At long last, Barbara Barrett’s Fortean Times article, “Voynich Under the Microscope“, has been published – and (for now, at least) it seems to be freely available on the web, which is very nice – read it quickly and buy a copy of FT anyway. 🙂
Ostensibly, it’s an update following the ORF TV documentary’s radiocarbon dating and microscopic analysis: but actually, Barbara seizes the opportunity to right a whole bunch of perceived Voynichological wrongs. For instance, she dismisses the whole “humanist hand” notion as a palaeographical misconception stemming from a 1976 comment by Rodney Dennis (a Harvard librarian) that has somehow hardened into a mistaken orthodoxy. She also dismisses all late-15th century theories (she’s doubtless far too polite to say *cough* “Leonardo”) based on the radiocarbon dating range, though whether she also intended to include 1465 (*cough* “Averlino”) I’m not sure – radiocarbon is good stuff, but is it really that good?
She has a little bit of a dig at unnamed bloggers’ casting doubts on the whole “written on fresh vellum” thing, keeping things fallaciously open in order to maintain otherwise untenable dating hypotheses. Well… I at least am still waiting for the data to turn up before I jump. As an exercise in historical reasoning, all the varied kinds of evidence we get have to dovetail with each other: and in this case, the evidence train may have left the station, but it most definitely has not yet arrived at its destination. The VMs’ patina formation, calcination, vellum gelatinization, etc – these are things I would really love to read about, but will that paper ever get written? Barbara seems to imply that she suspects it won’t, caught in a kind of research ownership turf war… but can that really be true? If true, what an abysmal waste! 🙁
Enjoy! 🙂
PS: though I liked Barbara’s mixed metaphor of “deflating a sacred cow”, it did also make me wonder what manner of holy flatus it was inflated with in the first place…
The only thing I don’t like about the article is the stab at the conservator, who in reality is one of the friendliest and most cooperative persons I have met during the course of the project. I don’t think that this was necessary and I don’t know where it is coming from.
All the rest will be sorted out eventually, hopefully sooner than later.
Any comment on her dismissal of the merlons as proof for a Northern Italy origin?
Rene: I’m really not sure what the deal is there, none if it seems to make a lot of sense. Really, how are we supposed to stand on the shoulders of giants if those same giants keep bickering amongst themselves? I’m pretty sure that some good, useful work has been done here – it would just be nice to see the data and see what story they actually tell, rather than having to rely on second-hand accounts of them. 🙁
Christopher: Personally, I’ve never argued that the swallowtail merlons in and of themselves are a sufficient proof of Northern Italy origin – that would be fairly absurd. They might certainly contribute to such a proof, particularly if you can successfully attribute them to a particular castello and/or town (*cough* Milan). 🙂 But let’s not get too carried away! 🙂
Christopher, these merlons are still predominantly present in N.Italy. It is all a matter of probability and concepts like ‘proof’ and ‘dismissal’ simply don’t apply.
Nick, my comment #1 really says it all…
My problem is not with the merlons not being definite proof. Rather, it seems to me that she disagrees with the merlons being evidence at all, which I don’t understand. The line in question is this:
As I understand it, she is arguing against something which contains the word “probably” as if that word weren’t there.
Am I just misinterpreting her words?
Its certainly true that most of our extant examples of the swallowtail merlon are in Italy, but its impossible to know whether it re-creates an antique custom, or is the result of imitating buildings elsewhere, to which the style was native. I wish the Barberini’s ancestral town hadn’t been treated by Florence as carthage had been by the Romans – whole place wiped from the map, and the soil sown with salt. Sad. But that’s where we might have found an answer to the whole riddle. Ditto if the Romans, and then the Barberini hadn’t gussied up the old centre at Praeneste.
Ah well, what can you do?
Rene & Christopher: arguably the most emotive word in the Voynichological dictionary is “prove”, particularly when linked with ideas of historical probability (i.e. art history proofs rather than scientific proofs). Conversely, the most silently powerful word is “disproof”: however, this doesn’t get wheeled out much, which is a shame… =:-o
Diane: sure, you can (with a little bit of digging) construct conceptual lineages for most representations and forms back to the Romans, Greeks, Mesopotamians, etc, so it is entirely possible that the swallowtail merlons were a conscious late 13th or 14th century re-creation of some Roman funerary or architectural conceit. The issue is that inbetween (say) 450 and (say) 1400, most people didn’t give the Romans a second thought, so for the VMs to have been originally from Antiquity, some kind of historically-invisible copying tradition needs to have kept its ideas alive. Hence, you start requiring either (a) novelistic millennia-spanning copyist traditions, such as alchemical brotherhoods etc, or (b) that the VMs was well-known but referred to under another name altogether. I’m not sure I see any evidence for either of those just yet.
