I thought it would be a good idea to try to draw up a list of the Voynich Manuscript’s male zodiac nymphs, as a dataset that might be useful when attempting to map between zodiac nymphs and feast days. And yet if you try to do this, it turns out to be really hard, because… what are we looking for, exactly? As the following image from f70v2 should make clear, is the absence of clearly delineated breasts really enough?
Also, if you hope to visually read the nymphs’ red lips as if they were (emblematically female) lipstick, this too is more than a touch problematic. From reading Caterina Sforza’s Gli Experimenti, I recall recipes for hair bleaching/colouring, face whitening, hand cream and rouge for the cheeks, but nothing for lipstick. In fact, lipstick seems to have played no great role in the fifteenth century: cosmetic historians tend to fast-forward to Queen Elizabeth I, who is said to have painted her lips excessively red (some have even theorised that a toxic layer of lipstick led to her demise).
Other nymphs appear to have male, uh, features, but this is often a result of how long you stare at them. The scans are good, but they’re far from definitive, let’s say. Meet the particular Gemini nymph I have in mind here:
As a result, I ended up spending a good amount of time looking at all the zodiac nymphs under the (virtual) microscope. (I used Jason Davies’ “Voynich Manuscript Voyager”, because the printing in the various facsimile editions I have wasn’t good enough to do this.) Which was when I found the Aries hats…
The Aries hats
Starting with Aries, the page layout changes format from 30 nymphs per page to 15 per page. This is accompanied by a change in style, where the drawings are slightly more detailed. This change continues through Taurus, but then flips back to 30 nymphs per page for the remainder of the zodiac.
What I found interesting was that “light Aries” (the second set of 15 zodiac nymphs for Aries) has a number of zodiac nymphs with a distinctive head-dress.
Though there are more hats on the page which follows (Taurus), only one of those has the same distinctive “bobble” on the top, and that is atop a (I think quite different) hat which is far more akin to a turban, AKA chaperon. (You can see mid-15th century chaperons here and here. And maybe here.)
So… what is this hat, then?
Is the thing on top a pom-pom? If not, then what?
The bobble on top seems far too small to be a fitted cap, so I think we can rule out hat styles like the galero. It seems to be a decorative style rather a practical style: or might it be a small peak on top, like a much smaller version of the truncated cones seen in some mid-fifteenth century hennins. Maybe it’s a pom-pom, but I have my doubts. (Plenty of them)
And having now trawled miserably through several thousand fifteenth century images looking for similar hats, I have found not a single one, and I have to admit defeat. Even the useful set of headdresses courtesy of Susan Reeds’ thesis is of no obvious help to us here, while Sophie Stitches has a good page of sources that also doesn’t seem to help. If it’s a kind of flat hat, Susan Reeds notes that “[a]s with cauls and sugarloaf hats, flat hats were worn mostly by men in the gentry or courtier/professional/official classes“.
So… what is this hat? My general feeling is that it must be a kind of hat that was probably unique to a particular time (perhaps no longer than a decade) and a particular place. Whoever finds when and where might well make a significant step forward here. But it doesn’t feel like that person is going to be me.
Diebold Lauber manuscripts
Finally, I had a good look through a number of Diebold Lauber manuscripts, but found only fragmentary matches, such as these from Cod Pal Germ 314:
(Last one from f49v).
Cod Pal germ 137 was equally unimpressive, with only a few knots on top of hats that are more in line with what are known as “acorns”:
Feel free to do much, much better than me in the hunt for this hat…
Dare I say it, but I think those in the bottom set of Voynich images are foreshadowing Steeleye Span by a few centuries!
According to Wikipedia in one version of the traditional folk song, the young man is a street hawker who is mourning his separation from his lover who has been transported to Australia … where she realised that there were plenty of other fish in the sea: flathead, leatherjacket – you know the type!
NickP … you know it, I know it, this wordy pursuit of a badly drawn and innocuous bobble is just an attempt by you to post something other than what is about to be revealed in South Australia.
I share the tension.
Peteb: even once we’ve heard SA police’s much delayed announcement, it’s still entirely possible we’ll know more about the bobble than the Somerton Man. 😬
Nick –
Is there a separate caption for the last of your examples from Cod Pal germ 137? It’s unlike the rest.
For the others – knitted and crocheted hats typically end like that. Knitted fabric began as an offshoot of net-making, and early examples have been found, but I’d guess crochet for most of the examples, knitting in Europe taking off among the city populations, I think, only from about the 16th-17thC. I can’t check it, though. I no longer have my copy of Agnes Geijer’s brilliant study.
Sorry – I should have said “Is there separate caption for the last example from *Cod Pal Germ 314*”
For your examples from Cod Pal germ 137, the fifteenth century is a bit early for needle-made fabrics, now I think about it. Irresponsible to guess when specialist studies – archaeological- and conservation reports supplementing histories of costume – will serve you better.
Without the pom-pom, those look like some kind of chaperon.
If I forget for a moment how bad is the Voynich Author at painting, I can say that I found a couple of pictures showing some headgear similiar to that.
One is the man at the centre of the Battaglia di San Romano by Paolo Uccello, who is wearing a mazzocchio with a distinct little ball at the top.
Another one is the man with the turban in a print depicting the meeting between Charles the Bold and Frederick III.
[1] https://www.uffizi.it/opere/battaglia-di-san-romano
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/166Friedrich_III_und_Karl_von_Burgund.jpg
Bobbles appear several times in this manuscript Nick. Noticing the clothing style is in f.82r below is much like the voynich archer. I linked all the bobbles to save anyone interested time.
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/zbs/SII-0043
Country of Location: Switzerland
Location: Solothurn
Library / Collection: Zentralbibliothek
Shelfmark: Cod. S II 43
Manuscript Title: “Historienbibel” from the workshop of Diebold Lauber (‘vom Staal-Story Bible’)
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/zbs/SII-0043/72v
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/zbs/SII-0043/82r
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/zbs/SII-0043/107r
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/zbs/SII-0043/116r
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/zbs/SII-0043/131v
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/zbs/SII-0043/252v
Steve: thanks, a very interesting Diebold Lauber manuscript bible (I checked through all the Cod Pal germ bibles, didn’t find anything interesting there)! Given that it seems to have been commissioned by the town clerk in Solothurn, I can’t help but wonder whether the distinctive hat might actually be a cultural nod from the artist(s) to him. The dial’s not at 100% yet, but it’s definitely a good lead to follow, thanks!
Stefano Guidoni: I’d say some of the headwear on the Taurus page is very much like a chaperon (one of which seems to have a pom-pom), but the Aries hats seem somewhat less extravagant and layered.
Uccello’s mazzocchio headwear is cool, though given that it is basically a torus, it would superficially seem to be a type of roundelle (as described by Susan Reeds) without a top ‘cap’ part (as per the three dark mazzocchio headwear instances in the Battaglia di San Romano painting). This makes the presence of a golden pom-pom on the top of the spiral roundelle headwear in the middle somewhat mystifying. In Uccello’s “Flood” fresco, the mazzocchio is around someone’s neck (though perhaps with a feather coming up from behind the wearer’s head?), so is definitely more like a cap-less roundelle.
Peteb: of course you’re right, it’s part of a drawn out series of diversions away from more important relevant issues that NP would rather distance himself from just now. Stands out like a top tasseled coif of olden times…or bulldogs balls, take your pick!
Worth considering?
The Voynich Manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb and the Encipherment of Women’s Secrets Get access Arrow
Keagan Brewer, Michelle L Lewis
Social History of Medicine, hkad099, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkad099
Published: 22 March 2024
marble bust. ‘Pythagoras of Samos’. Rome. Coliseum, 2ndC – 1stC BC.
(British LIbrary’s digitised mss – still down.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turban#/media/File:Pythagoras_in_the_Roman_Forum,_Colosseum.jpg
@Steve
What you call a hat with a bobble is a Jewish hat. This cannot be seen in the VM.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judenhut
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_hat
What you see is something like a priest’s cap or beret with a ball.
You can recognise some in this picture.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=2229143957308246&set=pcb.1970377369738721
Priest’s cap in the original and in the picture (1350)
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1997124463843531&set=g.504064963036643
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1997124063843571&set=g.504064963036643
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1997121997177111&set=g.504064963036643
The mazzocchio is, properly, the torus or roundel, however it was used as a part of the Italian chaperon, especially in Florence. As such it was usually covered with fabric. Example:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Florentine_15th_or_16th_Century%2C_probably_after_a_model_by_Andrea_del_Verrocchio_and_Orsino_Benintendi%2C_Lorenzo_de%27_Medici%2C_1478-1521%2C_NGA_12189.jpg
The pointed hats of that Diebold Lauber’s Bible are Jewish hats. There are many different kinds of Jewish pointed hats, but I could not find any with a large roundel or turban like those of the Voynich.
Well, unless those are not roundels or wrapped fabric, but large brims seen from below. However I think that would be a very strange pictorial choice, unusual and confusing, a mixture of bad perspective and poor style.
The other is a chaperone (bound).
Philip of Burgundy has often been depicted like this.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_III._(Burgund)
Lauber has a nice example here (link).
https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-4173-post-57902.html#pid57902
https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-4173-post-57901.html#pid57901
@Peter M.
Thank you, Peter.
I’m not sure how to ask this question without sparking indignation but it is an honest one.
Is the aim of this conversation to discover where, and by whom, headwear like that shown – well or badly – on the calendar-figures, or is it to support an argument made by Koen Gheuens that the Voynich calendar, or some part of it, is connected with Diebold Lauber’s workshop?
If the aim is to find ways to further a ‘Lauber workshop’ theory, I can understand why no-one seems to be looking further. Nick’s example from folio 49v in Cod Pal Germ 314 is certainly impressive – but what sort of person is identified by a hat of that type?
If, however, the aim is to investigate questions raised by the manuscript itself, why such an extraordinarily narrow range of sources?
By the 15thC, European males were wearing a wide variety of headwear and in Italy and in France, at least, it was quite the fashion to sport a hat designed in an antique or an exotic style. You see versions of the Turkish fez, of the turban, and in the following link, what is said to be a hat worn by a French army officer, an which is plainly modelled on Russian and more exactly on Mongol style – except made of velvet, and adorned with pearls, and according to the drawing’s caption.
(The drawing comes from a well-respected English history of costume).
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/24/e1/87/24e187c0c0858e6c75e5b086e4dc82d8.jpg
It’s worth keeping in mind, too that the Voynich figures are very small, and from brow to top, the headwear measures between one millimeter and two millimeters.
We can’t expect superhuman hand-eye co-ordination, and a tiny, roundish detail *might* be meant as a pom-pom, or as the crown of the head, or the slightly pointed end of a piece of fabric. Or a pom-pom.
There are many books at internet archive on the history of dress, but some are only meant to help fancy-dress parties, or as guides to theatricals. Some of the nineteenth-century ones look good, but filled with historical errors, romanticism and so on. Best to ask the conservation department of your nearest museum for the names of current standard references if your aim is to research these drawings.
Peteb: ‘follow my leader’ never fails, they can’t resist!
@Diane
You write “Nick’s example from folio 49v in Cod Pal Germ 314 is certainly impressive – but what kind of person can be recognised by such a hat?”
It’s a priest and a king.
The text begins with the words “One reads of a priest”. “Man liest von einem Pfaffen”.
Here he is giving the king something of a moral sermon.
It is large and drawn accurately enough to be easily recognisable.
The one example I have shown by chance is a stove tile from 1380, which was so fashionable. But it was ridiculous.
The fact that Koen’s example of the VM twins is so similar to Lauber’s twins is certainly no coincidence.
Lauber was a copy workshop. He mainly copied the books. Perhaps compiled and rewritten, but not written. (first author)
There must be more that is similar.
The examples Nick has listed. (4 books) are a prime example of copying, so to speak.
Then there is the headgear of the surgeons of the time. Not exactly a ball, but the one that looks like it has a thread.
But you can’t see it in the VM.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacobus_Berengarius_Anatomia_carpi_Titelholzschnitt_1535_(Isny).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacobus_Berengarius_Anatomia_carpi_Titelholzschnitt_1535_(Isny).jpg
Better to see here. Gown of medicine.
“Mondino dei Luzzi”
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/xwqcpd4w
And the last one is probably a Jewish cap.
Here you can see both at the same time. Hat and cap.
