabilities between parsed glyphs or parsed groups of glyphs)
• Category dramatisation (e.g. highlighting text according to its “A-ness” or its “B-ness”)

My suspicion has long been that ‘raw’ glyph contact tables will probably not prove very helpful: this is because these would not show any difference between “qo-” contacts and “o-” contacts (because they both seem like “o-” to contact tables). So even if you don’t “buy in” to a full-on verbose cipher layer, I expect you would need some kind of glyph pre-grouping for contact tables to not get lost in the noise.

You can use whatever visualisation strategies / techniques you like: but bear in mind the kind of things we would collectively like to take away from this visualisation:

• How can someone who doesn’t grasp all the nuances of Voynichese ‘get’ A-ness and B-ness?
• How do A-ness and B-ness “flow” into each other / evolve?
• Are there sections of B that are still basically A?
• How similar are “common section A” pages to “common section B” pages?
• Is there any relationship between A-ness / B-ness and the different scribal hands? etc

Problems to Overcome

There are a number of technical hurdles that need jumping over before you can design a proper analysis:

• Possibilism
• Normalising A vs B
• First glyphs on lines
• Working with spaces
• Corpus choice

Historically, too much argumentation has gone into “possibilism”, i.e. considering a glyph pattern to be “shared” because it appears at least once in both A and B: but if a given pattern occurs (say) ten times more often in B than A, then the fact that it appears at all in A would be particularly weak evidence that it is sharing the same thing in both A and B. In fact, I’m sure that there are plenty of statistical disparities between A and B to work with: so it would be unwise to limit any study purely to features that appear in one but not the other.

There is also a problem with normalising A text with B text. Even though there seems to be a significant band of common ground between the two, a small number of high-frequency common words might be distorting the overall statistics, e.g. EVA daiin / chol / chor in A pages and EVA qokey / qokeey / qol in B pages. I suspect that these (or groups similar to them) would need to be removed (or their effect reduced) in order to normalise the two sets of statistics to better identify their common ground.

Note that I am deeply suspicious of statistics that rely on the first glyph of each line. For example, even though EVA daiin appears in both A and B pages, there are some B pages where it appears primarily as the first word on different lines (e.g. f103v, f108v, f113v, all in Q20). So I think there is good reason to suspect that the first letter of all lines is (in some not-yet-properly-defined way) unreliable and should not be used to contribute to overall statistics. (Dealing properly with that would require a paper on its own… to be covered in a separate post).

Working with spaces (specifically half-spaces) is a problem: because of ambiguities in the text (which may be deliberate, from scribal arbitrariness, from transcriber arbitrariness, etc), Voynich transcription is far from an exact science. My suggested mitigation would be to avoid working with sections that have uncertain spacing and labels.

Finally: because of labelese, astro labels and pharma labels, corpus choice is also problematic. Personally, I would recommend limiting analysis of A pages to Herbal A only, and B pages to Q13 and Q20 (and preferably keeping those separate). There is probably as much to be learnt from analysing the differences between Q13’s B text and Q20’s B text as from the net differences between A and B.

If you hadn’t already heard, a Voynich Manuscript-themed virtual conference has recently been announced for 30th November to 1st December 2022: and its organisers have put out a call for papers.

Me, I have at least twenty ideas for topics, all of which I think could/should/would move the state of research forward. But my plan is actually to write up as many of them as I can in posts here, and let people freely take them to develop as their own, or (my preference) to form impromptu collaborations (via the comments section here, or via a thread on voynich.ninja, whatever works for you) to jointly pitch to the organisers.

I’ll start with what I think is the most obvious topic: DNA gathering analysis. I’ll explain how this works…

Quires vs Gatherings

Though some people like to oppose it, by 2022 Voynich researchers really should have fully accepted the idea that many of the Voynich’s bifolios have, over the centuries, ended up in a different nesting/facing order to their original nesting/facing order. There is so much supporting evidence that points towards this, not least of which is the arbitrary & confused interleaving of Herbal A and Herbal B bifolios.

Consequently, there is essentially zero doubt that the Voynich Manuscript is not in its original ‘alpha’ state. Moreover, good codicological evidence suggests that the original alpha state was not (bound) quires but instead (unbound) gatherings, because the quire numbering seems to have been added after an intermediate shuffling stage.

The big codicological challenge, then, is to work out how bifolios were originally grouped together (into gatherings), and how bifolios within each gathering were nested – i.e. the original ‘alpha’ state of the Voynich Manuscript.

Yet without being able to decrypt its text, we have only secondary clues to work with, such as tiny (and often contested) contact transfers. And because many of the (heavy) paint contact transfers (such as the heavy blue colour) seem to have happened much later in the manuscript’s lifetime, many of the contact transfers probably don’t tell us anything about the original state of the manuscript.

In Chapter 4 “Jumbled Jigsaws” (pp.51-71) of my (2006) book “The Curse of the Voynich”, I did my best to use a whole range of types of clue to reconstruct parts of the original folio nesting/facing order. Even so, this was always an uphill struggle, simply because we collectively had no properly solid physical forensic evidence to move this forward in what you might consider a systematic way.

From Gatherings to Vellum Sheets

However, a completely different way of looking at a manuscript is purely in terms of its material production: how were the pages in a gathering made up?

If a vellum manuscript is not a palimpsest (i.e. using previously-used vellum that has been scraped clean), it would typically have started as a large vellum sheet, which would then have been folded down and cut with a knife or shears or early scissors into the desired form. Given the unusual foldout super-wide folios we see in the Voynich Manuscript, I suspect there is almost no chance that these sheets were pre-cut.

