Jesuit libraries and archives…

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Following on from Philip Neal’s translations, I wondered to myself: what might be lurking in Jesuit archives (specifically to do with Jacobus de Tepenecz / Sinapius)? And so I thought I’d have a quick snoop…

For Jesuitica in general, sjweb.info has a useful list of Jesuit archives, of which the big three are (1) Georgetown University’s numerous Special Collections [Maryland District of Columbia]; (2) Loyola University Archives [Chicago]; and (3) the Maurits Sabbe Library at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven [Belgium]. Incidentally, Georgetown has a very cool favicon, hats off to their web designer. 🙂

A slightly wider web-trawl yields more resources: an EBIB article on a giant Jesuit library in Poland (with an online catalogue), and the Library Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt am Main. Doubtless there are many more to be found, but that is at least a starting point.

As an aside, the Society of Jesus was born at the height of the Republic of Letters, with its missionary empire spanning the globe supported by extensive letters (I saw Matteo Ricci’s Lettere [1580-1609] flash past during my unproductive Jesuit catalogue searching), so in some ways one might expect that Sinapius might be plugged in to that whole network. Yet he emerged from the [presumably unlettered] kitchen staff at Krumlov, and may have not been primarily inclined to write as much as others. It may well be that there simply are no Sinapius letters out there to be found (probably a bit of Melnik-related decree signing, but not a great deal else).

Yet on the other (Paracelsian) side of Yates’ Rosicrucian divide, we see Georg Baresch’s 1637 letter to Athanasius Kircher which praised the latter’s “unprecedented efforts for the republic of letters”. Plainly the idea of the Republic of Letters was still very much alive in the pre-Kircher years: but the question inevitably remains, hanging awkwardly in the air – where have all those letters gone? Were they lost or destroyed, or are many simply lying uncatalogued in private archives?

Incidentally, Christopher Clavius is a famous letter-writing Jesuit mathematician: while François De Aguilon first used the word “stereographic” (for astrolabe-style projections), and his book on optics (Opticorum libri sex philosophis juxta ac mathematicis utiles ) had illustrations by Peter Paul Rubens.

For the voluminous scientific correspondence of Peiresc (1580-1637) who left about 3200 letters and Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) who left around 1100, you might try trawling through the “Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne”, 16 vols. (1932-1986) or Ismaël Boulliau’s (1605-1694) 5000 unpublished letters. Even though these may well all fall just past our particular time-frame of interest, you’ll never know if you don’t look. [For Boulliau, see Robert Hatch’s chapter 4 in The formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe].

I don’t know: basically, I experience alternating waves of optimism and pessimism about the Voynich Manuscript’s post-1600 history – there’s too little and too late. I get the feeling that Sinapius is a bit of a cul-de-sac, and that we should be looking earlier and towards Southern France for a brief flash of our mysterious herbal manuscript inside the correspondence of the day. But what letters are out there? How would we ever find them?

Bellaso’s challenge ciphers (updated)…

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After I recently mentioned Bellaso’s set of seven challenge ciphers from 1564 on this blog, Augusto Buonafalce very kindly emailed me with scans of Bellaso’s three challenge ciphers from 1555. I’ve now transcribed these (as best I can) and have added them to the existing Bellaso cipher transcriptions page.

I do acknowledge that the font that my theme currently uses for “preformatted” text is too small (thanks Dennis!), but the ciphertexts are only really there to be cut-and-pasted into whatever hacky cryptanalysis package you choose. Incidentally, one neat little online crypto cipher package is John’s Javascript Secret-Code Systems webpage, which has a number of unsolved ciphertexts, such as the three “Richard Feynman” challenge ciphertexts (copied onto a Cipher Mysteries page).

New translations…

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Back in May this year, I suggested to my friend Philip Neal that a really useful Voynich research thing he could do would be to translate the passages relating to Jacobus Tepenecz (Sinapius) that Jorge Stolfi once copied from Schmidl’s (1754) Historiæ Societatis Jesu Provinciæ Bohemiæ (though Stolfi omitted to the section III 75 concerning Melnik) from Latin. The documentation around Sinapius is sketchy (to say the the least), yet he is arguably the earliest physically-confirmed owner of the Voynich Manuscript (even if Jan Hurych does suspect his signature might be a fake): and Schmidl’s “historical” account of the Jesuits in Prague is the main source of information we have on this Imperial Distiller.