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/de/zbz/C0005/34r
Are you going to comment on:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=63603
Once again the Voynich manuscript
and
The Voynich Manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb and the Encipherment of Women’s Secrets, by Keagan Brewer and Michelle L Lewis, Social History of Medicine, hkad099 (22 March 2024)
and
https://theconversation.com/for-600-years-the-voynich-manuscript-has-remained-a-mystery-now-we-think-its-partly-about-sex-227157
?
Nick,
That the styles of headwear change between one and another of those diagrams seems to me a significant new observation.
Peter M.,
In Koen’s blogpost of Sept. 2nd., 2018 where he treated the twins, he cited an image that I found most interesting. It comes from a fifteenth-century manuscript which copies the oldest available sources – including some credited to Eratosthenes.
3)22v (l. 15)-23r: Eratosthenes, ( c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BC), the work composed c. 284-194BC ‘ De circa exornatione stellarum et ethymologia de quibus videntur’.
About the hats, though – you might know that in western medieval art, when everyone isn’t dressed Latin-style no matter where they’re supposed to be from, hats are used to indicate status, culture and character. For an easy example look at that now well-known frontispiece to Oresme’s work – a contribution to the study made by Ellie Velinska, reviewed here by Nick. Ellie’s blog is now closed from the public.
Band plus (k)nobby bits
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fd/2c/07/fd2c07a271838ea4e3fcc04a9a2b83e8.jpg
@Diane
I understand you.
So a picture of Nick shows a helmet rather than a cap or hat.
Maybe it’s because he’s wearing something like a spear on his shoulder. Things like that influence the view. That’s why it’s always good to have several examples.
Looking at it this way, a cap can mean more.
Swiss shepherd’s cap.
https://www.toesstaldesign.ch/Swissness/Sennenkaeppi-Cap/
The Pope somehow has the same.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pileolus
That’s not surprising. Somehow he too is just a shepherd looking after his sheep.
Or why is the crozier actually a shepherd’s tool? Shepherd’s crook.
Peter M.
There’s a huge range of possibilities for the skull-cap. Our difficulty is to check that our ideas aren’t anachronistic, and to attempt to describe what was in the original draughtsman’s mind, rather than our own. Not easy, is it?
Sometimes it is really difficult to authenticate something.
In this link, the person on the right. What is she holding in her hand?
https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/de/zbz/C0005/185r/0/
Without reading the text, I would guess a fish.
But it’s not. The text says exactly what it is.
@Peter
Without reading the text I’d say it is a mandible. There are teeth on it.
@Stefano
That is correct. It’s the lower jaw of a donkey.
He writes ‘ Here Samson of Judea is arguing with a donkey’s lower jaw’… ‘chin + cheeks’.
“Hier streitet Samson von Judea mit einem Esel’s Unterkiefer” “Kinn + Backen”
Judges 15: 15-16.
The figure is Samson in pre-Delilah days.
@Peter
Now, after you told me that, I can literally read:
“Hie strit Sambson von Judea mit eins esels Kinbacken.S”
So, I suppose:
Hie = Hier
strit = ???
Sambson=Samson
eins = eines
Kinbacken = Kinnbacken
“Here Samson from Judea [does something] with the mandibles of one donkey.”
Anyway, I get that your theory here is that those hats are some kind of Canterbury caps or medieval “biretta”.
Looking for “medieval birettum” on Google, I literally found this:
https://textilverkstad.se/pdf/biretta_eng.pdf
@Stefano
“strit”alemann / dt. “Streit” comes from ‘dispute’.
As for the cap, there are plenty of representations. Even the Scots have one. But I don’t know from which century it was worn.
The original I have shown is a museum piece.
@ Stephen Goranson — re your comment of April 22, 2024.
You may be wondering why there’s so little reaction to your reference to the item by Keagan Brewer and Michelle L Lewis.
I expect it’s partly because some of the speculations are so old and partly because some of the speculations are so pleasing to persons determined to promote a ‘post-1440 Germanist’ storyline.
The old speculations have been adopted uncritically from William Romaine Newbold’s subjective impressions in the 1920s, just as they passed without investigation for the following century. They weren’t only not rejected for the most part, but never so much as cross-examined. The only one which was immediately rejected was the ‘biological-anatomical’ notion. Not that anyone listened, and when Sergio Toresella picked up again on the ‘women-sex-medicine’ speculations, no-one was so impolite to behave as the editor of Scientific American had been in the 1920s.
Why these authors should have decide to combine those old notions – without bothering to test them – with an inherently anachronistic ‘ Johannes Hartlieb’ theory I can’t imagine.
The very best you could say was that, IF all the content now in the manuscript had been first given form when our present manuscript was made and IF you completely ignore the fact that 1440 is, by all normal criteria, the latest date for the present artefact and pretend that at the age of 18 Hartleib could have been a specialist in women’s medicine and (despite being educated in the extremely conservative region of Bavaria) could have filled the pages of his notebook with unclothed female figures drawn in a style entirely unlike that of early fifteenth century Bavarian work, then there might be something to be said in favour of a genuine link … that is a genuine historical link, rather than a wholly imaginative one… between Hartleib and Yale, Beinecke MS 408.
By 1440 the only work which Hartleib can be connected with is a compendium of herbs. His translation of the Sicilian Trotula and ‘women’s secrets’ was not produced until the later 1450s, and the copy now is a copy made late in the sixteenth century – c.1570. (Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 480).
The publishing editors know whom they chose as peer reviewers for the manuscript. What led them to choose the reviewers they did I won’t try to speculate. Of course I’ll read it through – but the reviews you’ve linked to don’t inspire confidence in much except a dreary certainty that the ‘Toresellla-Germanist’ camp will start citing the authors as ‘academic authorities’ and the book as ‘scientific’.
I’d like to see them try to persuade the Louvre or the British Museum that the manuscript is a mid-fifteenth century Bavarian product.
Red lips, with or without red / pink cheeks etc. are part of the medieval technique of adding color to human faces. It’s not a promotion for cosmetics. French manuscript examples go back at least to the early 13th century.
A couple of 15th century examples show the variety and a certain proximity.
UB Freiburg Hs.334 [1410, Alsace. A picture Bible]
UBH Cod. Pal. germ. 359 [1418, Strasbourg. “Rosengarten zu Worms”]
@o.o.t.b.
..and it is an established convention of Spanish-Christian examples for centuries before that. I looked into the question a fair while ago, when investigating the elongated ascenders and again when tracking the history of ‘Arcitenens’ as distinct from ‘Saggitarius’ as image for that constellation. If it will be of use to you, I’ll go back and find some of the examples I cited from.. what.. the 11th and 12th centuries?
Sorry to sound as if I’ve been there and done that, but it’s possible to cover a lot of ground researching one, and then another question for more than a decade.
It is an artistic technique, and it can easily become embedded in culture. I like to stay between 1400-1450 as much as possible. I don’t see how historical Spanish art had a real influence of the production of the Alsace and Strasbourg mss.
The investigation of red lips is just another of the details to be found in the VMs. It is inclusive of the C-14 dating, but it is not particularly definitive. The VMs artist is rather minimalist and quite consistent in the application of this technique. In the Lauber productions, some texts are more consistent than others.
It all goes together – eventually – to show that the VMs artist had a surprising familiarity with historical realities based in the first half of the 15th century. From cosmic diagrams, to Melusine, to sleeves and hats, etc. the artist plays off of this knowledge to combine with Shirakatsi’s wheel or the FIeschi popes and heraldic canting. The use of dualistic representation is an indicator of intentional artistic trickery.
Without the history to back up the interpretation, there is no understanding what the VMs artist actually knew. With the historical focus on the C-14 era, this knowledge is being recognized in several VMs illustrations [e.g.: f46v costmary.]
ootb
I should like to see the codicological and palaeographic argument for the manuscript’s being attributed to Alsace Lorraine. Can you point me to an essay of that kind?
I am bewildered by assertions, or presumptions that the Voynich manuscript’s drawings are the creation of a single fifteenth-century ‘artist’, and all the more if that imagined ‘artist’ is imagined a medieval Latin in western Europe. There is no figure of Melusine in the Voynich manuscript; there are no stave-built barrels, either. Nor is there any figure wearing the tall headdress in which she is usually shown. The ‘Melusine’ idea is yet another of those which results from back-to-front research. Instead of asking – and exerting oneself to discover – what those who first created the drawing intended it to mean, the old way is to make a guess that the person was this or that, then to proceed by saying, in effect ‘Assuming my guess is right, then what’s the nearest fit within the limits of my speculation’ and the ‘nearest’ found to this figure within the old speculations is Melusine. Yet when you actually consider fifteenth-century Latin manuscript images of Melusine, none remotely resembles the style and presentation of any ‘Melusine image’. Then that obvious disparity is glossed over by attributing to some imagined fifteenth century ‘artist’ not only an appallingly poor ability as an ‘artist’ but the freedom to draw in any way that s/he felt like drawing – a massive anachronism. The notion of using drawings as a means of self-expression, let alone abandoning all the conventions which applies, is a fantasy – an imposition of post-19th century ideas about the ‘artist’ and the role of ‘art’ upon a time and region which had no concept of such things. I understand few have the time or interest to learn much about the history of art, or about how we distinguish iconography from one region and period from another, but I do wish it were possible to encourage more interest in such things, particularly when almost all the speculative and quasi-historical Voynich stories rely so very heavily on making assertions about the drawings. Yet when you actually consider fifteenth-century Latin manuscript images of Melusine, none remotely resembles the style and presentation of any image in the Vms.
@Diane
I completely agree with you. No Melusine in the VM. While the Melusine has grown a snake or fish tail, the VM seems to have someone in a fish mouth. Even if it is female, it seems closer to Jonas and the whale.
As for the figure itself, there are quite a few examples. They have been documented as wall decorations since the 12th century (around 1100).
Originally Celtic. Melusine, goddess or protector of fountains and springs.
Examples:
https://logbuch-schweiz.net/sgrafitti-im-engadin/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/715720565760142711/
https://josin-sgraffito.ch/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Kunsthandwerk_Sgraffito_Symbole_und_Bedeutung.pdf
https://www.google.ch/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fpictures.abebooks.com%2Finventory%2F31171866055.jpg&tbnid=-3f_zEtuY-ktPM&vet=10CGUQMyiUAWoXChMIuKbv3LjuhQMVAAAAAB0AAAAAEBU..i&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abebooks.com%2FSgraffito-Engadin-Bergell-K%25C3%25B6nz-Iachen-Ulrich%2F31171866055%2Fbd&docid=Ld_Bm1x7uakIlM&w=540&h=640&itg=1&q=Engadiner%20H%C3%A4user&hl=de&ved=0CGUQMyiUAWoXChMIuKbv3LjuhQMVAAAAAB0AAAAAEBU
https://www.google.ch/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.ricardostatic.ch%2Fimages%2Fb9c9914e-482e-4eeb-9d84-a5d58592a846%2Ft_1000x750%2Fsgraffito-engadin-bergell&tbnid=goMOXhn0odY1_M&vet=10CHEQMyiXAWoXChMIuKbv3LjuhQMVAAAAAB0AAAAAEBU..i&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ricardo.ch%2Fde%2Fa%2Fsgraffito-engadin-bergell-1147846236%2F&docid=r-pZd7AbBPBDdM&w=1000&h=750&q=Engadiner%20H%C3%A4user&hl=de&ved=0CHEQMyiXAWoXChMIuKbv3LjuhQMVAAAAAB0AAAAAEBU
In the comparison of the two ms. examples, they are only eight years apart and within C-14 dates. They are drastically different in artistic styles. And yet they share the technique of painting the faces with red lips and cheeks. It is certainly not a universal practice, even within a single ms., but it shows up in various situations. It’s not like artists would start using blue or green instead.
I’m curious what you have to say about the VMs “Mermaid” f79v illustration.
Based on the comparison of the VMs cosmos with BNF Fr. 565 and Harley 334, there is a similar mermaid type of illustration in Harley 334. Perhaps Harley could ‘explain’ something about the VMs, but Harley doesn’t have much to say. The mermaid is just a mermaid; not Minnie the Mermaid; not any specific mermaid; just a generic mermaid. That generic identity for mermaids is reinforced in the two Lauber illustrations in the “Book of Nature,” where a mermaid is found among the fish *and* among the sea monsters.
So, the question is whether the VMs mermaid is also a *generic* mermaid? And the answer is, No. Mermaids do not have thighs. Mermaids are fish-like from the waist down, and that is clearly not what the VMs artist has drawn, specifically regarding the central figure, although the rest of the illustration retains certain similarities. Who else might it be, if not a mermaid?