As such, the normal process (e.g. for book-like sections) would have been to fold a sheet in half, then in half again, and then cut along the edges (leaving the gutter fold edge intact) to form a small eight-page gathering. This is almost certainly what happened when the Voynich Manuscript was made, i.e. it was built up over time using a series of eight-page gatherings, each from a single sheet.

It’s also important to remember that vellum was never cheap (and it took most of the fifteenth century for the price of paper to become anything less than a luxury item too). Hence even larger fold-out sheets would have not been immune from this financial pressure: so where possible, what remained of a vellum sheet after a foldout had been removed would typically have had to have been used as a bifolio.

The reason this is important is that where bifolios of a gathering were formed from a single sheet of vellum, they would all necessarily share the same DNA. And so this is where the science-y bit comes in.

Enter the DNA Dragon

Essentially, if you can take a DNA swab (and who in the world hasn’t now done this?) of each of the Voynich Manuscript’s bifolios, you should be able to match them together. There is then a very high probability that these matches would – in almost all cases – tell you what the original gatherings were.

The collection procedure appears – from this 2017 New Scientist article – to be painfully simple: identify the least handled (and text-free and paint-free) parts of each bifolio, and use a rubber eraser to take a small amount of DNA from the surface. Other researchers (most famously Timothy Stinson) are trying to build up horizontal macro-collections of medieval vellum DNA: but because the Voynich Manuscript is not (yet) readable, a micro-collection of the DNA in its bifolios would offer a very different analytical ‘turn’.

Though DNA has famously been used for many types of forensic analysis (there are entire television channels devoted to this), determining the original gathering order of an enciphered manuscript is not yet – as far as I know – one of them. But it could be!

Finally: once the gatherings have been matched, close examination (typically microscopic) to determine the hair / flesh side of each bifolio should help further reduce the possible number of facing permutations within each gathering. Remember, the normal practice throughout the history of vellum was that a folded gathering or quire will almost always end up in a flesh-facing-flesh and skin-facing-skin state.

Why is this Important?

As far as understanding the codicology of an otherwise unreadable document goes, DNA gathering matching would be hugely important: it would give clarity on the construction sequence of every single section of the Voynich Manuscript. This, in turn, would cast a revealing light on contentious issues of document construction and sectioning that have bedeviled researchers for years.

This would include not only the relationship of Herbal A bifolios to Herbal B bifolios (a debate going at least back to Prescott Currier), but also the more modern debates about Q13A vs Q13B, Q20A vs Q20B, and the relationship between Herbal A and the various Pharma A pages.

The biggest winners from reconstructing the manuscript’s alpha state would be researchers looking to find meaning and structure in the text. As it is, they’re trying to infer patterns from a document that appears to have been arbitrarily shuffled multiple times in its history. Along these lines, there’s a chance we might be able to use this to uncover a block-level match between a section and an external (unencrypted) text, which is something I have long proposed as a possible way in to the cipher system.

There is also a strong likelihood that folio numbers might well be encrypted (e.g. in the top line of text) – historically, many complicated cipher systems have been decrypted by first identifying their underlying number system, so this too is an entirely possible direct outcome of this kind of research. It would additionally make sense for anyone trying to understand the different scribal hands to be able to situate those contributions relative to the manuscript’s alpha state rather than to its final (omega) state.

In those few sections where we have already been able to reconstruct the manuscript’s alpha state (e.g. Q9), we have uncovered additional symmetries and patterns that were not obviously visible in the shuffled state. Imagine how much more we would be able to uncover if we could reconstruct the alpha state of the entire manuscript!

So… Why Haven’t You Done This Already, Nick?

I’ve been trying for years, really I have. And through that time this basic proposal has received a ton of negativity and push-back from otherwise smart people (who I think really should have known better).

But the times they are (always) a-changing, so maybe it’s now the right time for someone else completely to try knocking at broadly this same door. And if they do, perhaps they’ll find it already open and waiting for them. A moment’s thought should highlight that there’s certainly a great deal – in fact, an almost uniquely large amount – of new, basic stuff to be learnt about the Voynich Manuscript’s construction here.

Yet at the same I would caution that if you look at the list of proposed topic areas for the conference, this kind of physical analysis doesn’t really fit the organisers’ submission model at all. After first submitting a 1-2-page abstract by 30th June 2022, allowing only five weeks after acceptance (20th July 2022) to write a 5-9 page paper seems a bit hasty and superficial, as if the organisers aren’t actually expecting anybody to submit anything particularly worthwhile. But perhaps they have their specific reasons, what do I know?

(But then again, maybe you’d be best off phoning your aunt who works at the History Channel and get an in with a TV documentary-making company. If film-makers can squeeze nine series out of “The Curse of Oak Island”, you’d have thought they’d be all over this like a rash, right? Right?)

And yes, you have me to blame for it.

So here goes…

It all starts in Frascati…

Today’s story begins in the Voynich Centenary Conference back in 2012, with – as I recall – a bunch of Voynicheros crowding around my Jean-Claude Gawsewitch Voynich Manuscript photo-facsimile. With the pages turned to some of the Q13A (medical) pages, Rene Zandbergen remarked that some of the pictures there looked eerily like slightly-disguised medical drawings.

The two diagrams I specifically remember Rene mentioning that day were (a) the “intestines” one:

And… (b) well, this piece of the male anatomy (which nobody can deny has a tube running through it):

Rene himself didn’t claim to have been the first to point out these similarities, but rather said that he had heard them mentioned many years before. As normal, a diligent trawl of the old Voynich mailing list archives would probably reveal more lineage (but it’s not hugely important for the purposes of this post).