So today, it was a delightful surprise to receive an email from Philip, pointing me at his spiffy new translations of all the primary 17th & 18th century Latin sources relating to the Voynich Manuscript – not just the passages from Schmidl, but also the Baresch, Marci and Kinner letters to Athanasius Kircher (the ones which Rene Zandbergen famously helped to uncover).

Just as I hoped, I learned plenty of new stuff from Philip’s translation of Schmidl: for example, that Sinapius was such a devout Catholic and supporter of the Jesuits in Prague that he even published his own Catholic Confession book in 1609 – though no copy has yet surfaced of this, it may well be that nobody has thought to look for it in religious libraries (it’s apparently not in WorldCat, for example). (Of course, the odds are that it will say nothing useful, but it would be interesting to see it nonetheless.) Sinapius was also buried in a marble tomb “next to the altar of the Annunciation” in Prague, which I presume is in the magnificent Church of Our Lady before Tyn where Tycho Brahe was buried in that same decade.

Interestingly, rather than try to produce the most technically accurate translation, Philip has tried to render both the text and the tone of each letter / passage within modern English usage, while removing all his technical translation notes to separate webpages. I think this was both a bold and a good decision, and found his notes just as fascinating as the translations themselves – but I suppose I would, wouldn’t I?

One thing Philip wasn’t aware of (which deserves mentioning independently) is Kircher’s “heliotrope”, mentioned in Marci’s 1640 letter to Kircher. The marvellous “heliotropic plant” which Kircher claimed to have swapped with an Arabic merchant in Marseille “for a watch so small that it was contained within a ring” (“Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything”, Paula Findlen (2004), p.13) was the talk of the day: this was a nightshade whose seeds allegedly “followed the motions of the sun when affixed to a cork bobbing in water”, in a kind of magnet-like way. This seems to have occupied the letters of natural philosophers even more than Galileo’s trial (from the same period). Yet to this day, nobody knows if Kircher was conning everyone with this heliotrope, or if he had been conned by someone else (but was perhaps unable to admit it to himself).

Then again, Kircher’s inclusion of the “cat piano” in his Musurgia Universalis might be a bit of a giveaway that he was a sucker for a tall tail tale. 🙂

Pseudo-science and The Curse of the Voynich…

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A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).

In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg & Schinner (who both took one transcription of the Voynich out of the manuscript’s codicological context) deserve a far more skeptical reception than they received from the mainstream press. Yet Schmeh is also critical of my Filarete hypothesis, seeing it as merely the most recent pseudo-scientific approach in a long line of (let’s face it) Voynich cranks. That’s OK by me: I see his piece as merely the most recent shallow summary from a long line of journalists who failed to engage with the Voynich Manuscript, and I hope that’s similarly OK by him. 🙂

With The Curse of the Voynich, I took what business writers sometimes call an “open kimono” approach (though if you know where “transparency” ends and “Japanese flasher” begins, please say), insofar as I tried to make plain all the evidence and observations relevant to my thesis, and not to hide any murky stuff beneath layers of rhetoric. Many Voynichologists, particularly those with an axe to grind, responded by drawing their swords (if that isn’t mixing too many bladed metaphors) and charging: yet most of the attacks have been ad hominems rather than ad argumentums, which is a shame.

I suspect Schmeh sees my book as pseudoscience because of a category error. Rather than being a scientific proof, “The Curse” is actually a detailed historical hypothesis (who made it, when they made it, how they made it, what need it satisfied, how its cipher system began and evolved, what subsequently happened to it, etc) announcing an ongoing art historical research programme (developing and testing those ideas through archival and analytical study). The kind of deductive scientific proof (A.K.A. a “smoking gun”) which people like Schmeh demand would most likely come as a final stage, not as a first stage.

So, Klaus: while I welcome your skepticism in the VMs arena, I can only suggest that – as far as The Curse goes – your train perhaps arrived a little before the station was built. 😮

As far as the details in Schmeh’s article go, many are outdated (and wrong): for example, the notion of a 20th century forgery has been very strongly refuted by letters found in Athanasius Kircher’s archive. The dates Schmeh gives for Anthony Ascham are for the (more famous) 17th century Anthony Ascham, not the (less famous) 16th century one proposed by Leonell Strong. The idea that there are zero corrections in the VMs has also been proved wrong. John Tiltman was a non-machine cipher specialist (one of the finest ever, in fact), and only indirectly connected with Colossus.