Melusine is interesting for several reasons. There are a number of historical connections, particularly to Jean, Duke of Berry (d. 1416). In addition, there are two different versions of Melusine, relevant to this situation. The more prominent version of the story is the Melusine of Lusignan, who is dragon-like, has wings, and in the end, she flies off. The alternative version is Melusine of Luxembourg. She is described as more like a mermaid, ichthyologically blue with silver beads of water, and she doesn’t fly away, but seeps into the Earth, instead.
Jean de Berry, who owned the BNF Fr. 565 cosmic illustration, also captured the Lusignan castle. He commissioned Jean d’Arras to write the book on the Lusignan Mélusine, and he is depicted in “Tres Riches Heures” along with Lusignan castle and a teeny, tiny, flying dragon. In addition to which, his mother was Bonne of Luxembourg. This purported ancestral connection to the Melusine of Luxembourg was common to all of the Valois lines. Melusine is specifically mentioned again in regard to the third generation of the Dukes of Burgundy, in a description of the Feast of the Pheasant. Melusine clearly had some significance, and it is significance at the highest level of social status. So, it would have been widely known, and therefore it’s not the knowledge per se.
What the VMs artist has done is to create a unique paired image. Melusine has been substituted for the generic mermaid of the other interpretations. It is an example of the same artistic trickery that created the VMs cosmos from two disparate parts. It is the novel pairing of “unknowns” that thwarts VMs investigation. Half the answer doesn’t work. It’s like the VMs costmary illustration, both parts are required to work together to produce the intended interpretation.
To explain it simply.
Images like these are not new.
Take the ceiling of St Martin Zillis, for example. 12th century.
https://www.alamy.com/zillis-dorfkirche-st-martin-romanische-holzdecke-mit-biblischen-darstellungen-image259835470.html
But now I go from there, 10 km south I am in Italy and a little further west in Bellinzona.
I have the battlements here, the Romansh of F116, the Habsburg crowns still apply here and it’s German-speaking.
It’s not just a book. It’s a whole cultural area. It stretches from Ticino to Slovenia.
Peter M., and ootb,
Peter, You are right – the antecedents of the west’s Melusine can be traced. Initially an effort to cope with images of Sheila na gig found in churches of the Irish and older Cetic south, those are in turn related to forms found in Roman north Africa, and the Roman east – those eastern forms also surviving in monumental works, coins and occasional manuscripts (a quite authentic late Roman example adorns the page for coral in the Codex Anicia Juliana.)
It’s not simple diffusion, but when one group of people comes up against another, it ‘reads’ the other in terms of its own customs – just as the Greeks and Romans presumed other nations’ deities were their own by other names.
Coins and monuments remain visible, or continue to be re-discovered, and that was as true, or truer, for earlier times and peoples as for our own; political change doesn’t immediately eradicate everything that went before.
Since you ask, o.o.t.b., I treated that detail quite some time ago, but a brief recap here.
The detail so often mis-read as if it were a western tradition’s ‘mermaid’ here takes a form comparable to pre-Islamic Egyptian (‘Coptic’) tapestries and images of Noah. (So far, I see, Peter has come, too)
Overall, though, I consider it to express the result of intermingling traditions from Coptos and from India, of the type we know occurred before the 3rdC AD.
(At the moment, I’m focusing on the time of Domitian).
In the research-summaries published through voynichimagery, I identified the Indian counterpart ( i.e. as master of the great Flood), and explained that in Indian tradition it is described as a form for Vishnu. I noted it was a focus of worship in only a few centres in India, and that these had been, in earlier times, ports open to foreign merchants. I also noted the Indian character in one of Kircher’s books, where his illustration is clearly one copied with minor adaptations from that in a book published by another another Jesuit who would appear to have relied on a drawing made for popular prints in seventeenth-century India.
The Vms version isn’t identical in form or atmosphere to the seventeenth-century drawings, but it is the same character in my opinion. ( remember later seeing another Voynichero mention the same Hindu deity, but cannot now recall who it was.) I’ve also mentioned that one fifteenth-century Arab navigator speaks of Noah as patron of those who venture onto the ocean flood and who are – as Homer would have said – ‘nausinous’ men. That same fifteenth-century navigator tells us that (according to the tradition he had inherited) Noah and Enoch are the same person.
I think the Vms’ type might be closer in nature to the ‘Ruh’ of Geneisis, but that aside, the more relevant point is that its astronomical counterpart is the ‘hull’ (depicted in the Vms as a log and the point of the pole as a nail) while its chief star is that we call Canopus.
I quite understand why so many people like the idea of that detail as a reference to the Latin Melusine.
We humans are hard-wired to have our eye first seek for what we find most familiar – the friend’s face in the crowd – but as things have evolved in Voynich studies, there is an added problem caused by pressure on researchers to restrict their investigation to one small region, a single medium and a ridiculously narrow time-frame. An analogy – if a poor one – would be to demand that someone research the history of ‘The City of God’ text in a late fifteenth-century French manuscript but never speak of any other region but France, and never refer to any time-range save the second half of the fifteenth century.. because someone has a theory that the author of the ‘city of god’ can only have lived when, and where, the fifteenth-century manuscript was produced, and none but a Frenchman as author will be permitted.
At present, the general state of the study simply is as it is – theory driven. What I’m waiting to see is what will happen when the first wave of historians arrives who have studied these centuries in term of a Global Middle Ages.
History of the Melusine. Short form.
As already mentioned.
Celts: Protective goddess of springs and wells.
Etruscans later called her goddess Reitia. Documented from the 5th-1st century BC.
https://www.sagen.info/forum/media/raetiaquelle.1156/
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A4tia-H%C3%B6hle
Romans later also called her Juno.
The church could not ignore her, she was too powerful and well-known for that.
Used as a patron saint.
https://www.matriarchiv.ch/uploads/003-Literaturliste-Frauen-Kultur-Landschaft.pdf
Today known throughout Europe as the Queen of May.
Remember, nobody does the same job for 3000 years, but she’s still around.
Peter M.,
Your post date-stamped (i.e. approved) May 3, 2024 at 6:55 am had not appeared when I wrote mine (approved on May 3, 2024 at 7:32 am), which replies to your previous one.
Forgive me but I will not follow your ‘alamy’ link because the site lists 31 tracking cookies as ‘essential’ and says some will continue tracking us for more than a year.
To make a good ‘battlements’ argument would take a lot more than just mappin where there happen to be swallowtails today.
To make it good, one would have to eliminate all the examples which date to the nineteenth century, when a sudden swelling of post-Napoleonic nationalism, combined with a nostalgic version of the medieval period seen in histories and in art, inspired widespread “renovation” which may or may not reflect the situation when the Voynich manuscript was made, let alone at the time that detail was first added to its map.
Having checked each extant example and eliminated the anachronisms, you would also have to determine the historical range over which swallowtail merlons had adorned battlements between (say) the time of the first crusade and 1440, using sources other than European ones because although we know many castles and forts were built during those centuries, a great many have now been demolished or re-built beyond recognition, or at the very least seen the fortifications demolished by war.
Reconstructing the situation when the Voynich quires were inscribed would be work enough, but since there is no reason to believe all the manuscript’s content first created then, you’d have to start by re-creating the general distribution for such forms even earlier – say, from the time of the first crusade to the beginning of the fifteenth century (or at least the mid-fourteenth).
As if that weren’t enough, if you refer to images as evidence, it is necessary to establish by fairly solid comparative studies, the degree to which a given example is intended literally. As imaginary example, you might find such merlons represented on a coin made for medieval Crete. It might be a portrait of a lost fort or castle, or that motif might have been included (as so many were) not as literal, but for the cultural significance it bore or even simply as an attractive ornament.
While I don’t claim to have undertaken an exhaustive study of the motif in art – it would have taken longer than the three years’ I did spend working through the Voynich map, but I can say that for many more reasons than one, I concluded that ‘castle’ was a token form for Constantinople and/or Pera, and that the constant implication of the ‘swallowtail’ motif in any form, literal or figurative, that the area enclosed (whether a city or a structure) was still, at that time, a sign that the area was under imperial protection. Not necessarily of a Christian emperor, but usually. That is, It marks an ‘imperial limit’ in something of the sense we say a foreign embassy is ‘foreign territory’ no matter where it is. It is also true that the Voynich map’s example is not entirely surrounded by swallowtails, but shows half-and-half ‘swallowtail’ and ‘square’.
I know the ‘swallowtails’ argument looked very promising in the early 2000s, and I sympathise.
@Diane
You don’t need to go to Alamy, Wiki works too. Doesn’t have as many pictures, but enough to see what it’s all about. Otherwise just search for the church and look at the pictures.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Martin_(Zillis)
About the battlements. Simply put, there are none. (Mediterranean area) Everything after 1500 are trade fortresses built by the Doge of Venice. The time of castles was already over by 1400. They switched to star-shaped fortresses because of the cannons.
Written records such as ‘Nobody can live in this shithole anymore’ already existed in the 14th century, when the death of castles had already been underway for 100 years.
About the coin. I’m sure it’s three-pronged, otherwise give me a link.
Peter M.,
Please share your references, or a source for your thinking that all swallowtails post-1500 were built by the Doge of Venice. Or did you mean all castles built after 1500 were built by the Venetians? If by ‘trade fortresses’ you are thinking of Caffa (Theodosia), or of another site in that region (the one I’ve identified as the place indicated on the Voynich map as the site furthest north known to the original makers), then I think you need to re-visit the history of that region.
But then again, since we have no concern with anything post-1500, the point is moot. The manuscript’s absolute upper limit (as I’m explaining in a post now) is 1439 AD, and that’s only for manufacture, not dating the content.
Peter, Would I be right in thinking you’re a convert to the latest mutation of the ‘Germanist’ position, one that now tries to annex all the maritime and cartographic, mercantile and similar material I introduced to the study, by swapping Genoese and Jewish for a new Germanist- Venetian-and-Dalmatian-maritime-militarist-trade and medicine” sort of theory?
Peter M.,
Thanks so much for the link to the church in Zillis. What a beautiful creation that ceiling is. Some very interesting and apparently paradoxical features – notably the form given Satan – at least as we see it now. Also interesting is the amount of meat on the people’s bones. Somethin about it reminds me less of late Roman works than of drawings in one early English manuscript. I cannot link it here; the British Library’s digitised manuscripts are offline, but if you’re interested, the text is popularly known as the Poems of Caedmon and I’ve always had a vague suspicion that it reflects a tradition gained from pre-Islamic north Africa rather than from the Carolingian court. Never found time to really explore the question, though.
Thanks again.
Not all buildings have something to do with Venice. Italian architects and architecture were simply in demand. People wanted change. The changes in Moscow alone are remarkable.
On German studies. Apart from the few German words and the crowns, I don’t see anything that really points to German.
I just try to categorise what I see or don’t see.
Example: I see church spires with high peaks and buildings with steep roofs. This suggests a high snow load.
But what I don’t see are domed roofs or flat roofs as would be normal in the eastern world. Arabic and Greek architecture.
I don’t see any reference to the east, but everything in the west. Even the city gate resembles a known city gate almost 1 to 1. Barrier walls as seen in the VM near the castle are only built in mountainous or very hilly terrain. Otherwise they are useless. Or oriel towers on buildings and walls are western architecture.
I can’t ignore that.
Back to the hats.
Both can be seen in this fresco. The cap of the Pfaff and the Jewish hat.
Remarkably, if you look at the other pictures you come to the entrance gate. At the top right it looks as if 2 women are being crucified.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformierte_Kirche_Waltensburg#/media/Datei:Waltensburg_Kreuzigung.jpg
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformierte_Kirche_Waltensburg#
@Peter M.
It is not a clerical cap. The clerical caps of today are derived from that model, but at the time it was just a cap for people of higher status.
The pdf I linked on April 25th explains it all with a lot of references to historical depictions. It is a cap called biretta or birettum in medieval latin, that evolved to the modern priest cap and doctoral cap after the 15th century.
—
Regarding merlons: there are enough sure traces of swallowtail merlons from that era. Merlons are weak structures, so they are easily destroyed and rebuilt. However it happens that they are incorporated in some new structure when the castle is renovated, and so they are preserved until these days, as they were, and they can be surely dated:
https://d13gisi6iet4nc.cloudfront.net/odm-prev/p,fc,2018,meldola,rocca_di_meldola,c,30317,diego_baglieri.jpg
http://www.icastelli.org/tecnici/complementi_difensivi/merli/Sabbionara_03.jpg
Peter,
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘oriel towers’ but (I’ll quote a website so you can check this)
Origin of the Oriel:
This type of bay window probably originated during the Middle Ages, in both Europe and the Middle East. The oriel window may have developed from a form of porch—oriolum is the Medieval Latin word for porch or gallery.