Also, as I’m sure many (if not most) Cipher Mysteries readers know, countless Voynich theories have been constructed around the notion that Q13 (Quire 13) has some kind of connection with the female reproductive system, in particular this gloriously mad drawing, with all its oddly misplaced frilly wolkenbanden:

A few pages further on, there’s also a curious pulsating blue brain thing (I have no idea what this means, and I don’t know if anyone has yet looked for visual parallels for it in 15th century manuscripts, perhaps it’s the kind of thing Koen Gheuens would like to take a stab at?):

But you mentioned “testicles”, right?

I did. And so (at last) here’s the specific Voynich image from Q13 that I’m wondering about.

Putting aside the whole ‘nymph’ issue to one side, what – you might reasonably ask – has got into me to wonder if this specific veiled drawing somehow represents a gigantic pair of testicles?

Benedetto Reguardati

A few posts back, I gave a list of authors who wrote small works on thermal baths in the first half (or so) of the fifteenth century. One of those authors was Benedetto Reguardati, a doctor who spent many years attending to the newly-installed Sforza Duke’s family in Milan (and environs).

He wrote a number of small treatises, including a pharmacopoeia that can be found in Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS Ricc. 818. This commences (on fol. 2r) with:

Emplastrum optimum ad inflationem testiculorum…

i.e. “the best plaster [normally a paste or salve applied to the skin on a piece of linen or leather] for swollen testicles…“

Sadly, I don’t have access to a transcript of Reguardati’s pharmacopeia (merely its incipit), so don’t know how this continues. Obviously this would be a prime research target for anyone who wants to chase after 15th century recipes for enlarged testicles.

Medieval Writings on Testicles

(By which I don’t actually mean tattoos.)

Though I haven’t yet stumbled upon a literature specifically covering medieval recipes for testicular complaints, it would perhaps be unwise to assume such a niche thing doesn’t exist. Even a fairly cursory search revealed that most testicle-related medical mishaps and scenarios were written about in the Middle Ages.

For example, Arnald of Villanova wrote about testicular hernias; Thorndike (1936) mentions a medical “Experimenta” found in “fols. gr, col. i-gv, col. 2 (older numbering, 1-7) of Vatic. Palat. lat. 1174, a vellum ms of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century with alternating red and blue initials“, that has a section name “Ad tumorem testiculorum”. Similarly, Simon of Genoa discussed testicular abscesses in his medical dictionary.

John Bradmore also included several brief sections on testicular complaints in his “Philomena” (see Lang 1998):

• 70v 40 de Apostematibus Testiculorum
• 71r 41 de Apostemate hernia Aquosa testiculorum
• 72r 42 de Apostemate hernia ventosa testiculorum
• 73r 43 de (Apostemate) hernia Carnosa et varicosa testiculorum
• 73r 44 De Apostemate hernia humorali testiculorum

Also: p.196 of this book mentions Bodleian MS Selden B35 (circa 1465) as listing “Ydicelidos” = “i. habens testiculos inflatos”, with a footnote mentioning Simon of Genoa’s “Clavis Sanationis”: “Hydrocelici vel ut grecus ydrokilis, dicuntur qui aquam habent circa testiculos in oscum”.

So I think it should hardly be a surprise to find Reguardati writing about salves for swollen testicles. But it turns out that he was far from the only one.

Medieval Swollen Testicles

However, what did surprise me was that I was able to find a good number of different medieval recipes for swollen testicles.

Egritudines Tocius Corporis, written by a physician names Copho in the second half of the 11th century, includes the following section:

De inflatione testiculorum — Ad inflationem testiculorum sine materia, interiora labarum trita optime coquas, et ut comeduntur calida superponus; vel, quod melius est, galbanum in vino coque et cola et in colatura spongiam marinam diu bullias et superponas; vel ebuli seu sambuci summitates diu in vino bullias, et postea cum axungia teras, et hoc totum super testiculos ponas. Si autem maxima duricia sit in testiculis duas pelliculas incide et in tercia stamina pone, et tam diu teneat durice materia que duriciem operatur recedut.

According to Monica H. Green, four versions of the Trotula include an extra section “Ad inflatione testiculorum”:

• 34: Harley 3407
• 70: Digby 29
• 74: Wood empt. 15 (SC 8603)
• 80: New College, 171

I don’t have access to the full text of this section, but it begins:

Ad testiculos inflatos fomentum, accipe maluam, absinthium, uerbenam, bismaluam, cassillaginem, arthimesiam, caules.

13th century Portuguese physician Pedro Hispano’s (Petrus Hispanus) Liber de conservanda sanitate (book by Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira (1973), p.233) has a Chapter XXXV, “De inflatione testium”:

1. Si testes inflentur, farina fabarum distemperata cum suco ebuli et oleo communi statim inflationem soluit. Dyascorides.
2. Item idem faciunt folia ebuli uel parietarie torrefacta.
3. Item idem faciunt folia ebuli et sambuci. Hoc ego.
4. Item fimus caprinus cum uino solutus omnem tumerm soluit, Kyrannus.
5. Item folia et semen iusquiama trita cum uino et emplastrata omnem tumorem soluit. Macer.
6. Item betonica trita et cocta in uino et apposita dolorem et tumorem aufert testiculorum. Dyascorides.

(Note that da Rocha Pereira also includes a quite different version of that same basic chapter in a footnote.)