If my German was better, I could doubtless produce more, but none of that (nor even his dismissal of my hypothesis!) is really the main point here. What I most object to about Schmeh’s piece is his repeated assertion that we still know almost nothing about the VMs, which he uses to support his skeptical position. Actually, we’ve come a very long way in the last few years – but the online hullabaloo tends to hide this.

The wisdom of a crowded forum…

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On the one hand, “Linus’ Law” asserts that if enough people collaborate to solve a problem, it becomes simple – hence open source software. On the other, even though more people have eyeballed the Voynich Manuscript in the last two years (thanks to the Beinecke Library’s scans posted on the Internet) than in the previous four centuries, the overall level of discourse seems to have gone dramatically downhill over that same period.

I used to believe that everyone’s contribution was potentially worthwhile, because anyone might see a connection that helps to unlock a door: but this inclusive liberal viewpoint isn’t tenable any more, basically because you have to be able to read the VMs’ pictures in a pretty sophisticated way to get even close.

The curious rubbed-through hole on f34r/f34v of the Voynich Manuscript

Even for the very brightest, there are numerous traps to fall in: such as Sergio Toresella’s belief that the hole rubbed through the tree-trunk-like thing on f34r signals the mad scribe’s sexual frustration (it would require a great deal of work to rub such a neatly arranged hole through vellum). Perhaps Sergio is right (he’s extremely close in almost every other way): but this presumes a very specific kind of irrationality – and so the observation relies very heavily on the hypothesis to validate it, which is a kind of circular argument.

All of which colours my reaction to Zachary1392’s post on the Facepunch Studios forums: when looking at the same hole rubbed through on f34r/f34v, he sees it as a representation of female genitalia. Which (having then thought about it some more) he then concludes we should perhaps worship, as part of a Voynich religion.

In some ways, it’s an optimistic moment: a very sophisticated opinion informed by Sergio Toresella’s lifetime of studying medieval herbals, being duplicated by some amusing forum troll. But it’s also a pessimistic moment, because it gets us nowhere: “Greeman” on the same forum similarly points out:

Haha it was probably some shmuck from 600 years ago who thought;

“I bet if I write some crazy letters and draw some real fucked up stuff on a book someone will find it years later and totally freak out.”

It worked, you all got trolled from an Ancient Pothead.

Good Game.

While “Trogdon” helpfully suggested that, because one word looks like “crop” (EVA chol), the VMs might instead be a Photoshop tutorial. And Draicia thinks the whole thing might be a viral advertisement (but for what? Another Dan Brown novel? Have book publishers suddenly evolved?)

I think that all this forum chatter demonstrates something quite basic: that Linus’ Law sucks for things you can’t easily decompose. Reductionism is such a fundamental tenet of scientific thought that nobody even thinks to mention it these days – but the awkward dizzying truth is that to get started on difficult problems, scientists actually have to actively exercise their scientific imagination to generate novel decompositions (which may or may not be right), within which the hard slog of execution can be split up amongst a virtual cloud of volunteers / academics /  workers. Hence string theory, etc.

Linus’ Law fails for the VMs because nobody wants to sign up to any apparently mad theory before committing any serious amount of effort to testing it. But the truth underlying such an odd object will most likely appear somewhat alien (if not outright demented) to our present day minds – and so any person proposing the hypothesis is naturally expected to do all the hard work of proving it.

The sad thing about the VMs is that we do now have a collection of basic art historical facts and observations which tell us broadly where and when the VMs came from: but these point to so prosaic a subset of answers that almost nobody wants them to be true. Far more interesting to put your trust in David Icke’s, Dan Burisch’s, or Gordon Rugg’s brand of alternate history: they’re scientists, aren’t they? (Errrrrrrm…)

Put it all together, and I think the wisdom of the crowded forums perhaps points to the antithesis of Linus’ Law: that if enough people help to trample on every suggestion, nothing is simple. Or perhaps even simpler: given enough troll eyeballs, everything becomes worthless junk. Oh well. 🙁

Dorabella: one step forward, two steps back…

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According to a nice little 2004 New Scientist article by Kevin Jones (Professor of Music at Kingston University, my most recent alma mater), even though Elgar composed his cipher note to Dora Penny in 1897, he appears to have reused the same 24-token cipher alphabet in an exercise book 30 years later. (Kevin Jones doesn’t mention in which collection the exercise book is to be found: there’s a nice listing of Elgar’s notes and immense collection of letters here.)

