A “research tree” is the term I like to use to describe a whole group of evidence / artefacts / phenomena / ideas that are linked together in non-chain-like ways. The term is particularly relevant to unsolved cipher mysteries because you almost always start by not knowing where in particular research trees your cipher fits (if it even fits at all, which they typically don’t).
So, to both recap and expand slightly:
(1) I suspect that the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 20 contains a sizeable collection of encrypted recipes.
– – Though an old suggestion, we now have a lot of secondary analysis to help reconstruct its original page order.
(2) I suspect we now know enough to be able to match Quire 20’s original structure with that of unencrypted recipe collections.
– – This matching trick is what I call the “block paradigm” approach to cracking historical ciphertexts.
(3) The most likely languages for the plaintext are Italian, Latin, and French.
– – The ‘michitonese’ handwriting appears to contain some Voynichese, and looks to have come from Savoy.
(4) I believe we can eliminate Latin as the plaintext language.
– – This is because Voynichese’s ‘8’ and ‘9’ characters appear to function as ‘contraction’ and ‘truncation’ shorthand tokens, making them essentially incompatible with Latin (where word endings hold a large amount of semantic content).
(5) My working hypothesis is that the plaintext is in Italian (Tuscan).
– – This is because there are a large number of Italian herbals, but very few French herbals.
(6) The various reliable dating evidences we have suggest that this was written between 1440 and 1470.
– – (…don’t get me started on this, or we’ll be here all night.)
(Feel free to disagree with any of the above! I’m not telling you what to think, but making clear the constraints I’m using to guide my own search.)
As a result, I’ve been looking for 13th / 14th / 15th century recipe lists written in Italian. My current hunch is that Quire 20’s plaintext might well be something close to BNF MS Latin 6741 – Jean le Bègue’s collection of paint, colouring, and gilding recipes.
Hence probably the best way to start is to build up a picture of the research tree in which that hunch is located, and then explore it a little…
The Italian colour recipes research tree
For building up an initial view of this research tree, I began with “Original Written Sources for the History of Mediaeval Painting Techniques and Materials: A List of Published Texts” by Salvador Muñoz Viñas, pp. 114-124 of Studies in Conservation, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1998) (many thanks to Juergen W. for this!). [Though because this concentrates on published sources, there may be several significant books of colour secrets out there that it misses, e.g. MS Sloane 416.]
Now that I have pruned the (initially somewhat overgrown) research tree down to more manageable proportions, this is the view I’m currently seeing through my research window:
This research tree has four main branches I now hope to explore in more depth:
* The recipes of Johannes Alcherius (as copied by Jehan Le Begue).
– – Jehan Le Begue’s translation is in volume 1 of Mary Merrifield’s book Original Treatises.
– – Alcherius was in fact a master builder working in Milan, had access to a large number of secrets, and was still alive in the early years of the 15th century: and so would seem to be an excellent candidate for the author of the Voynich Manuscript. 🙂
* Secreti per colori, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna MS 2861
– – Description here, transcription here, or in Volume 2 of Merrifield.
* “Ricepte d’affare Piu Colori”
– – There’s an article on this in Archeion, Vol. XV (1933), pp. 339-347 by Daniel V. Thompson Jr, which I hope to read soon. 🙂
– – There may possibly be more in “Trial index to some unpublished sources for the history of mediaeval craftsmanship” Daniel V. Thompson Jr – Speculum / Volume 10 / Issue 04 / October 1935, pp. 410-431.
* MS Sloane 416, “The Venetian Manuscript”.
– – This manuscript also contains a (brief) description of ciphers, which makes it doubly interesting to me.
– – Parts of this might be in Dutch, but I can’t tell properly from the description.
– – I can’t find any good description of this. I’ll probably have to spend a day at the British Library…
Have I missed anything important? Please say if I have! Oh, and I’ve ordered a copy of Mark Clarke’s (2001) “Art Of All Colours”, which looks to be extremely interesting as well….
“number” ‘8’ = ‘aes’
“number” ‘9’ = ‘geus’ or ‘ceus’
“straight-leg ‘9’ or ‘4’ = ‘q’ or ‘qua’ or ‘que’ or ‘qui’ or ‘quo’
Do any of you (younger folks) understand the meaning of the word ‘quo vadis’ ? This word has puzzled me every since I watched the movie, many years ago.