From Guillem de Béziers (fl. ~1300), we have another recipe “Contra inflationem testiculorum” (on. p.27):

Item. Contra inflationem testiculorum. Fiat primo subfumigium de aqua calida ad apertionem pororum et postea immittatur agrippa, deinde fiat emplastrum de fimo caprino et sepo arietino et thure, et ad ulti[mu]m minutionem vene sophene fac aperire interiori et sic multi curati sunt.

“Three Receptaria from Medieval England” (Hunt & Benskin) includes a couple of items:

• p.26: [207]: Uncore ad inflacionem testiculorum: Recipe malvam, artemisiam, jusquiamum, et caules veteres. Et si non potes habere hec omnia, accipoantur absinthium et malve tantum, et decoquantur et in illa decoctione epithimentur testiculi.
• p.27: [210]: Item paritoria frixa in patella et testiculis superposita removet inflationem testiculorum.

Thoughts, Nick?

Books on baths and medicine were often bound together, so suggesting that the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 might well contain both balneological and medical bifolios should cause no great tremors. And indeed the bifolios do – as Glen Claston pointed out many years ago – seem to be thematically divided between balneo and medical (in some way).

If you accept this is right, then the idea that a late medieval medical book like this might contain a short section on swollen testicles is surely not a huge stretch, given the number of different sources listed above that contain recipes or treatments for the same.

Might one of these recipes – or something very much like them – be the plaintext for some of the text on f83v? It’s a pretty good challenge, and definitely not a load of balls. 😉

As with just about all historical research, simply wanting to find things out isn’t enough: you really have to have a plan to guide you. And while I can see an awful lot of people who want to crack the Voynich Manuscript, I can’t currently see many who are trying to do so guided by anything that could be described as a plan.

Me and plans? We go a long way back. I’ve spent a long time trying to understand the Voynich’s drawings; a long time trying to understand its heavily structured writing; a long time trying to understand its codicology and development; a long time trying to find historical precedents (in terms of both visual and structural parallels); and a long time trying to reconstruct its path “from vellum to Prague“. But I think it’s fair to say that these different trees have all yielded small, stony fruit.

So it’s time for a new angle, a new direction of attack: this post describes my new plan that I’ve spent a few months figuring out. Make of it what you will (but wish me luck).

Quire 13 = Quire 13A + Quire 13B

When I first started looking for balneological parallels to the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (Quire 13) back in the early 2000s, I found nothing remotely resembling it. Q13’s mix of balneo plus strange tubing plus strange body-function pieces seemed a world away from the (generally plaintext, generally unremarkable) documents of the first half of the 15th century (which are often little more than Latin “Rules of the Baths”).

However, since 2006 my codicological understanding of what happened to Q13 (i.e. to leave it how we see it now) has come a long way. It’s not enough to grasp (as per my discussion in Curse 2006) that Q13’s bifolios ended up misnested (and this certainly happened early on, even before Q13’s 15th century quire number was added). Rather, to make sense of Q13, you have to see that it was originally formed from two separate gatherings – my late friend Glen Claston called these Q13A and Q13B – that were then shuffled together into a single oversized gathering, and then (mis-)bound into an oversized quire.

For Glen (actually Tim Rayhel), Q13A was the three “medical – biological – Galenic” bifolios, while Q13B comprised the two “Balneological” bifolios. You may disagree about the precise nesting Q13A had in its original ‘alpha’ state, but I think Q13B’s nesting order looks pretty rock solid, with f78v-f81r in the centre and f84-f75 (i.e. reversed relative to its position in Q13’s final ‘omega’ state) wrapped around it.

Ultimately, the huge takeaways from this for anyone searching for a balneological match are (a) the balneological section (in Q13B) is only half as big as you might otherwise think (i.e. Q13), (b) the source document for Q13B probably ‘travels’ with (i.e. “was typically copied alongside”) medical documents, and (c) it’s probably a ‘pure’ balneo text that we’re looking for.

Also: because we’re apparently missing a (folio-numbered) bifolio from Q13, it could well be that what we’re looking at with Q13B is only two thirds of a balneological ‘book’. However – and I think this is important – because we have an illustration that seems to run across a gathering’s centrefold, we can be reasonably sure that if so, we’re looking at the eight contiguous middle pages of a twelve-page document.

So we now have a lot more (and better) information about what we should be looking for in a balneological match (which we would hope to use as part of a known-plaintext attack on Q13B).

It should therefore be no surprise that my new plan is to search for a pre-1460 balneological source document where the central section matches the general structure of Q13B. I predict that this will be unillustrated, will not have been widely copied, and will typically be found bound alongside medical manuscripts.

I’m also expecting to have my search biased towards Northern Italian balneo sources (much as in 2006, I still suspect the Voynichese “4o” ligature was a Northern Italian palaeographic ‘tell’, one that was appropriated by numerous Northern Italian cipher keys 1440-1460), though I’ll initially cast my research net wider.

Constructing a Bibliography

Having said that, a key part of any historical research plan is working out an active bibliography (i.e. finding all the related scholarly works that have already done a significant part of the heavy digging), and then (somehow) getting access to them.

An excellent help in this regard proved to be the (open access) article “Le thermalisme médiéval et le gouvernement des corps : d’une recreatio corporis à une regula balnei ?” by Marilyn Nicoud, in Le thermalisme, by John Scheid, Marilyn Nicoud, Didier Boisseuil, et al. (pp.79-104).

Nicoud highlights numerous different sources on thermal baths, including a letter by Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolo Niccoli: and many different attitudes towards them, ranging from sexual indignation to Pope Pius II’s long sojourns to thermal baths in the 1460s, to mentions of thermal baths in the Datini correspondence (from the famous Merchant of Prato). [Interestingly, “The Duke and the Stars” by Monica Azzolini speaks approvingly of Nicoud as a kind of historiographical fellow-traveller.]