As with the majority of self-conceived ciphers, it was born of a simple idea:-

[Elgar] listed the symbols used in the Dorabella cipher matched against the letters of the alphabet. The cipher follows a simple pattern, with single, double and triple E-like characters, each in eight possible orientations – upright, rotated 45 degrees clockwise, 90 degrees clockwise and so on. This gives a total of 24 potential characters, and as with many ciphers, I and J share a single character, as do U and V.

Elgar then tries it out on some samples, which when deciphered read:-

M-A-R-C-O E-L-G-A-R (Marco was his pet spaniel) and A V-E-R-Y O-L-D C-Y-P-H-E-R. But when applied to the Dorabella cipher this key does not generate anything that makes obvious sense.

It certainly was “a very old cypher” (probably 30+ years old at that stage). But there’s something a bit back-to-front about this whole thing. If he was reusing an old cipher, why would he be going through the palaver of trying it out again? He would surely have gone through his experimenting phase decades before? But according to Kevin Jones’ subsequent notes to the 2007 BBC Proms:-

Elgar scribbled an 18 character code using the same cipher symbols in the column of printed programme notes for a concert he attended at Crystal Palace in April 1886 – opposite a musical example from Liszt’s “Les Preludes”. (Copy at the Elgar Birthplace Museum.) Annotations on other pages are not ciphered – so it’s possible that this may have been added at a later date.

And so even though this was used as a cipher circa 1886 (probably), and post 1927 (probably), was it also one circa 1897? All these scraps muddy the water once again – which is perhaps what Elgar was hoping to achieve. I just wish we knew what Dora Penny’s favourite song was…

Interestingly, one of the comments to this page was by Peter Brooks, who said he was “increasingly confident that the message consists of two parts separated by an evident period on the last line”, with a first apart in Latin and the second in some kind of vertically arranged English. Personally, I’m not sure how that would be any less obscure than the solution proposed by Eric Sams discussed here recently: but I’m sure Peter Brooks has plenty of sensible reasons to back his notion up.

Following on from the Proms post, “The Elgar Apostle” (“the Elgar on-line newspaper”) held a Dorabella cipher competition, which “seven individuals were brave enough to submit entries”.

The final Dorabella bombshell of the day comes from Peter Brooks, who noted (in his comment) that “there is a moderated Yahoo group Elgar-Cipher“. If you want to find out more about the Dorabella Cipher, this is surely the first place you’d want to head towards.

Incidentally, the “enigma” of the 1899 “Enigma Variations” was Elgar’s claim that they all played in counterpoint to a well-known melody (which he never disclosed, and which has never been worked out) – might the Dorabella Cipher be enciphering this tune, too? (The timing would be basically right.)

PPS: the German WWII Enigma machine was (apparently) specifically named after the Enigma Variations: yet another non-obvious connection between music and cryptography…

The mystery of Bellaso’s ciphers…

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A little while back, I asked Augusto Buonafalce about Renaissance cryptographer Giovan Battista Bellaso’s challenge ciphers, completely unaware that he seems to have published more articles on them than anyone else on the planet. (Shame on me for not subscribing to Cryptologia, I really ought to.)

In fact, Bellaso published two sets of challenge ciphers in his cryptography manuals: a set of three long ones in 1553 (which I don’t have copies of), and a set of seven short ones in 1564 (which I do). For me, the mystery is why nobody has cracked any of these in 450 years… compared to the Voynich Manuscript’s multilayered (and horrendously tangled) cryptography, they can’t be that hard, surely?

Here’s a link to the short page I’ve just put up on Bellaso’s challenge ciphers. Don’t forget that the “=” signs at the line-ends are almost certainly hyphens, and not part of the cipher. Good luck! 😉

BL cipher manuscript update…

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I’ve just heard back from the British Library Manuscript department about BL MS Add. 10035, “The Subtelty of Witches”, which I mentioned here a few days ago: “unfortunately it does not begin in English. The whole of the manuscript is written in cipher.”

So: was Eric Sams mistaken? Might the British Library actually have two unreadable books? Well… after a rather longer trawl through the various BL catalogues, I’ll say that “The Subtelty of Witches” is still the best candidate. There are plenty of enciphered letters there, but nothing else of any major size: all the same, I should probably consult Sheila Richards’ (1973) book “Secret writing in the public records, Henry VIII-George II” (actually 1519-1738), just in case there’s any fleeting reference to it there.

