Attack the Block / Quire 20 (Part 1)…

No, I’m not blogging about a Joe Cornish / John Boyega medieval mash-up, but about applying my block paradigm attack approach to the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 20.

This is a “known plaintext attack“: in non-crypto-bro English, it means ‘working out whether a given text is (somehow) the plaintext of the last section of the Voynich Manuscript’, even though we can’t read a word of the latter.

To do this, we’d need a pretty strong candidate text: in fact, we’d want one with broadly the right kind of structure, broadly the right kind of length, and which (preferably) might well have been considered a “trade secret” circa 1400-1450. But which we now have a copy of.

Since 2014 or so, my #1 candidate has been Jehan le Begue’s 1431 collection of colour-related recipes, which famously appeared in Mary Philadelphia Merrifield (1849). These recipes are in Latin and in French (plus Merrifield’s sons’ English translation), though Jehan le Begue helpfully notes that most were copied from Giovanni Alcherio’s collection of colour-related recipes (though le Begue added more of his own in French), even listing the sources that Alcherio listed. And so I’m arguably slightly more interested in Alcherio’s collection than le Begue’s.

However, this kind of begs the question: how can you be sure of the structure of an enciphered text? Making this even harder is the fact that there is convincing evidence that many of the Voynich Manuscript’s bifolios have ended up shuffled around (and according to no obvious pattern).

Hence this post starts with what we know about Quire 20, before moving on to Giovanni Alcherio’s collection of recipes. As always, wrangling all the individual pieces into one place is extraordinarily time-consuming, so that’s what this first post concentrates on doing – Part 2 will try to bring all these together to do the actual attack. (Which is arguably 10x harder. But you have to start somewhere.)

Notes on Quire 20

From my numerous blog posts on Q20 (starting with 2010), I have floated numerous tentative conclusions about how Q20 ‘works’, none or all of which may be useful in this context:

• Tailed paragraph stars may well be a steganographic ‘y’, short for ‘ytem’ (i.e. a bullet point)
• Tail-less paragraph stars may have been added to make the tailed paragraph stars less obvious
• Q20 was probably originally two separate quires/gatherings, that were later shuffled together
• f105r (with the ornate gallows at top left) was probably the start of Q20A
  • I would be unsurprised if the Voynich ‘title’ at the bottom of f105r was Q20A’s book title
• f103r was probably the start of Q20B (i.e. with f116v as its last page)
  • The stars on f103 and f116 are almost all tail-less
• The right margin gap on f112 is probably a copy of a vellum tear in the document it was copied from
  • (I covered this in Curse 2006)
• Elmar Vogt flagged an empty-full star-colour pattern, which f103, f104, and f108 didn’t conform to
  • I wondered whether that implied f103, f104, and f108 were originally bound together
• Tim Tattrie pointed out (among other things) links between words on f104r and f108v
  • I wondered whether that implied f108v and f104r faced each other (original page order)
• Rene Zandbergen pointed out in 2016 that many of the stars on f111r look to be fake
  • I collected together more such comments in this 2021 blog post

TL;DR – even though earlier Voynich researchers usually thought of Q20 as a single ‘thing’, it instead seems to have started life as two or more separate ‘books’. There also seems to be a category difference between tailed star paragraphs and non-tailed star paragraphs, with the former possibly denoting the start of an item.

Quire 20 Item / Paragraph Structure

Note that f109 and f110 appear to have been the two halves of a central bifolio that got removed when the manuscript was a couple of centuries old or so (say, after 1600 but probably before 1700). (However, there’s currently no obvious reason to presume that it was a central bifolio in the original (‘alpha’) bifolio nesting order.)

• f103r: 18 x no-tail, then 1 x odd “top tail”
• f103v: 14 x no-tail
• f104r: 13 x tail
• f104v: 13 x tail
• f105r: fancy gallows, then 9 large tails
• f105v: 10 x tail
• f106r: 15 x tail (#3 has a tiny ‘child’ star’)
• f106v: 14 x tail
• f107r: 15 x tail (#11 has “…” next to it)
• f107v: 15 x tail
• f108r: 16 x tail
• f108v: 16 x tail (note that 7-8 & 11-16 seem fake, #10-#16 seem to be a single paragraph)
• f111r: 17 x tail (note that 2-12 & 14 seem fake, #1-#12 seem to be a single paragraph)
• f111v: tail, no-tail, 2 x tail, 4 x no-tail, tail, 5 x no-tail, tail, 4 x no-tail (#2-#8, #10, #17 seem fake)
• f112r: 7 x tail, no-tail, 4 x tail
• f112v: 5 x tail, no-tail, tail, no-tail, 4 x tail, no-tail
• f113r: 16 x tail
• f113v: 15 x tail
• f114r: 13 x tail
• f114v: 8 x tail, no-tail, 3 x tail (#5 seems emphasized)
• f115r: tail, no-tail, 11 x tail
• f115v: 13 x tail
• f116r: 10 x no-tail, followed by two large unstarred paragraphs (like a colophon)
• f116v: (end-page)

We can also rearrange these same lines by bifolio (rather than by sequentially numbered folio):