In terms of the actual treatise author Nicoud mentions, one might helpfully pick out a reasonable starting list:

• Gentile da Foligno (died 1348) – [though Gentile seems somewhat early for us]
• Francesco Casini da Siena, who around 1399-1401 wrote a huge treatise on Tuscan baths dedicated to Gian Galeazzo Visconti
• Jerome of Viterbi, who wrote a treatise on thermal baths of his region dedicated to Pope Innocent VI
• Benedetto Reguardati (one of Francesco Sforza’s most highly regarded doctors) wrote down the rules of the Bormio thermal baths, plus various other small books
• Ugolino da Montecatini wrote a treatise on thermal baths at the start of the 15th century (in Tuscan, unusually)
• Antonio Guainerio (died 1458) wrote a treatise on the thermal baths of Acqui Terme. (I remember reading about him in Thorndike, he also wrote a “tractatus de venenis” i.e. on poisons)
• Michele Savonarola

See also Marilyn Nicoud, “Les Medecins Italiens et le bain thermal a la fin du moyen age” (Medievales 43, automne 2002, pp.13-40) on JSTOR, which mentions Florence Biblioteca nazionale XV. 189 and BnF nouv. acq. Lat. 211.

Of course, it goes without saying that many of the books cited by Nicoud are out of my meagre book budget price range. But it’s a starting point, and the British Library has recently reopened so… lots to do here.

In the meantime, here are some early rough notes, which I plan to expand into separate blog posts over the next few months.

Benedetto Reguardati / Benedictus de Nursia

De sanitate conservanda, to Astorgius episcopus Anconitanus. Salzburg St. Peter M 1 265, 15c, ff. 3-93 (Kr III 42)

De conservatione sanitatis. Paris BN lat. 14028, 15c (Kr III 233) [same as “De sanitate conservanda”]

Ugolino da Montecatini

De balneorum Italiae proprietatibus ac virtutibus (1417) – AKA Tractatus de balneis

Paris BN n.a. lat 211, 15c, ff. 54-70 (Kr III 277)

Tractatus de Balneis. Traduzione a cura di M. G. Nardi. 1950

Antonio Guainerio

The Bodleian helpfully lists a number of manuscripts from this Pavian doctor, many of which were later printed as incunabula and early books:

• “De aegritudinibus propriis mulierum”
• “De arthetica”
• “De febribus”
• “De peste”
• “De uenenis”

Michele Savonarola

His Wikipedia article lists a number of his works, including “De balneis”.

See also: Crisciani, Chiara and Gabriella Zuccolin. Michele Savonarola, Medicina e cultura di corte, Micrologus’ Library. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. This includes a chapter by Marilyn Nicoud (of course) on his De Balneis.

See also: Arnaldo Segarizzi, Della vita e delle opere di Michele Savonarola medico padovano del secolo XV (Padua: Fratelli Gallina, 1900)… errrm… if you can find a copy of it. (Google’s copy appears to have disappeared, oddly.)

I mentioned in a comment on Koen G’s recent post that I thought that Voynichese benched gallows (i.e. gallows that have a ch glyph struck through them) may well be nothing more complex than a different way of writing gallows+ch; and that I thought this was much more likely than the alternative notion that it was a different way of writing ch+gallows.

When Koen asked me what evidence I had for this, I thought that I ought to write a brief post explaining how I got there (i.e. rather than cramming my “truly marvelous demonstration” into a Fermatian margin). So here goes.

Yes, It’s Contact Tables (Again)

The evidence I’d point to is from (you guessed it) contact tables for glyphs following benched gallows. The notable feature of these I mentioned recently on Cipher Mysteries (though the obeservation is, of course, as old as the hills) is that benched gallows are only very rarely followed by -ch.

Here’s a simple parsed count example (Takahashi transcription), showing how very rare benched gallows + -ch are as compared to both -e and -ee:

cth 712	cthe 167	cthee 23	cthch 3
ckh 629	ckhe 222	ckhee 20	ckhch 5
cph 147	cphe 56	cphee 8	cphch 1
cfh 59	cfhe 13	cfhee 1	cfhch 0

Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (che 4138), (chee 742), and (chch 18)

Furthermore, as I noted in that post, almost all of the places where benched gallows are followed by ch seem to be Takahashi’s transcription errors (sorry Takahashi-san).

Compare and contrast with the contact tables for the preceding glyph, where the ch- instance counts hugely outnumber the counts for e- and ee-:

cth 701	ecth 59	eecth 6	chcth 139
ckh 501	eckh 124	eeckh 9	chckh 242
cph 177	ecph 7	eecph 1	chcph 27
cfh 54	ecfh 3	eecfh 1	chcfh 15

Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (ech 143), (eech 33), and (chch 18)

As a sidenote, the interesting things in this particular table are (a) how rarely benched gallows are preceded by ee- (far less than by just e- or ch-), and (b) how frequently benched gallows are preceded by ch- when ch itself is very rarely preceded by ch-.

So, What’s Going On Here?

I think it’s safe to say that there is probably a really basic reason why benched gallows preceded by ch- are found so much more often than benched gallows followed by -ch. But what might that reason be?

For me, the suspicion is simply that c+gallows+h is just a different way of writing gallows+ch. The contact tables I quote above certainly don’t seem to offer anything to support the alternative scenario where c+gallows+h is a different way of writing ch+gallows.