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-an-oriel-window-177517
I don’t know where, in the Vms, you see an oriel window so just as a general remark, medieval Cairo was filled with ‘oriels’ and you still see them in 19thC and early 20thC engravings.
Also, regions of heavy snowfall extend around the world, and people’s response is much the same everywhere it does – a steep-sloping roof.
As for ‘church spires’ – I won’t try to change your mind, because I’m sure that you’re sure it’s what you’re seeing. I will say that unlike Mr. Blackhirst and others, I do not consider any image in the Vms indended to represent a form of Christian church spire.
@Guido
That’s a brilliant image for how structures can evolve over time.
My point to Peter was that before pronouncing on the intention of detail like the map’s “castle”, it is necessary first to treat it as small detail in a six-hundred year old drawing. Why suppose the image meant literally? Why presume that, if it were ‘landscape drawing’, the building can only have been in Europe? Why suppose, even so, it must have survived? You might find it interesting to research the statistics for that.
@Diane
You think of this fortress when you think of Caffa?
I can’t find any of these battlements. There’s nothing in the paintings of the conquest either. Why don’t you give me a link so I can see if we are talking about the same castle.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:THEODOSIA_01.jpg
@Stefano
Thanks for the tip on the battlements.
We all know them where temporally in question.
See:
https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3643.html
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?ll=45.17933758614477%2C13.139149429745203&z=6&mid=1y1hxOfGDFhqo97deJVvFNi7ASspTlp9v
It’s a simple priest’s cap. From about 1350.
PS: by Voynich-Ninja I am Aga.
Sorry
Pfaff = Priester, Pfarrer,
Variant from the Alemannic. (southern German region)
@Diane
Bay windows like the one you show are indeed everywhere. Even in India. But this is more of an enclosed balcony.
What I mean is a defence tower to watch the wall without having to lean out too far (side protection). But it can’t be reached from the ground either. To be seen 2x in the VM.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scharwachtturm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartizan
There is certainly snow everywhere. But again, you’re only looking at one piece of the puzzle. But it must also fit in with the other parts. You write ‘medieval Cairo’ OK, and how much snow a year? And they have flat roofs.
On the subject of the church tower. What else is it supposed to be? A rocket launcher? Mothership + tower is a church.
Round dome and tower is a mosque, but I don’t see it. OK, sometimes a nuclear power station.
As the artist shows in this fresco. The forecourt to the gate to protect the entrance. The VM_artist draws exactly the same thing on his textbook city gate.
Example:
Trento, Torre dell’Aquila Ciclo dei mesi ca.1397
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciclo_dei_mesi#/media/File:Ciclo_dei_mesi,_gennaio.jpg
Peter,
I don’t think Caffa is the subject of the “castle” in the Voynich map; it’s just one example of ‘swallowtails’ which survive on structures from other places around the Mediterranean. I’ll link to an image I used in a research-summary treating the ‘castle’ and the map’s North emblem.
https://voynichrevisionist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/archit-details-swallowtail-caffa.-remnant-of-medieval.png
If you want to see a few more examples of remnants not in western Europe, just skip down to the second part of this post – at voynichrevisionist.com
D.N. O’Donovan, ‘Reprint – Towers and swallowtails. North emblem and north roundel’, voynichrevisionist, ( February 26, 2023)
‘https //voynichrevisionist com/2023/02/26/reprint-towers-and-swallowtails-north-emblem-and-north-roundel/
When I described the sort of work needed for this research, I wasn’t theorising. 🙂
1. it is not Caffa but Sudak. Caffa has no such battlements.
2. probably renovated after 1958. work is still in progress.
We are currently working on it on Ninja.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoese_fortress,_Sudak
I think the castle is just fantasy, but with details on the rosette side where the draughtsman saw it. I know some castles that are similar.
Don’t let yourself be fooled. An example: original battlements and replica from 1960.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96k%C3%BCz_Mehmet_Pa%C5%9Fa_Kervansaray%C4%B1
I think you should take a closer look at your work.
Peter – thanks for the link to Sudak.
It was, indeed, another of the Genoese enclaves on the Black Sea, but your image of it shows no ‘swallowtails’ there, while the image to which I directed you – and which does – was certainly an image of remnant of Caffa photographed in 2011, though given recent events, they may not still exist.
Caffa was, as I suppose you know, the enclave from which plague-bearing ships are generally said to have fled, to infect ports of mainland Europe.
You might be interested to know, too, that I suggested in that same post of 2012 that the red ’emblem’ on folio 1r is token for [Tartaria] *Aquilonarius* ‘, the name given to the Franciscan Vicariate of which Caffa (not Sudak) was the centre – this according to a Franciscan inventory taken in 1350.
I’m sorry to say that I had kept the photograph, and its documentation, in hardcopy and, with much else, that file was lost to a bushfire in 2013, so the only evidence I have now is the photo as I published it at voynichimagery the year before.
If, at last other Voynicheros are starting to follow up on the work I did back then, and looking at the Black Sea in connection with cartes marine, Genoa, and the east-west trade during the fourteenth century, may I recommend again the ground-breaking study which was so helpful to me as that work progressed through to 2011-13.
Virgil Ciocîltan, The Mongols and the Black Sea Trade in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, [series] East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450, Volume: 20 (2012).
Peter, don’t hesitate to comment if you think I’ve erred. I can’t tell you how often over the years I’ve found that something another person says seems to make ‘no sense’ not because I know more, but because I know less than they do. Mark Twain once remarked that, at the age of 18, he wondered how his parents could have lived so long and learned so little, but by the age of 22 he was pleased to see they had learned so much in just five years. [smiley emoticon]
To conclude.
1. caffa has no dovetail battlements. The tower is in Sudak. The picture of the tower with the battlements is the last tower on the left below the mountain top.
You can see it in the panoramic picture from Wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoese_fortress,_Sudak#/media/File:%D0%93%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%83%D0%B5%D0%B7%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D1%84%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%86%D1%8F._%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoese_fortress,_Sudak
This is exactly the tower you show on your website. Photographed from top to bottom.
https://voynichrevisionist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/archit-details-swallowtail-caffa.-remnant-of-medieval.png
The tower can also be seen in another picture. Photographed from bottom to top.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%88%D1%82%D0%B0_%28%D0%9A%D0%B8%D0%B7-%D0%9A%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B5%29%21.JPG
The same tower (around 1959) also photographed from bottom to top. As you can see with 2 original battlements, one on the wall and one on the tower.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Sudak_Fortress_Girl_tower.jpg
You can also see what the wall once looked like in a 3D reconstruction. (Spanish company).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Parque_arqueologico_reconstruccion_2.png
No dovetail battlements before 1500. here only around 1960. again. in the first half of the 20th century it seems to have been a fashion trend.
What happened? ( summarised from various reports).
No dovetail battlements before 1500. here only around 1960. again. It seems to have been a fashion trend in the first half of the 20th century.
What happened. (summarised from various reports)
Due to the increasing number of tourists (beach and sanatorium), Moscow (CCCP) has started construction work without taking historical accuracy into account. Figurehead and fashion trend.
Shortly afterwards, the work was cancelled and responsibility was handed over to Crimea/Ukraine. This work is still being carried out today in a historically correct manner.
So the tower is to be seen as propaganda and not as a historical feature.
Addendum to the severe damage to the walls.
Russian-Turkish war in the 18th century.
Russian-English war in the 19th century.
WW1 and WW2.
But the main culprits were the locals who used the walls as a quarry to build new houses.
Therefore it is more of a reconstruction than a renovation.
On the World Heritage List.
Peter M.,
I understand why you think the photograph I showed you was from Sudak, and I can see that there’s no point in trying to change your mind, even by saying I’ve been there – so I shan’t try.
You are certainly right that there was a wave of nostaglic ‘reconstruction’ during the nineteenth century. We agree on that – and I made the same point about superficial ‘mapping’ examples from western Europe, including Italy or the Val d’Aosta.
And as I said at the outset, I wasn’t claiming the Voynich detail a reference to Caffa. My conclusion was that it is a token for Constantinople-Pera. If you saw the post I cited, you will see an example of a Latin image which employs the same ‘swallowtail’ motif as a symbolic token only. As far as I could discover, if any of the walls of Constantinople really had swallowtails, no-one has found a trace of them, and the opinion of the archaeologists I consulted was that if there had ever been ‘swallowtail’ battlements there, they would have probably been on the walls which the Genoese built ‘illegally’ – that is, in despite of the rules imposed by the Byzantines on foreigners permitted enclaves on either side of the golden horn.
Sudak certainly was another important Black Sea site, though more so after 1350 than before. I realise, too, that you feel perfectly convinced that the image I showed you was of Sudak, not Caffa, and that you are unlikely to change your idea, but it is only fair to others to repeat that you are mistaken on that point, and that the photo was *not* taken at Sudak, but in Caffa.
Whatever your ideas about that, the basic point remains that you have to deal with the questions of whether that detail on the Voynich map is (a) meant literally and (b) represents a structure still existing with such battlements today as were there in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and (c) could not be meant for any structure since erased.
Exactly the same set of problems would have t be dealt with if you thought the Voynich map contained the image of, say, a lighthouse.
@Diane
I think you are wrong. It is Soduk.
Otherwise you have to explain to me why the centre pinnacle is broken off in both pictures and why the photo you used is on the tourist side.
https://hotels24.ua/news/%D0%A1%D1%83%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F-%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C-10230995.html
The symbol you show as a figure is a chess piece and is called ‘Roch’ and it is the tower. We also had it here.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roch_%28Heraldik%29
So, and now another topic.
@Diane
To be fair. Here you have a panoramic all-round view of the fortress and harbour of Caffa.
No hills, the terrain is quite different. No renovations. 2 or 3 towers, some wall, the harbour. Looks similar, that’s about it.
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.021519,35.3996484,3a,75y,324.77h,87.66t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipMyT0C92sx8XdGEgX08vdjUX9T1w2Xqzm9RL63R!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMyT0C92sx8XdGEgX08vdjUX9T1w2Xqzm9RL63R%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-2.1388366-ya259.0863-ro0-fo100!7i8704!8i4352?entry=ttu
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.022188,35.4020481,3a,75y/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipOjPzwfI-nYKxVmbuGlNV99gm6RUEi_nuHTleLt!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOjPzwfI-nYKxVmbuGlNV99gm6RUEi_nuHTleLt%3Dw203-h146-k-no!7i1500!8i1082?entry=ttu
According to a painting from 1783, Caffa must have been huge. Unfortunately, nothing can be seen today.
Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feodosia
Peter,
Yes. Caffa was the chief Latin enclave in the Black Sea from the 1290s until the 1350s. It was a Genoese grant but a mixture of people lived there.
Venetians really had to struggle in the earlier part of that period to gain any presence in the Black Sea – through which now, much of the silk and spice routes’ traffic was re-directed after loss of Latin holdings in the Levant, and due to ongoing disruptions caused by war. During this period and through that same troubled ‘fertile crescent’ region, is also when we see emerge texts instructing professional scribes how to encipher and disguise the intention of writings. For example, one method involves separating out the elements of a cursive script.
But let me get your position clear about those ‘swallowtails’. Is it your contention that such merlons were only ever made within Latin Europe, and that their presence in a detail on the Voynich map must be (a) literal and (b) prove the structure one which existed in Latin Europe and (c) that it must be one still standing there today?
One has to admire the amount of work which went into Koen’s project to map points where he, or a member of Voynich ninja, found a photo or building with swallowtails on it today. (That’s the Google-tool map you linked to above).
There was no historical research required, though, and the majority of contributors hold a Eurocentric-Voynich theory, so the map doesn’t differentiate between authentic and later, romantic, use of those merlons, and only Koen considered the question of Latins’ fortified structures outside mainland Europe, so – as I’m sure Koen would be the first person to say – that map is certainly interesting, but should not be mistaken for any final word.
Peter, the really interesting thing about Caffa and other sites granted to the Genoese around the Black Sea is their antiquity. Some were already two thousand years old. But in was in Serai that a Venetian traders’ guide says the trader should hire a Dragoman able to speak Cuman.
If the central bit isn’t meant for the round pom-pom but a more pointy form – three of your examples suggest that, but who can be sure when the draughtsman was working to such a scale? – it might have been originally a form of petasos.