Incidentally, Eric Sams wrote a piece for Musical Times in 1970 (now online) on Edward Elgar’s ‘Dorabella’ Cipher, where he suggested the 87 encrypted symbols could be decrypted to read…

STARTS: LARKS! IT’S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, α, β
BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

Sorry, but somehow I just don’t think Sams quite nailed it on this particular occasion. Sams also wrote a 1987 note explaining his reasoning in more detail: but that just seems a bit too eager to tie things up. All the same, he wraps up the final note by pretty much coming round to my opinion:-

[…] But what if that cipher-table served another purpose?

Dr. Percy Young’s standard biography tells us that Elgar used a music cipher; the names of people he disliked were thus consigned to the Demon’s Chorus in The Dream of Gerontius. An Oxford professor of music, Sir Jack Westrup, has suggested that Elgar used cipher in the Enigma Variations.

Perhaps interested readers would like to consider on what lines (or spaces) ex 3 might make a music cipher?

However, a musicological Ventris has yet to take up this challenge: what haunting melody might be encrypted there? As Elgar said to Dora Penny, “I thought you of all people would guess it“… but what was her favourite song? 😉

A new VMs hypothesis…

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Halfway through Blunt and Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal”, a small lightbulb flickered briefly to life in my tired head. And it was to do with the VMs’ Occitan marginalia, something that has bugged me for years…

To my codicological eyes, the VMs appears to have had a busy time in the 15th century (with three or four inquisitive owners), a very quiet time for most of the 16th century, before an intense flurry of activity circa 1600 (when I think its folios were numbered and the “heavy paint” layer added), which is just about when its semi-documented life at the Rudolfine court begins.

But, like an alcoholic after a particularly mad binge, there’s a whole chunk of time missing in the middle – in fact, about a century’s worth. What happened then? Who owned it? How did the VMs apparently get from Occitania (probably Southern France) to Prague? And – most crucially of all – why did nobody think fit to mention such an intriguing object?

Now: even though in many ways I hate what I call “join-the-dots histories”, when evidence is completely lacking (as is the case here) you really don’t have much choice. Basically, pragmatic hypotheses (which historians need so as to be even remotely strategic about what they look to for evidence) have to come from somewhere: and so here is my (possibly new) suggestion for how the VMs travelled from Northern Italy to Southern France and onwards towards the Rudolfine Imperial court at Prague. It may be rubbish, but it is at least testable rubbish. 🙂

The dots I propose to conveniently join together in a line (along which the VMs might well have travelled) are:-

  • Guillaume Pellicier [or Pellissier, or Pelicier] (c. 1490–1568), Bishop of Montpellier, who was a French diplomat in Venice between 1539 and 1542, from where he brought back Greek, Hebrew and Syriac books. He was also interested in botany; was imprisoned for a while (it’s a long story…); and was a long-time patron and friend of….
  • Guillaume Rondelet [or Rondeletius] (1507-1566), who famously taught medicine and botany at the University of Montpellier, and wrote a definitive book on fish. Rondelet bequeathed his collection of manuscripts to his student…
  • Matthias [de] L’Obel (Lobelius), (1538-1616) a young (but soon to be famous) botanist; he travelled to the North, settling first in Holland, then England, then Holland, and then England again.

From there you can get the VMs to Prague in any number of ways, though many (of course) would like it to have been carried there by Dee & Kelley. While that last part is still in the realms of wishful thinking, I’m more interested here in working out if the Montpellier side of things might be true… but how?

Further reading-wise, here are the lowest hanging fruits of all: HTML text resources.

  • I’ve placed a copy of Rev. Charles Kingsley’s chapter 14 of “Health and Eduction” (1874) “Rondelet, The Huguenot Naturalist” on the Cipher Mysteries website here. By modern standards, the text is a bit cloying, let’s say: but an OK starting point nonetheless.
  • A relatively up-to-date summary of Guillaume Rondelet’s life (in French) is here.

For correspondence, all three men have stuff in various archives: Pellicier’s Venetian correspondence, Rondelet’s (mainly medical) letters were published in his “Opera Omnia Medica” (?), while L’Obel (from whose name we get “Lobelia”, incidentally) similarly has a few letters out there (his patron Baron Zouche, the 16th century apothecary Jean Mouton, etc).

