Diving ever further down the Jehan le Bègue / Giovanni Alcherio rabbit hole, I found an exceptionally solid and persuasive paper by Inès Villela-Petit, who did a full modern transcription of the le Bègue manuscript as part of her doctoral work. Her reason for doing this was that the partial edition in Merrifield (1849) was inadequate, and that too many of Merrifield’s guesses had become ossified through unthinking repetition in the literature (my phrasing, not hers). A fresh pair of eyes was long overdue!
Hence her paper “Copies, Reworkings, and Renewals in Late Medieval Recipe Books” (translated well into English by Jilleen Nadolny) helpfully summarises a lot of Villela-Petit’s conclusions, while also situating them in a broader recipe manuscript context. I highly recommend it as a – modern – basis for approaching Paris BN Lat 6741. Her core argument is that le Bègue was much more of a copyist than Merrifield thought, and that the actual compiler was Giovanni Alcherio in Milan.
Quaterni
For a long time, I had been labouring under the incorrect impression that Alcherio had compiled a vernacular Italian treatise that le Bègue had translated into Latin. Certainly, seventeen of the recipes had originally been in Italian: but with Villela-Petit’s revised reading of Alcherio as the actual compiler and le Bègue as the copyist (with only a tiny number of recipes added by le Bègue at the end), this falls down. So it seems that Alcherio compiled his recipe collection in Latin after all.
Another important thing Villela-Petit helped me pick up on was that the original (i.e. pre-le Bègue) document organisation was what le Bègue called quaterni – loose bifolios, arranged in sequence, but unbound. When I first saw that word, I thought it meant something more like pecia (typically four leaves unbound/bound into a single quire/gathering, and rented out to students). But no, her close reading of the text reveals that a quaternus here refers specifically to a single loose bifolio.
So it turns out that quaterni may be a feature of Northern Italian workshop recipe manuscript culture in the 14th and 15th centuries. Baroni and Travaglio’s “Considerazioni e proposte per una metodologia di analisi dei ricettari di tecniche dell’arte e dell’artigianato. Note per una lettura e interpretazione” (published via the awesomely bodacious peer-reviewed open source journal Studi di Memofonte) discusses this in pp. 52-53. They point out that this kind of workshop (quaternus-based) order of recipes can give rise to a series of phenomena that “frequentemente passare inosservata” (often pass unnoticed), most obviously when the same quaterni later get (mis-)bound for preservation.
Mainly, though, Baroni and Travaglio highlight composite forms of what is often called “booklet” structure, which sits halfway between quaterni sequences and pecia. Codicologically, a “booklet” is a self-contained quire covering a single topic, often with pages left blank at the end. These too seem to be a typical workshop layout for practicality. Examples of manuscripts with booklet-based structure include:
- Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS D 437 inf.
- Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS 1195 (Liber de coloribus qui ponuntur in carta)
- Ferrara, Biblioteca Ariostea, ms. Cl.II.147 (the pseudo-Savonarola recipe book)
- Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 2861 (the Manoscritto Bolognese)
But the direct parallels with le Bègue and Alcherio would be in manuscripts exhibiting signs of having originally (pre-binding) had a more obviously pure quaterni structure. And these will take a little time to dig up (though I believe that when we do, we will end up with at least five clear examples). At the very least, I think we can all agree that though it’s a rare thing, it did actually exist.
Lisa Fagin Davis’ “Singulions”
The reason this is interesting for cipher mysteries aficionados is that Lisa Fagin Davis recently proposed a similar sequential-bifolio arrangement for the Voynich Manuscript. Her (as yet unpublished) paper suggests (or, rather, will suggest) that an LSA analysis of page adjacency text metrics implies that some (if not all) of the Voynich Manuscript was arranged as a sequence of “singulions” (a fairly rare codicological term meaning “single bifolio quires”). Though at the time of the lecture where she announced this, she had only been able to find a single example of an actual codex with this specific structure (from West Africa).