To my eyes, replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would match the statistics baseline for che/chee/chch far more closely than replacing benched gallows with ch+gallows would match the statistics baseline for ech/eech/chch. That is, the benched gallows right contact tables (i.e. the contacts that benched gallows have with glyphs immediately following them to the right) seem to me to broadly match the ch right contact tables, but the benched gallows left contact tables don’t obviously match the ch left contact tables.

The big issue here – as always, though – is one of proof. It’s all very well my speculating that it would be better to replace benched gallows with gallows+ch rather than ch+gallows, but how can this be made stronger?

Though I’m not sure that it would be possible to turn this gallows+ch replacement hypothesis into a smoking-gun proof, I do suspect that it could be tested much more rigorously. Perhaps CM readers will have good suggestions about how to carry out a suitable test (or three). 🙂

Finally: Might ch Be Enciphering U?

To me, Voynichese’s various families of shapes and glyph behaviours look (much as John Tiltman suggested) like a grab-bag of contemporary cipher tricks. As a result, it would make a lot of sense to me if the distinctive benched gallows was simply one of the set of slightly older cipher tricks that were artfully combined to form Voynichese.

Along these lines, I’ve previously floated the idea (based mainly on the look of the benched gallows, but also on my long-held suspicion that e/ee/ch/sh might somehow be vowels) that Voynichese ch might in fact encipher plaintext U/V. This is because I can easily imagine that c+gallows+h may have begun its life as an early 15th century steganographic trick used to disguise or visually disrupt QU patterns before being absorbed into the Voynichese Borg mind.

Replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would be entirely consistent with this idea (though note that the gallows need not necessarily be enciphering Q, even if the trick started that way), so it’s possible that both ideas might turn out to be true simultaneously.

Incidentally: in “The Curse of the Voynich” (p.177), I mentioned a strikethrough trick that appeared in an “otherwise unremarkable” 1455 cipher (Ludovico Petronio Senen) to encipher the Tironian-style ‘subscriptio’ shorthand sign (e.g. that turns “p” into “p[er]”). My speculation here is therefore that the strikethrough trick may have first emerged in this general era, though instead used to visually disguise plaintext U’s.

Hence one thing I have been meaning to do recently is to trawl carefully through Mark Knowles’ fascinating haul of 1400–1450 Northern Italian ciphers to see if there is any indication there that a strikethrough trick was ever used in one of those ciphers to disguise the U in QU pairs. You might have thought that encipherers would have added a special token for “QU”, or might have simply chosen to omit the U after Q: but neither of these options typically seems to have happened in this general timeframe (outside of the most complicated syllabic ciphers).

I recently mentioned in a comment that my working hypothesis was word-initial EVA l- was a different token to EVA l elsewhere: and Emma May Smith asked me what evidence I had for that statement. So I thought I’d post a few stats to throw onto the fire.

The Evidence

Just to be clear, though: because I’d rather not mess up my stats with line-initial EVA l- stats, all the following figures relate to word-initial (but not line-initial) stats. And to keep everything as clear as practical, the comparisons are solely between words beginning l-, ol-, and al-.

So, here are the raw instance counts according to the Takahashi transcription for word-initial (but not line-initial) l-, ol-, and al-. For example, there are 1267 word-initial (but not line-initial) l- words, of which 58 are just EVA l (on its own), along with 433 word-initial (but not line-initial) words beginning with lk-. (Note that the “(-)” line is an estimate, my app unfortunately couldn’t calculate it.)

	.l	.ol	.al
	1267	1416	477
(-)	58	538	256
k	433	326	42
t	34	35	1
f	10	12	3
P	17	13	2
ch	293	138	20
sh	105	53	8
o	171	85	55
a	41	97	32
d	48	52	26
y	13	58	32

To compare these three columns, we now need to turn their values into percentages. What this following table is saying, then, is that word-initial (but not line-initial) l- is followed by k 34.18% of the time, t 2.68% of the time, etc. (Note that I didn’t try to capture all of the values.)

	.l	.ol	.al
	100%	100%	100%
(-)	4.58%	37.99%	53.67%
k	34.18%	23.02%	8.81%
t	2.68%	2.47%	0.21%
f	0.79%	0.85%	0.63%
p	1.34%	0.92%	0.42%
ch	23.13%	9.75%	4.19%
sh	8.29%	3.74%	1.68%
d	13.50%	6.00%	11.53%
a	3.24%	6.85%	6.71%
o	3.79%	3.67%	5.45%
y	1.03%	4.10%	6.71%

In short, this table is trying to compare the contact tables for three word-initial (but not line-initial) contexts: l-, ol-, and al-. So… what does it say?

Though the +f and +p rows are broadly the same for all three contexts, I think just about every row presents significant differences. For example:

• Only one word in the VMs begins with EVA alt (on f72v2, Virgo)
• Comparisons between the ch and sh lines seem to imply that tehre is vastly more similarity between ch and sh (ch seems to occur 3x more often than sh) than between l-, ol-, and al-.
• l- is typically followed by k (34.18%) and ch (23.13%), but this is quite unlike ol- and al-.

However, the biggest difference in all these counts is where l, ol, and al form the whole word (the “(-)” row). So here’s the last table of the day, which is where the whole word counts are removed from the totals, i.e. word-initial but not line-initial and also not word-complete:

	.l	.ol	.al
k	35.81%	37.13%	19.00%
t	2.81%	3.99%	0.45%
f	0.83%	1.37%	1.36%
p	1.41%	1.48%	0.90%
ch	24.23%	15.72%	9.05%
sh	8.68%	6.04%	3.62%
d	14.14%	9.68%	24.89%
a	3.39%	11.05%	14.48%
o	3.97%	5.92%	11.76%
y	1.08%	6.61%	14.48%

Even though taking out all the word-total instances has damped down some of the larger ratios, there are still plenty of big ratios to be seen.