As with most questions about French letters, Gallica has plenty of scans of creaky old books which may (or may not) be useful. Here are some quick links to start with, sorted by date (rather than by usefulness):-

  • 1554: Libri de piscibus marinis, in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt. Rondelet, Guillaume. Matthiam Bonhomme (Lugduni). Online here.
  • 1557: Histoire des plantes, en laquelle est contenue la description entière des herbes… non seulement de celles qui croissent en ce païs, mais aussi des autres estrangères qui viennent en usage de médecine. Dodoens, Rembert (1517-1585). Impr. de J. Loe (Anvers). Online here.
  • 1572: Illustrations de Commentaires de M. Pierre André Matthiole, médecin Senois, sur les six livres de Ped. Dioscoride anazarbeen de la matière médicinale. Mattioli, Pierandrea (1500-1577). Guillaume Rouillé (Lyon). Online here.
  • 1579: Nicolai Dortomanni Arnhemij Libri duo. De causis & effectibus thermarum belilucanarum. / Carmina G. Salmuth, C. Heintzelij, A. Widholtzii. Dortoman, Nicolas. Apud Carolum Pesnot (Lugduni). Online here.
  • 1581: Plantarum seu Stirpium icones. De Lobel, Matthias. C. Plantini (Antuerpiae). Online here.
  • 1841: Notes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de Lyon, 1483-1546. T. 1.  Péricaud, Antoine (1782-1867). impr. de Mougin-Rusand (Lyon). Online here.
  • 1877: Étude historique sur l’École de droit de Montpellier, 1160-1793, d’après les documents originaux,…  Germain, Alexandre-Charles. Boehm et fils (Montpellier). Online here.
  • 1903: Les ambassadeurs français permanents au XVIe siècle. Vindry, Fleury. H. Champion (Paris). Online here. (Text starts on page 5)
  • 1911-1914 Bullaire de l’église de Maguelone. [Volume 1]. Rouquette, Julien (1871-1927). Online here.

Books to look at for Guillaume Pellicier (note the various spellings!) would seem to be:-

  1. 1886: Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pelicier évêque de Montpellier, ambassadeur de François Ier à Venise. Henri Auguste Omont. A. Picard, Paris. In the Internet Archive here.
  2. 1891: Inventaire de la bibliotheque de Guillaume Pelicier, eveque de Montpellier (1529-1568). Henri Omont, in Revue des Bibliotheques, I, pp. 161-172. “Inv. used. Montpellier. Clergy, booklist printed”, according to this page on French wills. Gallica has apparently not yet scanned the 1891 edition (while the earliest currently on Google Books is 1897), which is a huge shame as this is the first place I’d like to look… oh well. 🙁
  3. 1899: Correspondance politique de Guillaume Pellicier: ambassadeur de France à Venise 1540-1542. Tausserat-Radel, Alexandre (1858-1921). Paris, F. Alcan.
  4. 1969: La diplomatique francaise vers le milieu du XVIe siecle, d’apres la correspondance de Guillaume Pellicier, eveque de Montpellier, ambassadeur de Francois Ier a Venise 1539-1542. J. Zeller. Slatkine Reprints.
  5. 1986: Les copistes de Guillaume Pellicier, éveque de Montpellier <1490-1567>. Annaclara Cataldi Palau, in Scriptorium 40, pp. 225-237. According to this website, “The author’s research on the Greek manuscripts in the library of Guillaume Pélicier, the French ambassador to Venice between 1539-42, relied heavily upon analysis of the watermarks to supplement other palaeographical and documentary evidence“
  6. 1986: Les vicissitudes de la collection de manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pellicier. Annaclara Cataldi Palau, in Scriptorium 40 (1), pp.32-53
  7. ????: Manoscritti greci della collezione di Guillaume Pellicier, Vescovo di Montpellier (ca. 1490-1568) : “Disiecta membra”. (I don’t know where it’s from, but ULRLS has a copy).

(Incidentally, Annaclara Cataldi Palau is a Professor at King’s College London, whose research interests are “Greek palaeography and history of book production“: so I presume that the last article was placed in the University of London Library system directly by her, in case you can’t find it anywhere else.)