There’s a statuette from Tanagra in Boetia wearing it – that object’s in the British Museum. Other examples include a very nice one in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Those and others are also pinned by Kat Max to his/her pinterest page.
https://www.pinterest es/pin/387731849161369901/
I don’t rule out, either, it’s being a form of that ‘beret’ we see given by Romans to an older and Phoenician ‘Asclepius’ – known as Eshmun.
I’ve been a bit reluctant to mention Eshmun because I’ve a post in the pipeline which mentions him in relation to Asclepius and that post won’t go up for at least a month. Still, fair do’s…
The best ‘hatted’ examples of Eshmun are on Roman-era coins.
One is from Leptis Magna, Libya – east from Tripoli. (the linked caption as ‘Lepcis Magna’). That image suggests the pointy bits supposed to evoke his swift help (i.e. his former wings)
https://br.pinterest com/pin/24136547980389517/
Assuming the Voynich draughtsman’s hand as steady as a jeweller’s, I think that comes closest.
There is another interesting hat, on a coin dated 1stC BC, which nicely bridges use of the type in Babylonian or Assyrian with the later Turkish ‘fez’. In numisma-speak that sort of hat is a ‘low kalanthos’.
https://www wildwinds com/coins/greece/phoenicia/berytos/SNGCop_87.jpg
If the links won’t work, readers might have to go to the wildwinds site and sign in (no cost, no obligation, no subscription – just anti-nuisance precaution).
Nice image of the men’s petasos [has top-knob]
https://hatguide.co uk/petasos/
The petasos, and the zuccato were worn by ‘Byzantines’ according to one source cited by the wiki article. That source is at archive.org but gives little detail, just
“Several hats inherited from the Greeks were worn, including the Phrygian cap and the petasos”. No specifics for the medieval centuries.
In the archive.org edition I’ve looked at (one-hour borrow), it is on page 267.
Reference given by the wiki article differs a little –
Sara Pendergast and Tom Hermsen (eds.), “Headwear of the Byzantine Empire.” in *Fashion, Costume, and Culture: Clothing, Headwear, Body Decorations, and Footwear Through the Ages*, 2nd ed., vol. 2: Early Cultures Across the Globe, UXL, 2013, pp. 257-259.
Nick, I think I can say with a fair degree of confidence that the original draughtsman (who lived date and place unknown) intended the hat with ‘knob’ for the mens’ petasos, and perhaps not the version made of straw, but the military helmet, messengers and warriors (angeloi and – perhaps – male ‘hosts of heaven’?).
This won’t suit many Voynicheros, but is entirely consistent with much else I’ve found while working through the manuscript’s drawings.
This doesn’t, alone, determine when or where the drawings were first enunciated
because Greek remained a popular lingua franca through much of the lower and eastern Mediterranean sphere into the Roman- and much of the medieval era, even after the advent of Islam. Not that I’m suggesting Voynichese is or isn’t Greek; only that it would be wrong to suppose older Greek images would make no sense once the Roman empire came on the scene.
(Nick’s question has pushed me, finally, to order replacements for a couple of history-of-clothing books lost some time ago. )
About another type of headwear seen on figures in the calendar – the type about which Nick asks, ‘What kind is this, then’,
https://ciphermysteries.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/04/image-3.png
I’d suggest the Greeks’ *kausia*, whose modern descendant is known as the ‘pakol’
Side-by-side image of the Ancient and contemporary forms at
https://greekreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/kausia-and-pakol-credit-British-Museum-public-domain-wikimedia-commons-Mostafameraji-CC0-wikimedia-1392×1035.jpg
That image from an article online:
* Alexander Gale, ‘Ancient Greek Hats: Headwear in Antiquity’, Greek Reporter,
(November 7, 2023).
I’d allow that the more heavily-overpainted figures’ hats might be intended to resemble the ‘chaparon’, one cannot presume that had been the intention of the original drawings. Looking into the image of the calendar’s archer, or rather into its lineage, I found forms of tailed hat which were certainly not chaperons and which appear, even in western Europe, among peoples as far distant as Dalmatia and Spain, and by not later than the 8thC AD.
Also, true turbans were being worn by some Latins in western Europe during the fifteenth century – so while the usual theory is that the true ‘chaperon’ adapted the European peasant’s hood, it’s not necessarily the case that the Voynich drawings were meant for those.
In 1500, when Vasari painted scenes from the life of Cosimo de’ Medici, we see that he is still tries to convey a person’s intellectual lineage by the type of headwear they are given – Cosimo wears a form of ‘kausia’ while Paolo de Pozzo Toscanelli wears an authentic style of tribal ( Mahribi?) turban.. and so on.
See
https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/paolo-dal-pozzo-toscanelli/
If the treccani hotlink doesn’t work for you, try
https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/paolo-toscanelli/
or just search
Vasari Cosimo Toscanelli
– the Toscanelli detail is often reproduced.
For “in 1500” read “in the 1500s” – that work was begun late in the sixteenth century, some say c.1550, others have it begun in 1575 or so.
D.N. O’Donovan
Could be on a winner with your Greek headware; Considering that painters Ted and Maggie Taylor nee Boole along with their art ‘student’s were regular visitors to traditional living rural localities in Hellas as well as Italia at turn of the last century. All seems to fit nicely, along with other significant findings for VM proof of Boole family authorage, wouldn”t you agree?
John Sanders,
No, I don’t agree with theories that the Voynich manuscript’s drawings should be attributed to any persons who lived later than c.1438, and in my opinion although some few may be reasonably argued fifteenth-century additions, the majority were gained from “considerably older” sources (pl.) The figures in the calendars’ tiers reflect a habit of drawing both older than, and different from, the central emblems’ and while the addition of heavy pigment is obviously the last phase of the drawings’ evolution, and may be attributed to the fifteenth century, the central emblems are in an earlier style, and the tiered figures one that suggests derivation from a Hellenistic original .. in my opinion.
John, re
“the Voynich manuscript’s drawings should be attributed to any persons who lived later than c.1438,” I should have said born later than…
One exception I should mention is the drawing on folio 57v., which might possibly have been a seventeenth-century addition, though apparently drawn on a blank leaf in the manuscript. The iconographic evidence (plus Rich Santacoloma’s observations about its three centre-points) is what leads me to suggest it a very late addition – by reference to a drawing in one Kircher’s books, and what is known about the sources he used. Against this evidence, though, is McCrone’s saying they found no obvious difference in the inks used throughout for writing and drawing.
Diane: but what about the white porcelain ware, the cast iron pipes & fittings, the plumbed & lined free standing pools, Victorian lady typist, the wing shot albatross, Bouvelocque’s pelvimeter with measure stick &c..To my reckoning they point to some time even beyond your seventernth century add on contentions. PS. I could be mistaken about the vintage Coca Cola bottle on f1r near the worm holes top right.
… It would seem that people who were neither Europeans nor Mediterranean Greeks wore petasos-style hats. I’ve just come across the image of two Islamic astronomers wearing them – the source is undocumented, but I’d *guess* the image is of a Mongol-era Islamic observatory, in which case, late 13thC or 14thC.
See at 6:09 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-T5yxZWXzs
John, concerning
“…white porcelain ware, the cast iron pipes & fittings, the plumbed & lined free standing pools, Victorian lady typist, the wing shot albatross, Bouvelocque’s pelvimeter with measure stick &c..”
As I’ve said recently, when people expect to see only what is already part of their mental landscape, that’s what their memory will throw up as next-nearest thing. “What you get is what you’ll see.”
Believe it or not, it takes conscious training, and some mental discipline to remain as keenly aware of what, in a drawing or on the page, is unfamiliar. Imagination will constantly try to invent a story about it, to make its *un*familiarity less discomforting.
One technique is to accept a first, subjective impression for what it is, and then ask – seriously – ‘what else could it be?’. And when you’ve done some research and have a number of possibilities – such as, what if the ‘white porcelain’ is white-washed brick, or white stone, or just a drawing the painter was not inclined to spend time painting… etc., you might try to decide which (if any) better suits all the information from codicology, palaeography and materials science.
Have you looked at the way people represented their dividers (compass) during, say the 10th-15thC? How about in non-Latin works? Byzantine works? What if the instrument is a measuring tool and not a medical instrument at all, let alone one made so late as your imagination’s ‘match’ suggests?
Iconographic analysis isn’t like a game of happy families. You don’t always hold enough already in your hand to win.
Diane: agreed, one medical instrument of the correct size shape and appendage, doesn’t make a set of pelvic obstetric calipers; but when one takes time to input the surrounds and the narrow hipped pregnant nymph and the instrument toting
attendant for etc., the chances of said pelvimiter being anything but, be product of uncompromising blind ignorance and arrogance, so typical amongst medieval VM stalwarts like your good self madam.
John ‘ .. “like your good self Madam?” really!!? Perhaps you’ve been binge- watching Downtown Abbey or Wodehouse?
Back to the topic of hats found on VMs White Aries. An interesting explanation can be made based on the often-overlooked medieval science of heraldry. The investigation of heraldry reveals historical connections to the origins of religious tradition as well as the artist’s subtle methods of deception and confirmation.
The key to this heraldic interpretation is the VMs nymph in the inner circle of White Aries at about 10 o’clock – the one with a reddish hat, standing in a tub with blue stripes. Given the ecclesiastical and armorial heraldic interpretations represented, this constitutes a potential historical connection. In effect, the image presents the puzzle of the Genoese Gambit. Does the investigator know the armorial insignia of the pope who initiated the tradition of the cardinal’s red galero?
Intentional duality and other factors attempt to disguise the historical interpretation. Structural and positional factors based on religious and heraldic tradition are used to provide four independent, objective confirmations of the historical interpretation.
Mdm. Diane: Suggest you make a closer study of two nymphs, one with the non child bearing hips, t”other with mit calipers and take particular note of the setting. Then google up ‘Pelvimiter images’ which will be an eye opener I’m sure. You’ll see that they all bear the same general characteristics and compare favourably with those in f80r, including the Jean Louis Baudelocque 1789 pat. measure’ stick. When you’re satisfied that my hand is in fact a winner, then we can continue with other objets d’art to be found in VM that display more latter day date determining clues.
Sorry for the miss address ie., ‘madam’ in my previous post which was not meant as an insult.
@John Sanders
When you use the word ‘pelvimiter’ you create the impression that the people who did the C-14 carbon test are morons.
Just try using a different word. ‘Example gripping circle’ has been around for 2000 years and looks the same.
https://www.google.ch/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnew.e-flip.at%2FIngLehrer%2F201944%2FLehrer_Hauptkatalog_2021_22%2FpubData%2Fsource%2Fimages%2Fpages%2Fpage302.jpg&tbnid=kAT6McZcAiuvQM&vet=12ahUKEwi9xJiinq2GAxU7jv0HHfBBC7IQMyg1egUIARD7Aw..i&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnew.e-flip.at%2FIngLehrer%2F201944%2FLehrer_Hauptkatalog_2021_22%2Fpage_302.html&docid=tfFlHxRaMlj37M&w=598&h=845&itg=1&q=Greifzirkel&ved=2ahUKEwi9xJiinq2GAxU7jv0HHfBBC7IQMyg1egUIARD7Aw
Exemples
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifzirkel
On this way.
https://jbc.bj.uj.edu.pl/dlibra/doccontent?id=258834
Not you again moron baiter. Last time, I recall you sent a link depicting a three three ton forest tree puller. Get real or back to your Swiss style alchemy.
@Sanders
You are right. I’d better stay in Switzerland. Why should I argue with someone like you who has the IQ of a housefly.
Peter M: be careful, or I’ll start getting cross comments from houseflies.
@Nick
Yes, you are right. Why do I even react to something like that.
Nick: got to admit your TIC veiled threat re dumb horseflies deserves an imogi or, failing that, snide snickers from dedicated’zodiac nymps & aries hats’ commenters, all four of them by last count!
Peter M.,
I think ‘Calipers’ is the English for Greifzirkel?
I recall seeing a man haul blocks of ice using something similar, and I’ve already tried (and failed) to balance the ‘pelvimeter’ notion by citing this example of geometrical divider/compass. (By the way, she’s not a ‘woman teaching geometry’; she’s personified Geometria.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Woman_teaching_geometry.jpg
I wonder if there’s a museum somewhere that has a collection of ancient and medieval measuring instruments?