So, please aes-ceus my manifold reiterations. I’m pretty sure you are, finally, headed in the right direction; but only if you can realize that scribes have, for centuries, been writing and illustrating upon blank parchment/vellum which has been ‘in storage’ for decades before the scribes began to write upon it.
“Here and there” appear manuscripts which have obviously been scraped ‘clean’ and re-used. So, whether the older writings and illustrations ‘fell out of use’ or ended up in archives, or were re-scraped (if written on animal skin — as opposed to ‘paper’ or ‘papyrus’, or whether the ‘copyists’ decided begin copying with a freshly prepared piece of vellum or writing over a misspelled word, or maybe entering their doddering years, or just getting annoyed, or following Inquisitorial demands……….
Several months ago, I gave up on the maneuvers of the “Voynichers” and the ‘so-called’ EVA — Electronic Voynich Alphabet. I know very well who invented the EVA.
Nick, don’t you think it is time to update the EVA ‘alphabet’ and/ or ‘syllables’?
bd
Good luck with your Italian manuscript readings. I’m finding many recipes in the Florentine Codex (which was released from Inquisitional files some decades after Fray Sahagun’s death. Why it is not being called the “Sahagun Codex”, is because it was never returned to him before his death. Nor was the ‘rough draft’ (Voynich/B-408) returned to him, but rather languished in a Papal Storage Room for centuries. Eventually (in the early 1900’s?) The “Voynich” manuscript appeared (before you were born Nick?) and was promptly named the “Voynich Manuscript”. Mr. and Mrs. Voynich were only purchasers/codiologists who were unsuccessful in decoding manuscript. The manuscript was eventually donated to the Boenicke/Benicke Library by its last owner (Krause?) …..
A tout a l’heure!
Excellent, trade secrets would be one thing you would want to keep secret.
-> bdid 1 dr:
“number” ‘8’ = ‘aes’
“number” ‘9’ = ‘geus’ or ‘ceus’
“straight-leg ‘9’ or ‘4’ = ‘q’ or ‘qua’ or ‘que’ or ‘qui’ or ‘quo’
There are two “8’s”, one has a curl to the left at the bottom. Do you treat them the same ?
Since the last time i posted I have come to the conclusion that the “michitonese” is almost certainly not a Nihil obstat. I had a thought that if the writer of the michitonese understood the manuscript then they may have used it as a source material in their own works if any. With this in my current direction has been to seek out possible influence on later material while keeping in mind that we can’t be one hundred percent sure of the actual date of writing. I liken this to a converse of Nick’s Block Paradigm , of course with my love of simple solutions its probably about as complicated a method as any.
Most likely one of the ‘8’ figures is just what it appears to be: an ampersand?
And then we have two figures which look like backward-facing question-mark — and the other figure which looks like backward-facing ‘S’ — which is representing the alpha-letter “R”
So, good words with which to x-per i ment would be : experimental and ampersand
?
b-d-I’d as ev-r
Many months ago, Nick and I visited the last pictorial items of B-408 which were being discussed by Nick: I identified the red and blue cylinders as being transparent glass (pharmaceutlcal?) jars which indicated the different amounts of hot or cold water were to be used when mixing the various botanical specimens into the jars.
ps: Another odd-looking cipher, which doesn’t appear often, is what I have discussed on one of Nick’s other presentations. But —– if you should come across a glyph which I have translated is a word ending in ,,,,itius , this may be as close as the scribes were able to translate such words as ‘minutiae’ .
I’m trying to recall if I have identified and/or used that particular glyph when writing about the ‘oa-tl – lily’ and/or the: ‘ oa-tl ll-o-itius ‘ (Water Lotus).
I’m just guessing when it comes to dialogues such as michiton oladabas. The most likely writer of that phrase would have been one of Suleiman’s scribes/readers, before he added the grubby manuscript to the pile of some 200 manuscripts he was sending to the Austrian Emperor (via Ambassador Busbecq). You will find Busbecq’s sign-off and references to Ankara and the huge Monumentum Augustus.