Books which tend to get cited on Guillaume Rondelet are:-

  1. 1582: Vita Gulielmi Rondeletti, L. Joubert [Rondelet’s first biographer], in Opera Latina, 2 (Lyon, 1582), pp. 186-93. [Nancy Siraisi briefly discusses Joubert’s account in her “History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning” (2007), pp.126-127]
  2. 1865: Rondelet et ses Disciples ou la botanique à Montpellier au XVIe siècle. Discours prononcé dans la séance solennelle de rentrée des Facultés et de l’École supérieure de pharmacie de Montpellier, le 15 novembre 1865 par J.-E. Planchon, directeur de l’École de pharmacie. If you’re interested, there’s a copy on AbeBooks for a paltry £363.04: or you can go to the Natural History Museum’s library instead (which is what I plan to do). 🙂
  3. 1899: La botanique en provence au XVIe siecle, II, Pierre Pena et Mathias de Lobel. L. Legré (Marseilles).
  4. 1926: Un manuscrit médical du XVIe siècle, contenant principalement des œuvres de Guillaume Rondelet: Notes bibliographique et biographiques, Suzanne Solente (with E. Jeanselme and Dr. M. Lanselle), in Bulletin de la Societe Francaise d’histoire de la Medecine, 20. pp. 3-36
  5. 1936: Guillaume Rondelet, J. M. Oppenheimer, in Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 4, pp. 817-34.
  6. 1965: Guillaume Rondelet, C. Dulieu, in Clio medica, 1, pp. 89-111.

I’ll return to Lobelius another day (I’m still reeling from all the above). As it is, I’ve already jeopardised my membership of the Bloggers Union by including too much useful information in a single post. :-O

Review of “The Illustrated Herbal”…

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It’s an oldie, but a goodie: first published in 1979, Wilfrid Blunt and Sandra Raphael’s “The Illustrated Herbal” (particularly the revised 1994 edition) is a must-buy first read for any Voynich Manuscript would-be herbal decipherer – if only to make plain by how much its herbal pages differ from other contemporary herbals.

Of course, Blunt has sneaked a few pictures from the VMs in there (pp. 88-91); and though he cites Alfred Werner’s (1963) observation that one page in the water section is like “a plumber’s dream“, he quickly cautions that “…’Heath Robinson nightmare’ might seem more appropriate” (which is fair enough). But as for commenting on the plants themselves, Blunt is content to pass them by at some speed, in much the same way that Eric Sams fled from the ciphertext. You’ll just have to find your own answers, I guess.

What did I learn? A new way of looking at plants began to emerge from around 1380, which a handful of artists were plugged into – but which most plainly weren’t. For example, even Giotto wasn’t au fait with it (though he “painted birds and other animals with a tolerable naturalism, [he] still made trees like outsize herbs”, p.57), but Leonardo (circa 1500) certainly was (and I would add Van Eyck too). As far as herbals go, if you look at Rinio’s Liber de Simplicibus (1419) [which John Ruskin adored], or even Serapion the Younger’s Herbolario volgare (better known as the Carrara herbal, MS Egerton 2020) (1390-1400), I think there’s something ‘graphic’ about the rendering, that we might today recognise as a “draughtsman-like aesthetic”. But far, far beneath the soaring flights of these stunning, draw-what-you-see masterpieces, the pedestrian copy-what-you-know world of medieval herbals stumbled on regardless.

Voynich Manuscript f17r and f17v, side-by-side
Medieval and modern, on the front and back of the same folio!

In the big scheme of things, I would say that what we see in the Voynich herbal pages is annoying because it fails to fit in either of these two easy pigeonholes – neither the high flyers nor the low achievers. And so the VMs actually has a chasm on each side: and because it contains occasional flashes of both medievalism and modernity, it – doubly annoyingly – lets people read either (or indeed both!) of those into what they see. Yet in order for those flashes of modernity to be present at all, it has to postdate 1380, and must have had an author who was at least aware of both levels: while its overall drawing style matches 15th century stylistic conventions far, far more closely than it does 16th century ones. But there you go.

Blunt and Raphael’s work is built on two lifetimes’ worth of herbal scholarship and reflection: and, nicely, is happy to adopt a light tone when it suits the needs of the passage. This seems to happen particularly when quoting Charles Singer from the 1920s, such as Singer’s description of the Leiden manuscript as “a futile work, with its unrecognisable figures and incomprehensible vocabulary” (the VMs isn’t completely alone, then).

At the end of reading “The Illustrated Herbal”, I came away with my head buzzing with stuff, but none it about where the VMs’ herbals came from – Blunt’s Wittgensteinian “if you can’t say anything useful, stay silent” position on the VMs’ plants has a lot to commend it. No, what I was most inspired by was his discussion of the transmission of ideas about herbals during the 16th century: but I’ll have to return to that in another post (shortly)…