Perhaps the most surprising is the comparison between ly- (1.08%) and aly- (14.48%). (Interestingly, all but one of all the places where the ly and aly instances occur in the text are at the end of a line or butted up against a mid-line illustration. Which I think points strongly to ly and aly being abbreviated in some way, but that’s an argument for another day.)

The Conclusion

For me, I simply can’t see anything systematic or language-like about the comparisons between any of the three columns. When their contact tables are so different, what actual evidence is there that l-, ol-, and al- are all presenting the same (right-facing) linguistic context? Personally, I simply can’t see any.

My conclusion from the above is therefore that l-, ol- and al- are (without any real doubt at all) three different tokens, i.e. they are standing in for three different underlying entities.

While idly flicking through the splendid ex-library copy of Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt’s (1929) “Schwäbische Federzeichnungen” that landed on my doorstep this morning, my eye was drawn to Abb. 52, a drawing from Gotha Chart A 158 (and more on that another time). What is Gotha (and might it be home to Batma?), and how come it has so many wonderful 15th century German books?

Forschungsbibliothek Gotha

According to this page (containing descriptions of many Gotha mss):

The old German manuscripts of the FB Gotha [i.e. Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, now at Uni Erfurt] form one of the last large collections of medieval German-language manuscripts for which no modern scientific index has yet been made available. Its inventory shows the typical profile of a princely collection: it contains numerous literary and illustrated texts, including testimonies of classic Middle High German literature as well as unique pieces such as the verse novel “Reinfried von Braunschweig”. In addition, the entire spectrum of late medieval German literature is represented in Gotha.

The Gotha collection contains plenty of the German manuscripts we’ve been discussing: Der welsche Gast, Andreas Capellanus’ “De amore“, Macer floridus, Feuerwerkbuch von 1420, Ars moriendi, Astrologisch-medizinische Sammelhandschrift, Biblia pauperum, Sachsenspiegel, Minnereden, Parzival, Johannes Hartlieb’s Namenmantik, etc. As far as I can tell, few of these have yet been digitized: not many more have been properly studied.

Basically, Gotha is like the Mars of 15th century manuscripts – distant, little known, but with plenty to study. Time to send a probe down to its surface!

Gotha Chart. A 472

Cutting to the chase, one particular Gotha manuscript really caught my eye: Gotha Chart. A 472 [Handschriftencensus page] [Erfurt catalogue page].

This contains a series of circular volvelles described in Ernst Zinner (1956) “Astronomische Instrumente des 11.-18. Jh.s” (p.153). The catalogue description has the following to say (largely quoting Zinner):

17 disk-shaped diagrams of the instruments are described. These are the theoricae planetarum, first introduced by the astronomer Jakob ben Machir (Profatius Judaeus) around 1300: these are “discs of paper or parchment that rotate over the basic drawing. Threads run from the center point, adjusting the various movements of the planetary volvelles, so that the location marked on the epicyclic disc indicates the correct planet location. One volvelle was constructed for each planet ” [Zinner 1956, p.32]. Fol. 3r-8r have the titles: 3r Circulus orbis signorum, 4r Circulus anni, 5r Circulus Saturni, 5v Circulus Jouis, 6r Circulus Martis, 7r Circulus Veneris, 8r Circulus augum planetarum. 15r and 17v are diagrams without movable attachments. Pages 12r, 22r, 30r, 34r, 39r, 42r, 47r and 52r contain volvelles with multi-part, rotatable attachments, some of which have come loose (now included) though some have been lost. On 39v a thread is inserted into the center of the disc for line drawing; circular holes are in the center of the diagram.

To my eyes, the interesting thing about this is that the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire #9 (‘Q9’) has a super-wide hexfolio, which – if you virtually rebind it along the correct crease, as I discussed in Curse (2006) – contains seven full-page circular diagrams, starting with the Sun and Moon. And even though I have seen many 15th century manuscripts listing the seven ‘wanderers’ on consecutive pages, I had never yet found a 15th century manuscript with a set of full-size circular diagrams for those seven astrological planets.

Until now. So let’s just say I’m suddenly very interested.

The Voynich’s Seven Planets

For reference, here’s what the Voynich Manuscript’s seven planets look like:

In Curse (p.60), I labelled these:

Planet A, Sun, Moon, Planet B
Planet C, Planet D, Planet E

I also noted that the diagram for Planet B comprised 46 radiating lines, which I noted (p.61) matched Mercury’s goal year period of 46 years. But that was as far as I was able to pursue this back in 2006.

Might there be more to find here, possibly even a block paradigm match to be had?

Georg von Peurbach

Now, I also happen to know that Georg von Peurbach created similar epicycle-based volvelles in his Novae Theoricae Planetarum. There’s a really cool online page from the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection showing these in action (albeit in a later printed book):

Though LJS 64 was printed in Padua between 1525 and 1575, Georg von Peurbach (1423-1461) wrote his original work back in the 15th century: he was Regiomontanus’ teacher and mentor.

As an aside, I’d previously read the English translation of Zinner’s chunky book on Regiomontanus (which I mentioned here in 2018, in my discussion of nocturnals and f57v): but before now I’d never really considered von Peurbach’s Novae Theoricae Planetarum.

Note that von Peurbach was giving lectures in Italy in 1448 to 1451, so would be a plausible candidate for someone who somehow bridged between German scientific culture and Northern Italian culture at just about the right time and place. So there’s a lot of lines criss-crossing here.

Might all these things be tied together by Gotha Chart. A 472?