But this appears to be the same thing that le Bègue called quaterni in 1436! Which may or may not be an extraordinary coincidence.
Now, I’m not yet convinced that the whole of the Voynich Manuscript was compiled in this way, but it would seem to be a good fit for Q20 (the starred paragraph section) at the very least. Perhaps if we can find more manuscripts with physical codicological evidence of having originally (pre-binding) been formed of a sequence of quaterni, we will be on more solid inferential ground here. Studi di Memofonte 16 (2016) was devoted entirely to articles relating to recipe manuscripts, so that’s probably a good place to start.
Very exciting stuff, Nick.
It’s true that we have quite a number of examples of pages and quires left unbound for years – sometimes hundreds of years – before being made into a bound volume – I recall the library of St.Catherine in Sinai contained a good number – but this mode of production does seem to me to be in accord with what we see in Beinecke MS 408 – an intelligent assemblage of matter from a number of distinctly different sources. The next general question is surely whether this practice is unique to the Italian peninsula or is found as a practical method for copying at any other time.
After all, not all the Voynich quires are – or could ever have been – quaterions.
Thanks for this reference, Nick. Unfortunately, I don’t see that the author is arguing for singulion structure of the hypothesized original. On p. 168, she writes “the annotations suggest that in its original form, the compilation comprised a series of loose quires or fascicules (the text refers in passing to quaterni on f. 28r, 32v, 33r, 34r, 35r, etc.).” The term “quaterni” would almost certainly refer to a quaternion, or two nested bifolia making four leaves. We’ll all keep looking! As I said in my lecture, though, it is extremely unlikely that an unbound group of singulions would survive to the present day. The few examples I found in African collections only survived because they were carefully preserved in their wrappers by private owners over the centuries.
Nick,
You’ve spent years exploring Quire 20 and the star-marked paragraphs, often interpreting them as Italian recipes, especially in the style of Caterina Sforza. But the Voynich manuscript is not a recipe book. It’s a structured, encrypted genealogical and symbolic text, written in homophonic substitution cipher.
Voynich himself referred to it as a “Bohemian book,” and the cipher used in the manuscript matches the one he used in his own correspondence. The stars in Q20 are not recipe markers — they are symbolic typological flags.
For example, the word “Stár” appears in Q20. It has multiple meanings, but one is crucial: it marks age. In folio 105r, the third paragraph mentions that Eliška’s mother died at the age of 51. Eliška draws a star (Stár) and writes about who died. The word “Slona” also appears — in Eliška’s dialect, it means “s lůna” (from the womb), indicating birth. Another variant, “Scona” or “Skona,” means someone passed away. So the star or flower symbol marks either birth or death, depending on context.
There’s also a reference to Eliška’s lineage. She writes that her family descends from Vítek — specifically Vítek of Prčice and Plankenberk. In the manuscript, she spells it in Old Czech as “Svítka,” which becomes “Cvítka” with a simple letter shift.
Continuing down the recipe path is a significant waste of time. The manuscript is far deeper than it appears, and its linguistic structure confirms it.
Josef Zlatoděj
Lisa Fagin Davis: I’ll try asking Ines Villela-Petit about this directly. My post didn’t claim that a singulion-sequenced manuscript would likely still be extant in that form, but rather – broadly as Baroni and Travaglio suggested – that a (mis-)bound version of a set of recipes might display anomalous behaviours that a perceptive researcher might well be able to pick up on.
About sheets/fascicles/quaterni left unbound. This is Nick’s current topic not mine, but two non-Voynich specialists whose thoughts would be valuable – if they’d agree to share any – are Erik Kwakkel, now at the University of Leiden (for medieval and European examples) and Alin Suciu, (for pre-medieval works, particularly from the eastern side of the Mediterranean).