Not that it has anything to do with Nick’s post, but Alamy has an interesting image of what it calls ‘Roman to medieval’ dividers and calipers. Reconstructions, but in fact reconstructors have to work for pub-quiz-level nit-picking amateurs who know a lot about the minutiae, so they do the research. The calipers look fairly right, I think.
https://www.alamy.com/roman-to-medieval-dividers-and-calipers-reconstruction-by-daegrad-tools-image245320494.html
Yes, the reconstruction (Alamy) image seems to be pretty right.
Here is a definitely Roman version from
“Marble relief of a woodworkers shop, originally from an altar perhaps dedicated to Minerva. Tools from left to right are a frame saw, a carpenters square, a calliper, a bucksaw. … L. 1.38 m, H 58 cm. Capitoline Museum (Montemartini) Rome. late first century. [photographic-] Image see R.B. Ulrich, Roman Woodworking, (2007) Yale Uni Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10341-0. Also at archive.org.
Image reproduced in the St.Thomas Guild blogpost (blogger) 19 January 2013.
https://thomasguild.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-medieval-toolchest-compass-calliper.html
Would you believe it! Those male nymphs are getting around!
https://www.morgansrarebooks.com/products/house-flies-and-how-they-spread-disease-by-c-g-hewitt
Rich Santacoloma (re hash of 2018 comment)
Jean-Louis Baudelocque 1745-1810 was a French obstetrition who studied and practiced Medicine in Paris. He was known for making midwifery obstetrics a scientific medical dicipline. He is credited with refining Andre Levret’s 18th century “pelvic forceps” and constructing a pelvimiter for use in determining the viability of pre delivery normal child birthing potential. His anthropometric calipers were used to measure external pelvic dimensions (see f80r), the measurement obtained thus becoming known as “Baudelocque’s diameter” (external conjugate diameter of the pelvis). The “compas la mesure pelvimetrie extern…..” with stick micrometre was patented in 1889 and, in 1806, Napolean appointed Baudelocque (IQ of a housefly according to some) as first chair of obstetrics in France…..
@Diane
What you are looking for are ‘gripping pliers’. I don’t know exactly for the English one. They come in different sizes.
For example. Small tongs are for holding test tubes over fire, but also just as tongs for sugar cubes.
Large ones, for example for 2 people to carry blocks of ice or in a horse harness to pull tree trunks out of the forest. But the principle is always the same.
Examples:
https://www.google.ch/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.etsystatic.com%2F11559025%2Fr%2Fil%2F40cbb5%2F1933070592%2Fil_fullxfull.1933070592_maer.jpg&tbnid=_WJwY0MDiWdGZM&vet=10CBkQxiAoCmoXChMIuI6-qoawhgMVAAAAAB0AAAAAEAw..i&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.etsy.com%2Fde%2Fmarket%2Feis_block_zange&docid=-1s5v9FyShlYjM&w=1711&h=1711&q=Greifzange%20Eisblock&ved=0CBkQxiAoCmoXChMIuI6-qoawhgMVAAAAAB0AAAAAEAw
https://www.ebay.at/itm/194176559441
@Diane
What you were looking for ‘ice block tongs’.
You can find them in the atiquities market.
Formerly also used on the railway as rail supports.
https://www.etsy.com/ch/listing/1514123023/antike-eisblock-zange?click_key=a38c09b46abd333275d0f693b5dfd20218911455%3A1514123023&click_sum=22a69979&ref=sold_out-1&pro=1
@Peter M.
Perhaps you would consider puting your jumbo forest tree pulling tongs up again for misguided medieval Voynicheros who missed it first tine around to swoon over.
….patent date for Boudelocque’s clever device which was continually improved upon (google Pelvimetrics) up until the present (even digital variations), was in fact 1789 not 1889 as earlier misreported.
Folio 80v. When the scientist will be able to read the text. That’s how he finds out that there are painted corners in the picture. corners. The reason why the horns are painted on the picture is that Eliška’s father is also described as = goat in the text of the manuscript. He liked making love and sex and intercourse. That’s why Eliška calls him = goat. Next to the picture is written when Eliška’s father was born. (birth of a goat). ( goat = text = cocco , 37337 ). Below that is a picture where a woman is painted holding tears in her hand. ( 3 tears ) As is of course also written in the text next to the picture. So it says when Eliška’s father died. (that’s why the 3 tears are drawn there). John II from Rožmberk, he was born third in line in the family. Third birth. And so Eliška also writes about him as the third. There are also year numbers in the text. 1431 = birth of John II. from Rožmberk. In 1472 John II died. from Rožmberk. He died of the plague.
There are no pliers in the picture. Neither pelvic, nor on ice, nor on rails.
In the picture, ordinary corners are painted. (in the text it is written = R.O.E.A.M.E.Q. = substitution = ROHATEJ. (in the mother’s womb is John II. of Rožmberk.) in the text there is also the year 1430.
Of course, some texts are more complex. For example, when Eliška begins to describe his mother’s family. That’s a treat. So you must also know the Polish royal family of the Piasts.
Professor Josef: getting a little ahead of yerself with f80v tears sans shears old mate. If you turn back to f80r. Best hang on to your seat you’re in for a trick or treat courtesy Eliska Rozmberk fan, Maggie Taylor nee Bool circa. 1898.
Peter M-
I’m just beginning to survey the range – geographic and temporal – for similarly-formed tools. So long as they’re attested before 1440, they’re in.
As a literal translation for Greifzirkel, ‘gripping pliers’ is right. However, the tool called, in English, ‘gripping pliers’ is not the type meant by ‘Greifzirkel’ and so far as I have seen, was unknown in medieval times.
The relevant English terms would appear (so far) to be ‘calipers’ and ‘tongs’, though some forms of divider might be included. For holding and lifting large blocks of ice, the tool was called [a pair of] ‘tongs’.
Here’s a picture which shows blocks of ice being unloaded from the hull of a ship. A similar type might be used for stone, if the blocks weren’t too heavy.
I’m prepared to find similar tools used for similar purposes everywhere, and over many centuries before 1440, and I doubt it will assist provenancing the image – but it’s worth checking, just in case.
https://www.canalmuseum.org.uk/ice/lifting.jpg
Especially for you, Sanders.
So that you finally learn something. It’s the same as ice tongs, just for wood. It still has a chain on it. That’s the difference.
A wooden gripper for you.
https://www.vevor.de/holzzange-c_12213/vevor-holzschleuderzange-32-zoll-2-klauen-holzhebezange-robust-drehbar-p_010278184837
John Sanders. No birthing forceps are drawn in the manuscript. In the text of the manuscript folio 80v it is written when Jan II was born. from Rožmberk. and the date 1431 is written there. Next to the picture it is written that in 1430 there is a goat in the mother’s womb. That is why they are painted there = horns like the goat animal has. (why it is written that John II is a goat I wrote above, I will not repeat it).
Old mate. You can have your picture taken with some pliers or you can take a selfie with the pliers.
Try to think, for example, why so many Goats are drawn in the manuscript.
John, it is very important to read the text of the manuscript. And not make up some nonsense. As I already wrote to everyone, the text is written in the Czech language. But the code is Jewish.
@Diane
Whether alchemy, blacksmithing, wood or stone tools. Also surgical instruments from the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians. They all have something in common. All these tools have a handle like a pair of scissors.
It is precisely this handle that I do not see in the VM. The only thing that is correct in terms of time and imagery, 1400 and representation, is the compass (calipers).
That’s why it takes position 1 for me. Everything else would be speculation, unless something really better turns up.
Peter M: your oafish attempts to explain away what f80r makes abundantly clear, have more holes than a Swiss cheese or the legend of Willem Tell.
Diane: I might say in hindsight that, if only the artist had have had the foresight to place a ‘very small’ block of ice between our matronly pelvimitrist and her subject, you might be in with a chance to prove a point with your otherwise nonsensical ice “tongs” musings. Alas….!
Joseph Prof: see where your headed old mate. Thanks for the tip!
John Sanders. Okey. I was heading right by. I should have aimed for R. Sorry good old mate. (folio 80r). Horns + three tears.
Rich Santacaloma,
In re your latest Proto57discussions with Dunstan & Diane O’Donovan on likely links between Wilfrid Voynich and Sotherby’s 1903 auction of the 17th century Clavis Inferni black magic Manuscript. Leaving Diane’s arguments aside for lack of any worthwhile initiatives, I’ve picked up on something that may at least be worthy of closer scrutiny; Namely similarity between Wilfrid Voynich’s company logo taken from a fifteenth Cent. Sessa printers mark that inturn closely resembles the crown atop a serpents head on the Clavis Inferni manuscript. Note the fleur de lis design of the tiara ring which dates to Richard II. I would be pleased to hear your own thoughts on same. js
Clavis Inferni
Alththough Richard II’s crown appears on the cover of the Skinner Rankine Clavis Inferni (Grimoire of St. Cyprian) publication, a more inclusive detailed version of the Cyprianus, M.L., original can be found @ fig. 4 under cover of ‘ the Serpentine Ouroboros and Seals of the Four Demon Kings (Sotheby’s cattledog 1903 or 12?)
One can’t help but wonder what be the odds on how/why Wilfrid and an as yet unknown early 17th cent. Ms. author, could both (convenientlly) settle on a 14th century regal crown as publicity promo.
John
You might do better to address these remarks to Rich at his blog, or through the mailing list that he maintains. I don’t recall discussing “likely links between Wilfrid Voynich and Sotherby’s 1903 auction of the 17th century Clavis Inferni black magic Manuscript” at all.
What you mean by ‘initiatives’ I can’t imagine. I expect researchers to be self-motivated, and take it as a sign of a person without the means to do the work themselves that they spend their time ‘initiating’ but never produce anything useful of their own. That said, of course if anyone’s at a loss for a research-question to work on, and wants to ask me for a lead, I’m happy to share my own list of items outstanding in case anything grabs their interest.
About the ‘fleur de lys’ crown – I’ve often suspected that the motif comes from the ‘lily field’ as biblical allusion or as pre-Roman SIcilian emblem for Lilybaeum in Frederick II’s Sicilian kingdom, since it is there that he adopted it (and from which came the Latin’s version of the swallowtail merlons), the crown being passed on through the Norman/Angevin side of his lineage, the English and French monarchs.
You see its earliest version in the thirteenth century, in the frontispiece to Frederick’s De Arte Venandi cum Avibus.
There may be even earlier versions as royal insignia in Latin Europe, but that’s as far as I traced it when treating the Voynich calendar’s three crowns, two of which appear to be additions made later than the copied exemplar, and apparently later than our copy was made. Those three appear to me to be the Sassanian Persian crown (the stepped type); then the Byzantine crown (with cross on top) with the third maybe..possibly.. Antioch’s.
A group of three modified fleur-de-lys crowns were also used in the late sixteenth century as a Venetian printer’s mark, but while that might be relevant to signs used by Wilfrid, it isn’t wise to ignore chronological order when trying to argue cause and effect.
John Sanders. Michael Voynich logo. It’s simple. The cat is playing with the mouse. Michal did research on the manuscript for about 13 years. And of course he found out something important. The crown is a symbol of kings. Michal was Polish. He also certainly knew the royal family of the Pias family.
Eliška had the blood of the Piast royal family in her. After the mother.
After her father, she had the blood of the Czech royal family of Přemysl Otakar II.
That’s why the crown is there.
What does mouse mean. Diminutive of the name Michal = Miššo. (Mish). English = mouse.
What does cat mean? You have to look at the picture where it is painted. Czech nobleman – Vítek from Prčice and Plantenberg. Who is a very important ancestor of the Rožmberk family. (He is painted as a Cat).
That’s what the logo means too. That the author is playing with you. Like a cat and a mouse.
Also, what is written in the letter that is at Yale is important.
There it is written = Czech book. Code 1.2.3. (123 means that the scientist must know the Jewish substitution. And Michal Voynich was Jewish.)
Jewish Cipher = Kabbalistic Numerology System of Gematria.
All letters have their numerical value.
Diane: By lack of worthwhile initiatives, I was referring to your taking our ‘Clavis Inferni’ informant ‘Dunstan’ to task for using the apparently VM experts tabu term calf skin and parchment? when describing it’s more acceptable velum description. Truth being known, it has not yet been determined through any reliable means what his 17th century (or later) volume was laid out on. Nor, I might add, our more celebrated 15th century (or much later) Voynich Manuscript, as you and your much misguided VM Revisionist argument would have us believe. It turns out not even C14 tester Greg Hodgkins of AU was only able to take the word of others that his five test samples were Velum, when in fact they consisted of Collagen slivers from an unknown, but presumably bovine species. If you or any Voynichero guru has evidence to confirm otherwise, then I suggest you put it forward and let it speak, or else stop blathering to others on their own shortcomings.