Gotha Chart. A 472 Bibliography

The Handschriftencensus page lists three references, the main one of which (Zinner 1956) I have just ordered from America (but don’t expect to see for a fair while, to be honest):

• Ernst Zinner, Verzeichnis der astronomischen Handschriften des deutschen Kulturgebietes, München 1925, Nr. 9839.
• Ernst Zinner, Deutsche und niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11.-18. Jahrhunderts, München 1956, S. 153.
• Oliver Schwarz, Cornelia Hopf und Hans Stein, Quellen zur Astronomie in der Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek Gotha unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Gothaer Sternwarten (Veröffentlichungen der Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek Gotha 36), Gotha 1998, S. 54. This is also online here.

Meanwhile, I’m also going to contact the curators at FB Gotha to see if they can tell me any more about Chart. A 472. As always, asking is free!

My recent “Pax Nax Vax revisited” post led me to a new Voynich hypothesis that I don’t recall reading anywhere. Given that (as Jan Hurych helpfully pointed out) our Voynich-owning chum Jakub Hořčický (Sinapius) became capitaneus / administrator of the properties of St George’s Convent in Prague Castle in 1606, might Sinapius have simply swiped the Voynich Manuscript from the convent’s library?

It’s a decent enough question, but is it one that can be answered?

St George’s Convent

As you’d probably expect, the Czech Wikipedia page on Prague’s St George’s Convent is the place to start. And, thanks to the magic that is Google Translate, we can see the broad sweep of the convent’s history clearly enough.

Culturally, the convent’s Golden Age was at the beginning of the 14th century. Under Abbess Kunhuta (who her brother Wenceslas II had previously kind-of-forced into an unsuccessful political marriage to the Duke of Mazovia), its scriptorium (founded in about 1294) produced many beautiful illuminated manuscripts (e.g. this one).

[This was also the period when a second convent (Ducha a Milosrdenství Božího, the Spirit and Mercy of God) was founded in Prague: administration of this was passed over to St. George’s Convent in the mid-16th century.]

However, the Hussite Wars marked an abrupt change in St George’s Convent’s fortunes. When the Abbess refused to sign an agreement handing it over, “the convent was plundered, the nuns were forced to flee, and the convent’s property was sold off”.

The convent was restored to use during the 16th century: a carving above a doorway dating to 1515 depicts St George defeating his dragon. A fire in 1541 then wrecked the convent, which was followed by more rebuilding, at which point the buildings were used as an armoury. It has a nice frontage:

Nuns only returned to the convent (in the western part of the nave) in 1608-1612 under Abbess Žofie Albínka z Helfenburku. According to (Czech) Wikipedia, “During her office the monastery library was restored and most of the older texts were provided with a new Baroque binding, during which the text and paintings were often disturbed. The binding from that period gave today’s appearance to the vast majority of manuscripts.“

Can This Theory Be Tested?

Right now, I’m not sure. Even though we have indirect evidence (specifically, a hole in the vellum made by a woodworm) that the Voynich Manuscript had a wood cover at around this period in its history, I haven’t yet read of anyone going looking for tiny fragments of wood embedded in its outermost bifolios. And then they’d have to take samples from the Baroque wood covers of the Kunhuta-period manuscripts for comparison. And then they’d have to work out how to compare them in a useful way.

Similarly, the next research step would be to read the earliest history of St George’s Convent, which (Wikipedia assures us) was written in 1715 by Jan Florian Hammerschmidt at the request of Abbess František Helena Pieroniána of Galiana. I believe this is his Historia  in qua primaeva fundatio Et Institutio Regiorum Ac Antiquissimorum  Monasteriorum S. Georgii In Castro Pragensi, S. Spiritus Vulgo ad  Misericordias Dei In antiqua Urbe Pragensi Ordinis SP Benedicti  Sancti-Monialium: Cum omnibus there Pontificijs, Quam Caesareus ,  Immunitatibus, Concessionibus, per distinctos Paragraphos recensentur.  Honori  celsissimae Franciscae Helenae Pyeronianae de Galliano, Dei Gratia  Principissae & Abbatissae supra fatorum Monasteriorum dicata / and  Joanne Floriano Hammerschmidt, SS.  Theologiae  Doctore, Proto-Notario Apostolico, Comite Palatino, Auratae Militiae  Equite, Regiae, Exemptae & Nullius Dioecesis Ecclesiae SS.  Petri & Pauli in Wissehrad, & SS.  Cosmae & Damiani Canonico, pt Regiae Urbis Vetero-Pragensis BVM in Coelos Assumptae in Teyn Curato. Catchy title. 🙂

It’s online here (as a PDF), though given that it’s made up of a long series of fragments diligently copied from old documents, anyone expecting to find a single timeline will quickly be disappointed. All the same, this does cover the right period, e.g. p.88 says (my corrections to the OCR):

Annô Domini 1606. Principissae ad S. Georgium Sophia Al-
bince de Hellfenburg rebellârunt cives Trzebenicenses, ei in nullo
voluerunt obedire, vineas pro oblata solutione excolere, Pa-
rocho decimas dare noluerunt, claves illi ab Ecclesia accepe-
runt, illum ab ingressu Ecclesiae excluserunt. De qua rebel-
lione vide §. sequentem in serie Abbatissarum.

There’s more of the same on pp.107-112, but I was completely unable to find any trace of Hořčický / Sinapius there. All the same, perhaps other people’s eyes will prove to be sharper than mine. 🙂

Incidentally, the prize for Best Name In This Book surely goes to Abundantia Bukowskin dе Hustirzan.