Suciu’s erudition positively makes my teeth ache. Here’s one of his codicology-oriented blog-posts.
https://alinsuciu.com/2018/05/09/lecture-at-matenadaran-yerevan-may-12-2018/
A simple question such as ‘were copied sections often left unbound, and if so are any known left in that state for decades?’ could well be answered in some detail by either man… so long as you don’t utter that poisonous word ‘Voynich’
I’ll also try to find again a reference I once found, to a practice in Egypt where people hawked around a selection of books, customers able to commission copies made of the particular sections they fancied from one or another.
One is also reminded of other kinds of workshops and work-sheets
Originally “quaternus”/”quaternum” was a synonim for “quaternio” (quaternion), but it soon became a word for “quire”. Actually “quire” is from Latin “quaternum” through French.
In the Late Middle Ages, you could go to the market and buy a “quaternum”, that is a lone, unbound quire of paper or vellum sheets.
That is why the most common meaning of “quaderno” in modern Italian is “notebook”.
Well, actually the T.L.I.O. (Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini), which is based on sources from the XI century to 1375, has “notebook” as the first meaning of “quaderno” (meaning 1 is “notebook”, meaning 1.1 is “quire, usually made of four sheets”).
Less prestigious works could be written on “quaterni”. A work could be published piece by piece: those pieces could be called “quaterni”. I am not sure about the situation at time of the VM, though.
Diane – I wrote Erik Kwakkel, who is a good friend of mine, some time ago about this question, and he responded that he has never seen a manuscript comprised entirely of singulions, either bound or unbound. Neither have I. But as ever, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially for a format that would be so ephemeral and fragile.
Lisa – yours was a question about structure, I think. I was thinking rather w about time elapsing between inscription of quires and their being bound.
I have thought for years that the Voynich manuscript was written as bifolios, copied from an exemplar which also had a bifolio structure. I think of it in terms of a Tolkien metaphor.
Bilbo writes a book with text written across bifolios and surrounded by decorative images. Frodo copies the book bifolio for bifolio, first reproducing the images and attempting to reproduce the text window down to the level of the paragraph. But Bilbo wrote the exemplar in the Cirth Daeron while Frodo writes his copy in the Tengwar of Feanor, and characters of the Tengwar consist of more strokes than the Cirth. Furthermore, Frodo’s bifolios are not always the same size as Bilbo’s bifolios.
Where Frodo’s bifolios are large, or there is little text on the page, the spacious Currier language A results. Where his bifolios are smaller, he has too little space for each paragraph and the result is Currier language B and the cramped appearance very evident in the final quire of the VMS (note that crampedness is a feature of the paragraphs). There is also no reason why Frodo should reach the end of a line where Bilbo does (in fact, normally he would not). This, I suggest, is the reason for the very distinctive Voynich character frequencies observed initially and finally in page, paragraph and line. I am working on hypotheses suggested by this analysis, but with no success so far.
Philip’s vivid image of the copying process has recalled another glimpse into tht environment which I meant to share a while ago. It’s from a book by Robert T. Gunther, better known for his book about the Ashmolean’s astrolabes.
Describing marks in a manuscript copied at an early English abbey he sheds light on how they were placed and located.
“… it is therefore clear that books the titles of which began with ‘m’ *and* medical books [whose subject begins with ‘m’] were press-marked “m” (followed by a number) …
[As the Abbey’s library has been conceptually reconstructed] ..Dr. James supposes .a long room, with desks projecting at right angles from the walls.. and books arranged on [these?] sloping desks, on which they lay, on their sides.
In Curse… (2006) p.17 Nick notes oddities in some of the Vms’ quire numbers; some have an ‘m’-like element in them.
So I wonder now – What if these were the copyist’s own note of where his exemplar lay, or of the subject informing that given section, or the first letter from the name supposed that of an original author?
Quoted passage from Robert T. Gunther- better known for his book on the Ashmolean’s astrolabes.
The Herbal of Apuleius Barbarus… (etc.) book published in 1925. (p.xiv)