Prof. Josef: you’ll please to pardon my impertinance as usual, but you may have overlooked the fact, and I make my point ragarding same, that the Clavis Inferni snake wearing the 14th Century regal crown on it’s mean head, ain’t accompanied by Wilfrid’s black Sessa cat or dead mouse. Upon that I rest my case, although you also might bear in mind that I’m a big fan of Eliska’s key role as original author of our manuscript’s content, and that the language has all elements that one would expect of early reginal written Czech (N/E Bohemian) language format.
….as an afterthought Diane, whilst you may not be aware, I believe that Rich was once a keen follower of CM’s VM blog when it was at it’s best, as was the attraction to his own 1910 hoax site for the doubting thomases. Alas all that we now seem to be hooked on are hackneyed subjects like Aries hats that can be put aside until we solve the as yet unyielding VM language barrier itself that even non medievals are in need of to prove its limited provinance from circa.1903. I might add Diane that whilst I admire Rich SantaColoma’s contributions and stellar research, I’m not a fan of his 1910 fake hypothesis perse. My past attempts to advance my own contrary views on his most enlightening Prov57 discussion site were obviously not taken in the manner I had envisaged, hence my discontinuance; and so, if you don’t object I’ll soldier on here, hoping to gain the initiative at some, albeit unlikely future point.
John,
The non-uterine vellum. I’m not relying on the current ‘online community’ for this, but on competent professionals who saw the manuscript and were experienced in the materials used for medieval manuscripts. Vellum was always made from the skin of a calf – and the manuscript’s date was certainly confirmed by the radiocarbon-14, but that’s all.
German-speakers only use ‘vellum’ for uterine vellum, as I’ve said, but since we are using English, ‘vellum’ applies, and was the term used without exception.
So, for example, d’Imperio describes it so, and quotes Wilfrid’s saying “Even a brief examination of the vellum upon which it was written…” (d’Imperio, Elegant.. p.3).
Referring to Friedman’s ‘hoax’ fantasy, she notes the opinion of Dr. Carter,
“Dr. AJbert H. Carter (one time technical historian of the Armv Security Agency) that, “So much time and so much expense in vellum of excellent quality went into it, it cannot be a hoax.” (ibid. p.5)
Elizebeth Friedman spoke of “the concensus of expert opinion on… thedrawings. the writing, the ink and vellum. ..” (ibid.p.8)
d’Imperio herself, speaking of the materials, says “the inks. pigments. and vellum of the manuscript..” (ibid. p. 77)
D’Imperio reprints the entry from Kraus’ catalogue as “Cipher manuscript on vellum” and of “Old limp vellum covers (now detached) (ibid. p.79)
Panofsky’s reply to Friedman’s question about the writing surface notes that he cannot speak about which animal provided the membrane but ” the medium was certainly vellum in the more general sense and characterised by a fairly coarse-grained texture.”
another scholar, a specialist in the works of Roger Bacon also also notes that “the vellum is coarse, even for the thirteenth century”.
In fact, no-one who’d seen the manuscript and had reason to claim experience in handling medieval manuscripts described the material as other than vellum.
The most recent revision of the wikipedia article has “The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438).”
I wish I could quote the Beinecke catalogue as authoritative, but it includes so much that is wrong (including Newbold’s impressionistic descriptions of the drawings, an outrageous overstatement that the manuscript was in Rudolf’s library, an entirely speculative place of manufacture unsupported by an codicological or palaeolographic evidence, that it’s having ‘parchment’ cannot be taken at face value. Among librarians, and some conservationists, it is not unknown to use the vaguest possible term to avoid being disputed. Some will not say more than ‘membrane’ for that reason. But vellum it is – and that does matter when we’re talking about time and place of manufacture.
Sorry, Nick and others – this is so far from the subject of Nick’s post. But it is important to keep a sense of perspective and keep our few real facts as facts.
John S., “… until we solve the as yet unyielding VM language barrier itself… ” How do you plan to overcome the “Great Barrier language Reef” to recognize anything? Do you start to learn an acient language? And even if Voynich had forged some nonsense and written it himself, he will have used Polish or Russian as the basis for his word combinations, languages he knew best
Diane: if I might have a final (not likely) word re your petty grievance with poor old Dunstan and his unforced gaff when using the word “calf skin” rather than your more educated terminology ‘vellum’ to describe a more specialised type of bovine parchment ie. uterine membrane, slink veau (pardon my French) or plain old “calf skin” according to y’man. Guess I could go on and name all sorts of other placenta mammilia juvenilis species that were also utilised to create vellum parchment since time immemorial, most enciuntered in mefieval times included sheep, goat, cow, pig, horse, ass, deer, bear, camel, dog, cat and derivations of same ad infinitum.
You may note that when it came time to jump start the old UofA AMS C14 dating beast with minute colagen slivers from one of the above beasties the techo. would need to have had a sound knowledge of it’s mother’s dietry habits to produce an acceptable reading within twenty years. In the case the AMS techo.Greg Hodgkins being briefed by Rene Zandburger and his gang of four, who knows what input data went into the hopper. Let us say for instance the input material consisted of samples derived from seals or other marine mammals, commonly available from the mid 19th Century, then all bets are off comes down to realistic expectations of accuracy where C14 dating’s concerned.
To put it simply, Diane has already explained it correctly, she just didn’t go into the details.
The order is papyrus, leather, parchment, paper.
According to the dictionary:
Egypt stopped supplying papyrus. They switched to leather (simple tanning). Preferably calf, goat or sheep.
From the 200th century BC the improved process and lightening of the leather by lime bleaching. Developed in the Eastern Roman city of Pergamon. Hence the name parchment.
Both skins were used. One is yellowish in colour, the other white.
However, parchment was not introduced to Western Europe until the 7th century.
Everything that was written on bleached parchment and not on leather before then certainly came from the East.
Today, the word parchment generally refers to the skin. A chemical analysis is needed to determine the difference between old bleached and normal leather.
The really expensive parchment is that of stillborn calves. That was about 30% of all calves born. This is really snow-white.
To copy ancient text still written in papyrus onto parchment, vast quantities of parchment or leather were needed. Papyrus was durable in the dry south, but did not last long in the humid north. Hence the rewriting in the monasteries.
It looks something like this.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Darius: if only Prof. Josef would stop beating about the bush and share with us what he’s been driving at including a language and structure based on a Misnaic Hebrew dialect and medieval Slavic/Czech written form as I recall. I’m a great fan mathametician George Boole whose albraic logics are still in vogue and who got a start on the potential of artifical language before his untimely demise. His works impressed many late Victorian intellects likes of physicist Geoffrey Taylor and multi lingual theorist/inventor/author Charles Hinton both Boole relatives, just to name a few. There was also George Bernard Shaw a friend of Ethel who developed a form of shorthand based on Boole’s lingua logics for his own use….Whoops goota run, nice subject to rekindle the rattled old brain cells what?
btw, even a basic knowledge of Aramaic would reveal where e.g. the connected c’s come from. The frequent occurence of double consonants ..ll.., ..dd.., ..bb.. or the short words, such as demonstrative pronouns, following a verb or noun. Spoken like this sound like doubling as in [zuwd][da’ ]: “arrogance this” or “pride this”, not as in English “this arrogance, this pride” – leaving then a portion of the barrier behind
Peter,
Two points – the shift from papyrus to parchment wasn’t a simple progression and while use of parchment begins by the 2ndC BC (I think your translation program let you down there); papyrus and parchment both continued in use even in western Europe to as late as the 11th or 12thC, though with papyrus increasingly reserved for the occasional very special document.
The whole question is confused by the same word being used, in medieval Latin, for paper as for papyrus, but we have extant examples to prove it was no simple progression like ‘papyrus out/parchment in’. I think the last papal bull written on papyrus is dated around the 11thC, but that papyrus continued in use in Sicily (and was grown there) as late as the 12thC.
Writing on leather didn’t stop with the introduction of parchment, and continues to this day.
Who began circulating the idea in Voynich studies that the only way to distinguish parchment from vellum is by laboratory analysis I don’t know. It’s not true.
What is true – as I’ve been told by people who should know – is that there is a kind of quality spectrum and at one end of that spectrum, definition becomes a little problematic. Vellum is always from the skin of a calf, though – never from sheep or goat.
The important fact, for Voynich studies, is that the Voynich quires are very obviously vellum (in the ordinary English sense of the word), and that’s a significant indication of provenance – for the quires as such, if not necessarily for their inscription. The type and quality of vellum that was produced at different times and in different regions has been studied by specialists and so becomes another indicator of the work’s provenance,
It has additional significance in that vellum was preferred when a work was expected to see constant use and fairly hard wear – that is, where durability was important. The pocket-book, folding calendar, sea-chart or world-map intended for practical daily use in the open air, rather than for display or to be used in a library, was more likely to be set onto vellum, rather than parchment. So there again, the use of vellum for the Voynich quires is significant.
John, can be that Boolean logic was object of admiration of aesthetes or linguists, but also, if you will, through the NAND gates part of every computer. To formulate expressions you need variables and a handful of logical operators. For me personally it becomes interesting when it comes to questions like e.g. the reducibility of Boolean expressions with connection to the complexity theory (but here other people were trendsetter). However, I don’t believe that somebody of his format would invest a lot of time to produce a nonsensical gag.
These people deal with other types of cipher mysteries, with those which the nature encoded (or the Father if you are religious).
And, I’m also waiting for further revelations from Prof. about Eliska and her father Johann (called Billy Goat?), I’m a fan of his theory (who isn’t?)
Speaking of computers, I think I will soon be able to introduce something that makes it possible to decode the text without in-depth knowledge of plain text language. What the heck, otherwise no one would bother to learn even two words and hundreds of people would continue to write millions of baseless posts. I would be interested in your opinion. I’ll get to it later.
Darius: Hellhath no fury like a woman scorned the saying goes, which is what transpired with George Boole’s equally ‘logical’ widow who ended up in the poor house with five hungry mouths to feed. Her only pal after being sacking from her teaching job in the early 70s was Dick Garnett curator the British Museum library reading room who was himself taken for granted by learned educators of the day…To my way of thinking, the idea of the undecipherable volume to Mary Boole, as with her feministic daughters would be payback for the years of elitist snobbery inflicted upon the family..NP uses the term curse for describing his monster and seems to be that the curse is still tormenting our Voynicherio elites as was Mary’s intention.
John, if I put my theory aside (temporarily, because I have no reason to doubt it)… Your first argument was about an artificial language, i.e. a logic-based natural language, that is created using logical production rules (something similar what Chomsy decades later tried to formalize). But that sounds very altruistic at first, there was no money to be made with something like that in the middle of the 19th century. And you mean this kind of artificially generated language was then encrypted by Mary B. and casted on an old parchment and promoted with the help of her husband, which was then much less altruistic? They were logical people. Would the effort be justifiable in relation to any expected profit? For example, if there were enough potential buyers for a script with indecipherable heroglyphs around? A hype about a script like we have it today would not be expected at all. It would be more promising to forge a well-known author, like John Dee, or even better, for example, fake love letters from Maria Stewart smuggled out of prison (story very believable because she also had conspiracy letters smuggled). All in all, the profit/effort ratio is too small for logicians.
…with the help of her daughter’s husband…
Peter M.,
about parchment and papyrus.
I’ve just come across an article written for the Antiquarian Booksellers of America in which the writer says,
[quote]
“Writing on prepared animal skins had a long history, however. Some Egyptian Fourth Dynasty texts were written on vellum and parchment. Though the Assyrians and the Babylonians impressed their cuneiform on clay tablets, they also wrote on parchment and vellum from the 6th century BC onward. Rabbinic culture equated the idea of a book with a parchment scroll. Early Islamic texts are also found on parchment.”
[end quote]
Egypt’s fourth dynasty is dated to the third millenium BC – that is, from about BC 2613 to BC 2494.
So I may owe you an apology – your translation program wasn’t as badly wrong as I supposed.
Unfortunately that author gives no references, so I cross-checking his information will take some time. In the meantime you might like to read his article,
Rich Rennicks, ‘The History Of Vellum And Parchment’, (blogpost – Dec, 29Th., 2022) for The New Antiquarian – Blog of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America.
You may notice that Rennicks side-steps the issue of vellum’s definition and distinction from parchment. [smiley]
https://www.abaa.org/blog/post/the-history-of-vellum-and-parchment
…yes of course Wilfrid was there from the early nineties when he was introduced to Dickie Garnett, the man with access to undocumented medieval script material.