There are lots of illustrated MSS which have drawings of castles, walls and cities. From my very limited experience I would say that the majority of these have straight merlons. Those few that I have seen (with swallow-tail merlons) tend to originate from Northern Italy. There was one in this blog quite recently. I also mentioned BL MS Sloane 4016 at some occasion.
I have seen German MSS with castle drawings, but not a single one with swallow-tail merlons. Same for S.Italian MSS.
Of course, it would be much more interesting to have such an analysis from a real expert on the matter, rather than from my very limited exposure to MS illustations.
Rene: even if we are not experts on swallowtail merlons, perhaps we now know enough about them in the context of the VMs, insofar as we are sure that even though they would support a Northern Italian connection, their apparent presence will never really comprise strong enough evidence to constitute a definitive proof on its own… unless we just happen to be able to identify the specific castle. 🙂
Hey, we’re all amateur experts here 🙂
By the way – how come that the VMs merlons are even taken as evidence for its origin in the first place? Surely, a person of any nationality from anywhere in the world could draw a castle from Northern Italy? I’ve always pondered this.
But trying to identify “the castle” is picking one structure which is most feasibly a real one, and leaving off all the other towers, buildings, walls, terraces, spires and so on, which are clearly at best inspired by real structures. The center of the rosettes page, for instance, is almost certainly a imaginary set of towers. Inspired by various architectural features in different places? No doubt. But you have six mis-matched onion-domed towers, no walls, in a pattern, with a bizarre canopy of some kind floating above. My point is: it is easy to ignore the structures which cannot be real, and go to the one which is closest to real, then look for that one.
I think this is the wrong view of the problem. The overriding imaginative… inspired but imaginative… nature of these buildings (and the Voynich as a whole) strongly implies that that are not real. Expecting a match to a real building has not only been fruitless for a century, but draws one away from a much better clue: It’s clearly not a real place… and so, why is it not real? Fantasies and mythology have been very popular before and through the time the vellum was prepared… to ignore them, is ignoring many more probable scenarios than real geography. But fantasy gets left out of consideration, which is, a mistake in my opinion.
http://proto57.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/a-trip-to-the-rosettes/
http://www.santa-coloma.net/voynich_drebbel/rosette_structures.html
http://www.santa-coloma.net/voynich_drebbel/utopias/utopias.html
So don’t forget the fantasy: It was well loved from Gilgamesh, through the Greeks, through Prestor John, all the Utopias… to today. Fantasy and Mythology have always been overpowering influences on literature and art. To discount this possibility in the Voynich would be (is) a mistake.
Rich: I think that separating out fact, fantasy, and wishful/hopeful thinking (and then holding them well apart from each other) is a modern conceit, one for the most part not shared with the early Renaissance, where thought was both more fluid and less sophisticated than today. In the VMs’ drawings, I think we can all catch glimpses of this deft anti-categorical fluidity: but the difficult part is working out what they signified to/for their author in his/her original context… =:-o
Yes… agreed.
Nick – the comment is not reasonable
‘you can..construct conceptual lineages .. etc’.
There’s no need to *construct* a lineage, since it is pretty obvious where we got e.g. the acanthus motif. The fact that it fell from favour among the sort of people who made and bought books doesn’t mean it was maintained by secret brotherhoods, just that it fell to the status of a minority group’s tradition, which later again became popular.
The literate European of the fourteenth century thought it was tres moderne to go hunting out and reviving old ideas, books and art-styles. Hell, Durer was busy creating figures from the Hierogylphica of Horapollo. No secret brotherhood there either.
Just fashion for the retro.
Oh – and I forgot to mention that other thing again: that the diagrams in the Zibaldone da Canal, which dates to 1312, use the swallow-tail merlon as an habitual detail in the mathematical drawings. Now this actually relevant, since the trade described is chiefly between Venice and Tunis, and we know that Venice got some of its more sophisticated maths from North Africa, because Smith mentions it in discussing the technique of long division. He notes that the habit of setting out the solution to a problem of that kind as the model of a ship came from Nth Africa etc. But the towers are also maths diagrams, and could very well have come from the same sources. Which leads one to posit that maths texts were among those which Constantine brought…though we don’t know.
and more to the point, the swallow tail merlons appear everywhere as sign of imperium, not only the Holy Roman emperor’s but by extension they can be used on medieval maps to denote a ‘imperial’ boundary of the classical or even earlier period, retrospectively. We see them used for the ‘red snake’ wall-and-towers of Gorgan, which were built by the Sasanids. And of course actual examples as the previous correspondent so rightly notes, occur in what is now Russia. Images of crusader castles, and some of those remaining also show their use. So Barbara is right – their use in the Vms may be token only, not literal depiction.
PS – I’d love to read Barbara Barrett’s article, but the paywall is up again. Anyone care to (*cough*) email me?