• f103-f116 bifolio
  • f103r: 18 x no-tail, then 1 x odd “top tail”
  • f103v: 14 x no-tail
  • f116r: 10 x no-tail, followed by two large unstarred paragraphs (like a colophon)
  • f116v: (end-page)
• f104-f115 bifolio
  • f104r: 13 x tail
  • f104v: 13 x tail
  • f115r: tail, no-tail, 11 x tail
  • f115v: 13 x tail
• f105-f114 bifolio
  • f105r: fancy gallows, then 9 large tails
  • f105v: 10 x tail
  • f114r: 13 x tail
  • f114v: 8 x tail, no-tail, 3 x tail (#5 seems emphasized)
• f106-f113 bifolio
  • f106r: 15 x tail (3rd star has a tiny ‘child’ star’)
  • f106v: 14 x tail
  • f113r: 16 x tail
  • f113v: 15 x tail
• f107-f112 bifolio
  • f107r: 15 x tail (#11 has “…” next to it)
  • f107v: 15 x tail
  • f112r: 7 x tail, no-tail, 4 x tail
  • f112v: 5 x tail, no-tail, tail, no-tail, 4 x tail, no-tail
• f108-f111 bifolio
  • f108r: 16 x tail
  • f108v: 16 x tail (note that #7-#8 & #11-#16 seem fake, #10-#16 seem to be a single paragraph)
  • f111r: 17 x tail (note that #2-#12 & 14 seem fake, #1-#12 seem to be a single paragraph)
  • f111v: tail, no-tail, 2 x tail, 4 x no-tail, tail, 5 x no-tail, tail, 4 x no-tail (#2-#8, #10, #17 seem fake)

Commentary: as with the Herbal bifolios, there are often unexpected consistencies to be found between the contents of two folios where they are part of the same (attached) bifolio. The most obvious example of this is f108v, f111r and f111v, which all have large paragraphs and what appear to be fake stars. Yet f108r and the first five paragraphs of f108v seem to be quite different (they’re more ‘metronomic’, small paras regularly followed by other small paras). I can’t help but wonder whether there is a change in recipe ‘style’ part way down f108v: and also whether the f108-f111 bifolio may have originally been the central bifolio of a guire / gathering.

It also seems that we have three categories of starred paragraph to wrestle with: starred ‘item’ paragraphs, non-starred paragraphs, and starred non-paragraphs (i.e. fake stars, which may or may not have a tail). So I think we have to be very much on our toes when trying to draw inferences about stars.

More generally, there are occasional changes in ‘tempo’, e.g. when dense small-para pages with tiny tight stars (such as f111v) get followed by not-so-dense pages with larger paras and fewer stars (such as f112r). These give me the strong impression that we’re not looking at a single, uniformly-structured list of items, but rather at several different kinds of item (i.e. with different text styles) that have ended up interleaved. Moreover, the presence of fake-looking stars (as flagged by Rene) looks to me as though the author may have been trying to conceal some aspects of the very structure I’m trying to discern. But maybe this is a good sign, and that – as Sherlock Holmes once said – “The game is afoot! Not a word!“

Jehan le Begue Bibliography

The manuscript itself (Lat. 6741) is in the BnF, and is accessible online here. It’s marked “Ex Libri Lud[ovico] Martelli Rx 1587). It starts with a long table of synonyms, often with alternating red-blue capitals, e.g. part of fol. 2r looks like this:

This is transcribed on Merrifield p.18, but just so you can get acclimatised to the writing, I reworked it below to include the (entirely typical) early 15th century scribal abbreviations visible above:

• [A]zurium vel lazuriu[m] est color ; aliter celestis vel celes[-]
  tinus, aliter blauccus, a[li]t[er] pers[us], et a[li]t[er] ethere[us] dic[itur].
• [A]uru[m] est nobilius metallu[m] croceu[m] colore[m] habens et
  tenuatur in petulis, quo carentes utunt[ur] stanno
  attenuato et colorito colore croceo et in petulis tenuato.
• [A]rgentu[m] est nob[i]le metallu[m] album colore[m] habens, quo
  qui caret utitur ejus loco de d[i]cto stanno tenuato, non colorito.
• [A]uripigmentum est color croceus qui al[i]t[er] arsicon dicit[ur]

This is followed by:

• Experimenta de coloribus
• Experimenta diversa alia quam de coloribus
• Liber Theophili admirabilis et doctissimi magistri de omni scientia picturae artis
• Liber Magistri Petri de Sancto Audemaro de coloribus faciendis
• Eraclii sapientissimi viri liber primus […]
• De coloribus ad pingendum capitula scripta et notata a Johanne Archerio seu Alcherio anno Domini 1398 […]
• Capitula de coloribus ad illuminandum libros ab eodem Archerio sive Alcherio scripta et notata anno 1398 […]
• Aultres receptes en Latin et en Francois per Magistrum Johannem dir Le Begue […]

Mark Clarke’s (2001) “The Art of All Colours” p.101 includes a half-page description of Lat 6741, and also notes a complete 19th century transcription in BL MS Add. 27,459. The most important reference (crazily omitted from the BnF description) is the major part of Volume 1 of Mary Philadelphia Merrifield (1849), who not only transcribed 6741 (adding a voluminous introduction), but also had her sons translate it into English (“except [for the] Theophilus portion”, Clarke points out). Clarke also notes that a transcription appears in van Acker (1972) “Petri Pictoris Carmina”, pp.143-198 and 242-246. A more recent edition was by Inès Villela-Petit (1995), presumably in her PhD dissertation (which I haven’t seen).