He would have seen the possibilities for puting it together in manuscript form that could later find a wealth buyer. Mary and her kin meantime were mainly seeking revenge against their despised detractors but knew that the exposure to American collectors was good exposure for their hoax.
John Sanders,
I have a feeling that to protest your randomly invented calumnies will be fruitless, but nevertheless, I want to register an objection to your invention of a character for RIchard Garnett which bears no relation to what we know of him, his work in the British Museum’s reading room, his publications and his well-earned reputation as a scholar and person of integrity. The fact that he had already been been dead for some years before Wilfrid was invited, in Italy, to look over some books in a chest could explain why you are now back-dating your fantasy-narrative to include him and even Ethel Boole’s mother among those you demonise but you might try, now and then, to ask whether or not the story your imagination offers bears any relation to what is known from history, or from manuscript studies. I don’t mean to suggest that you are the only person who has resorted to an argument that the reason they cannot understand anything in manuscript is that the manuscript was produced by one or more persons “bad/mad/heretical/occult/mentally sick” persons, but as an excuse for mental laziness, and disinclination to study history, or manuscripts, its as poor now as it ever was.
Richard Garnett was spoken of well by all who knew him, and his working life was spent very much in the public eye – within the main reading room. To suppose he would value his position and reputation so low as to risk it for a stupid hoax is simply mad – and there’s no evidence he ever saw or heard of the manuscript Voynich was to buy after Garnett’s death. I adopted Garnett’s portrait as my avatar for that very reason – to remember a time I’d never heard of Beinecke MS 408.
@Diane
Thank you, definitely an interesting and educational read.
I’ve just been trawling through a few libraries myself looking for writings on papyrus.
There’s not much left, apart from from Egypt and other dry lands. All Roman, Greek, and others are copies on parchment. Historians, philosophers and others. All copies, but no originals.
This makes the whole thing look as if not much was written in Europe. It’s just not there any more. I don’t think it’s just the mould or the insects that have destroyed everything, I think it’s bacteria. Like a compost heap where the bacteria turn everything green into compost. Even papyrus into dust. The Middle Ages were not as dark as many people think.
For general reference – Italian costumes 14th-15thC
https://world4 eu/italian-14th-century-clothing/
The images can’t be copied from that site, and the article’s author has omitted details of the published sources from which “world4” has copied them.
Diane: at last someone has finally come to agree with my assessment of Greg not coming clean about his flawed C14 testing methodology which is what I have been saying over and over ad nauseam for years and, I might also add, been ragged for suggesting such nonsence by one and all, including y’ladyship… Referring to your latest post on SantaColoma’s Prov57 site of 5th inst. (Rich be a firm C14 believer). …Thanks for your having come to your senses at long last.
John, I have never criticised Greg, or his work. The problem – and the same occurred when McCrone was involved – is that instead of showing the specialists the respect they deserved, and simply handing them the brief (‘please report on inks and pigments’ or ‘please perform radiocarbon-14 tests on four sample), the persons requesting the tests interfered to the point where the experts couldn’t do the tests in the normal way. It was senseless to test those pigments McCrone were ordered to test – they were very ordinary and not telling of provenance. Same for the requirement to use mopa-mopa (!!) in the process when something like, say, gum arabic or albumen would have been more sensible. Greg was obliged to obey the wishes of unqualified persons as to where the samples should be taken, and that is what ruined the experiment in scientific terms. It doesn’t mean that the process he used to analyse the samples was flawed – I don’t for a moment believe it was, and that once the non-random samples got to the lab, the process was impeccable. Amateurs don’t realise, though, that when they treat specialists as mere hirelings that the specialists’ own reputation, in their own field, can be harmed. I have never thought it a co-incidence that McCrone dated their summary letter ‘April 1st’, and didn’t send a report in the format one normally receives scientific reports – but that doesn’t mean I don’t accept every word of their commentary, and the same is so for Greg’s analysis of those samples.
John, as I remember your doubts about Greg Hodges C14 1404/38 date range based on limited testing without input of essential C3/C4 isotopic carbon transfer data led you to claim the results could be wrong by +/- 80 years. So the latest point of time for Booles or Voynich to forge would be then 1518? Or do you claim that the script was recorded 400 years later on this old parchment? But in this case why to debate about Greg Hodges probe.
Click on my name above and then the sidebar „VoyEvgChat 1.0“ to see whether this is what you expected from Wilfrid or Mary as text author.
Darius: perhaps you’re confusing me with somebody else from the dark side!
John: sorry if I recall it wrong. But isn’t it tempting to leave the overcrowded darkness for a while and visit the other side listening to the ancients?
There are two Aries (70v-part 2, 71r) that look more similar to goats than to Aries because above all Aries have much rounder horns. But what surprises me is that there are two of them. Shouldn’t a folio symbolize singular a month? Then both cannot stand for Aries. Does anyone have an explanation for this? Diane, did you or anyone else commet on this?
Darius,
The first person to observe that the creatures were goats, not sheep, did so before I came to the study (i.e. pre 2008/9), but it didn’t suit many Voynich theories so at first the inclination was to ignore what was on the page, and ‘see’ what most people expected to see. Then there was a phase (around 2013-17) when supporters of a ‘Germanist’ theory tried to argue that lots of Germans drew goats instead of sheep. But you’re right, they are goats.
As for the ‘split months’ – no-one has ever really looked at the problem, I think. What we usually seen are rationalisations made in the context of maintaining a theoretical narrative on which the person(s) are already fixed.
In case you’re interested in my opinion about the goats… I think this is another case (like the images for copies of diagrams made for a text on star-knowledge made for Alfonso X) the diagrams’ original centres had been unacceptable to Latins, which meant they had to be replaced by more acceptable central emblems. With those in the work made for Alfonso, the early copies have the central emblems mostly cut out, and each later copy of that work sees the copyist take the central emblems from some other (mostly identified) source. I think the same sort of disjunction explains why the figures in the calendar’s tiers are not in European style, but the central emblems are – and appropriate to what we find in Italy around the 12thC or so.
I’ve done a bit of a search for calendars in which the same months are split and though I have found one, I’m not sure enough of its relevant to discuss it. No point setting a hare among the pups.
Darius Lorek: You obtain clarity, not necessarily conclusion to the sheep or goat debate from experrt opinions on the subject in an earlier CM thread ‘Voynich Aries & Greedy Goats’…I’m a goat fan by virtue of the fact that rams don’t climb trees. do they?
John – thanks for seeing if there was a post here by Nick and finding that one from 2019.
It might avoid some of the ‘groundhog day-ing’ that is such a pest in Voynich studies if I also add a little from one of the posts where I treated these details. Hardly surprising that Nick didn’t mention those analytical studies since I see that they were among the earliest I contributed, the goats being treated while I was still using a Blogger blog, before moving to wordpress and ‘Voynichimagery’.
Forgive me if I just cut-and-paste just a few sentences and quotes from Isidore here, all from one of the ‘goats and bovidae’ posts… the one published on June 15th., 2011. Can’t include the pictures here.
I should say, too, that my aim was to compare details of the drawings with one, and another, iconographic tradition to see whether or not these emblems are compatible with the theory of Latin origin, or at least a Latin context for their addition. As you’ll see, I found the details express passages from the Bible and from a number of medieval Latin works.
I’m comparing details of the Voynich goats with details in these texts – to emphasise that ancient and medieval drawings embody words – are ‘speaking images’ and are better not used as if they were mere ‘illustrations’ of adjacent writing.
[quote begins]
… stock ideas about the goat, partly through Isidore of Seville (7thC ce):
[who says]
“Wild goats (male capri, female caprae) are said to take their name because they pluck (carpendis) shrubs, or from the noise of their legs (crepitu crurum), or because they pursue difficult things (captent aspera). Wild goats live on high mountains and see from far away all who approach.”
The motif of opposed, rampant creatures (shown as in the next illustration) originated again in Mesopotamia [ historical and comparative iconographic matter omitted].
For medieval Latins, the form is again explained by reference to Isidore.
[who says]
“The goat (hircus) is a lascivious animal; it likes to butt heads and is always ready to mate. Because of its lust its eyes are slanted, from which it gets its name (hirqui are the corners of the eyes). The nature of goats is so hot that their blood can dissolve diamond”.
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae: Book 12, 1:14-15
It is noticeable that in both the illustrations from these [illustrated] Bestiaries, the two goats are distinguished by making the one darker than the other, and by marking the darker with longer, or shaggier hair across its back, which is again what one sees in fol. 70v. The Latins of the west evidently saw them as a male and female pair, which is not the case elsewhere,
[section of post omitted]
The illuminated Bestiaries invariably include one or more of these sentences:
“Goats like to live on high mountains, but also like pastures in valleys. They can see over great distances whether approaching men are harmless travellers or hunters. The caprea is the wild goat. The blood of a goat can dissolve diamond.”
“The goat’s love of high mountains represents Christ, who also loves high mountains, that is, the prophets, angels and patriarchs. As the goat feeds in the valleys, so does Christ in the church, where good works are his food. The sharp eyesight of the goat shows the omniscience of God and his perception of the tricks of the devil”.
http //bestiary ca/beasts/beast163.htm
This is not what one might expect in a tradition which later invariably imagines the devil as a goat.
[section of post omitted]
One passage which would have been known by heart to any literate person in the Jewish and in the Christian traditions is one from the book of Psalms:
“The high mountains are for the wild goats; The cliffs are a refuge for the shephanim.
(Psalm 104:18 NAU)
But what the last word means, no one is quite sure and so I leave it untranslated.
Note – included on Jun 16th., 2011. By a curious coincidence, I have today seen an online paper, in a site on the Phoenician language, where it says that the original name for Spain is thought to have come from this same word, which is said to be Phoenician. I won’t site the net reference, but those interested might like to check a more formal source
PS John, I see I missed the typo ‘site’ the net reference, when of course it should have been ‘cite’.
Diane, John, thanks for the responses. I would also be interested to know what you, Diane, found about the calendar with split months. Since I follow the Aramaic-Jewish theory (as for the origin, a later insertion of the emblems is very plausible), the months would not cover those of the Julian calendar. Strange, I have clues that the Goat month points to Eluwl (around Aug-Sept). I’ll get to it later.
Darius,
I’d prefer we talk at voynichrevisionist, or you can email me at voynichimagery – it’s gmail.com
Surrounded by experts – no way out.
Personally, I prefer the term ‘Voynichero’ to ‘Voynich expert’. It sounds a bit like a ‘Ranchero’, someone who will defend his hacienda for life, regardless of whether it produces anything or not… But first a little about the thread content, the ‘zodiac folio’. The large ring of 71r says:
“There is a Father (who is) God. He shines upon the darkness. Lord/Master of thousands. Towards/by [‘Eluwl] (Aug or Sept) a hungry man contends with anguish, fixed with a seeking heart, only faint (internal struggle and emotional weight of this period of repentance and seeking reconciliation), afraid or sick, encompassed or rather in pain. Restrain/compel yourself exceedingly from consenting to be weak. The ram not bound that strives to be sated goes to the fresh green, like moving away sorrow/distress, a burden, moving away a thick/dark cloud. The sad ones, they sweep away the distress of that. Remember to work/serve now! …“
That is around 2/3 of the text. The rest will be published (as usual with glyph to glyph, vord to vord mapping and grammatical verification) on my website.
But now we already know what the difference is between a Voynichero and a goat. Once a Voynichero has found two blades of grass on a stony field “of his own”, he will never leave his field, even if the lushest grass grows around the corner.
Darius: thanks for your heads up with my descriptive term Voynichero, aptly supported by Voynicherio that I used after Nick Pelling had given Diane her marching orders consequence of a sheep v goat comment back in ’17, from memory.
Hi Dianne, I just had a look at the world4 site you mentioned, with the right browser (I use Firefox) and extension the images can be saved pretty easily.
Finally found time to finish deciphering the big ring of 71r (published on my webpage, subpage VoyEvgChat 1.0, deciphered with the help of this AI tool and ChatGPT for grammatical verification). This should put an end to unrealistic discussions about the Zodiac emblem.
You will be able to apply the provided key to all passages and folios to reveal meaningful, ancient religious texts (short homilies) and often mocking or ridiculing comments from the scribes. Why this bold statement? Because to many passages from different sections are already doing this and the confidence interval that narrows to this key provides too high a probability for it to be still wrong. You have now the key and many passages as examples. The only obstacle to overcome between you and the solution for a passage of your choice are your linguistic talents.