For accessible sources on Alcherio / Alcherius, I’d heartily recommend:

• “The Recipe Collection of Johannes Alcherius and the Painting Materials Used in Manuscript Illumination in France and Northern Italy, c. 1380-1420”, by Nancy Turner
• “Copies, Reworkings and Renewals in Late Medieval Recipe Books”, by Inès Villela-Petit, and translated by Jilleen Nadolny. (Available on academia.edu.)

Navigating Lat 6741

The recipes in Lat 6741 have been sequentially numbered (with occasional gaps) in the left margin, which gives anyone discussing them a helpful starting point. For now, I’m going to restrict this discussion to those 118 recipes that Jehan le Begue copied from Alcherio (or else this would end up insanely large):

• Experimenta de coloribus
  • 1-46: Latin. Copied by Alcherio in 1409 from “an unbound [quire] lent me by Brother Dionysius […] at Milan.” Note that these recipes use an alchemical-sounding code for colours: “Sol” is for gold (i.e. yellow), “Luna” for silver (“the rust of which is azure”), “Mars” for iron (“the rust of which is violet”), “Jupiter” for tin, “Venus” for copper or brass (“the rust of which is green”), and “Saturn” for lead (“the rust of which is a white colour”).
  • 47-88: Latin. Copied by Alcherio from a second unbound [quire] lent by Brother Dionysius. #48 onwards is “Experimenta diversa alia quam de coloribus”.
  • 89-99: French. Copied by Alcherio from recipes lent to him in Bologna by an embroiderer called Theodore of Flanders, who had in turn procured them in London.
  • 100-116: Italian. Copied by Alcherio in Bologna in 1410 from a book of Magister Johannes de Modena. (Jehan le Begue copied these, and then had a friend translate them into Latin.)
  • 117: Latin. Copied by Alcherio in Venice in 1410, from Michelino di Vesuccio, “the most excellent painter among all the painters of the world”.
  • 118: Latin. Copied by Alcherio in Paris in 1410, from Master Johannes de […something…]

This is also because these 118 recipes seem to have the highest “trade secret” rating of all the recipes given by le Begue: most of the rest were either centuries old or French recipes added by le Begue himself.

Recipes #1 to #46 (fol 22r to fol. 27v)

Diving straight in, recipe #1 looks like this:

Note the recipe number in the left margin, and the title of the section / book embedded in the top line in red. Merrifield transcribes this recipe on her p.47, which (reconstructing the abbreviations above) would look like this:

1. [N]ota q[uod] auree Experimenta de coloribus
li[tte]re scribu[n]t[ur] sic, cu[m] ista aqua ; accipe sulphur vivu[m] et
corticem int[er]iorem mali granati, alum[i]nis, saltis, et de plu[-]
via auri, tantu[m] q[uan]tu[m] vis, et aqua[m] g[u]mmi liquide, et modi[-]
cu[m] de croco, et misce et scribe.

Note, the number of lines in Lat 6741 for #1 to #46 (to the nearest half-line) I counted are:
4.5 4.5 3.5 3 5 6.5 11 2 7 17 13 19 11 14 5 3.5 13 4.5 19.5 6.5 5 9.5 3 7.5 5.5 4.5 9 4 6 4.5 11.5 6 10.5 3.5 5.5 6.5 6.5 6 10 8 8.5 6 5.5 11 6.5 6

Recipes #47 to #88

The number of lines for #47 to #88 (note that le Begue has some numbering gaps) I counted are:

20 4.5 5 3.5 9 5.5 8 4 4 15 9 4 12 9.5 13.5 4 8.5 7 16 4.5 4 (#69 missing) 2 (#71 missing) (#72 missing) (#73 missing) (#74 missing) 5.5 3 1.5 (#79 missing) 3.5 5.5 4 8 8 9.5 3 4 7 3 2

Recipes #89 to #99

These are in French, and have a noticeably different format, with a header preceding each recipe:

Merrifield transcribes this (p.85) as follows:

89. Pour faire l’eau noire. – Prenez une pinte de l’yaue de dessoulz la meule sur quoy on meult les courtesaulx, et la mettes sur le feu, et gettez ung voire de vin aigre, et ii onces de galles, et prenez demie onche d’alon, et une onche de coperose, et le faitez tant boulir, qu’il apetice du tiers, et puis le laissier reposer un jour.

Recipes #100 to #116

These were originally written in Italian, but were translated into Latin by a certain friend of Jehan le Begue.

Recipe #117

25 lines long

Recipe #118

122 lines long, which – compared to the rest of the recipes – is a bit of a monster.