Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

Want to know about Antonio Guayneri? As always, Step One is to open Thorndike’s “History of Magic & Experimental Science” Book IV, and go straight to the index. OK: “Guaineri, Antonio, Chap. XLVII”. Let’s go, boiz.

Thorndike largely contents himself with extracting the list of Guaineri’s (many) individual books from the 1481 editio princeps printed at Pavia, as per the copy he examined “in the E. C. Streeter collection at the New York Academy of Medicine”. As far as manuscript copies of the de balneis go, he lists only Turin 1200 (H-II-16; Pasini Lat. 533), 15th century (I think this is dated 1451, ref “V K 10”?).

We also know that Guayneri’s de balneis appears in Pavia MS Aldini 488 (f70v-f74r) [not available online], and BNF Nouv. Acq. Lat 211 [1469, accessible online, but only in black and white]. There’s a 1481 copy online here (which seems to have postdated the 1481 incunabulum). A manuscript copy appears in the 1553 Venetian Giunta print compilation of balneological books (probably the most accessible source), where the text seems very close to MS Aldini 488 (which is in turn very close to BNF Nouv Acq Lat 211).

Guayneri began working on his de balneis around 1435 (when he accompanied his patron to a thermal bath), and then completed it in 1439, according to this article (in Italian). Hence from my Voynichese perspective, I find this interesting because his de balneis is both broadly in the right date range, and short enough to match the general size of the Voynich’s Q13B.

Annoyingly, while Thorndike lists the chapter headings for Michele Savonarola’s book on thermal baths in one of his appendices, he doesn’t do the same for Guayneri’s de balneis (probably because of its brevity). So I’m going to have to summarise its contents the hard way (dash and darn it).

Regardless, the first thing I do is to try to find the earliest copy of any given text I can. So… can I track down the MS Torino 1200 mentioned by Thorndike?

MS Torino 1200 [1451]

According to a 1922 inventory of Italian manuscripts, the contents of MS Torino 1200 (H-II-16, Cod Cart Lat, sec XV, cc 141) are/were as follows (all in Latin):

1. Marco Marsilio da S. Sofia. Receptae super I-IV. Avicennae de febribus.
2. Calvis Paulus de Mudila. (Calvi Paolo da Modena). Liber de urinis.
3. Guainerio, Antonio. De Balneis Aquensibus in Ducatu Montisferrati.
4. Guainerio, Antonio. Tractatus de mulierum aegritudinibus.
5. Bernerio Gerardo. Consultationes medicae.
6. Petrus de Ebeno (Pietro d’Abano). Tractatus de venenis, eorumque medela.
7. Gentili, Gentile. Tractatus de proportione medicinarum.
8. Guainerio, Antonio. Tractatus de fluxibus.

However, I can’t tell whether this manuscript was a victim of the infamous fire of 1904: though many mss were destroyed, many others were rescued or restored. (The Biblioteca was also bombed in 1942.) I found a picture of a similar Torino manuscript that had suffered fire damage in this (Italian) article:

The silver lining from the 1904 Turin fire was the rapid increase in the specialist knowledge of how to restore badly damaged manuscripts. For example, the above fragment was restored to this state:

As an aside, there are some truly epic pictures showing the Italian restorers’ numerous tricks at the end of this other (Italian) article, which I highly recommend.

As an aside, the only Antonio Guayneri manuscripts I found in Italian library catalogues were:

• Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Manoscritti, A 108 inf. (1474), which had just about everything else Guayneri wrote (but not his De balneis); and
• Modena, Biblioteca Estense – Universitaria, Estense, Lat. 607 = alfa.9.13, which only had his De calculosa passione.

I can only really assume (unless you know better?) that MS Torino 1200 was destroyed, probably in the 1942 bombing. So I’m instead going to work with BNF Nouv Acq Lat 211, which seems to be a 1469 copy of a 1454 copy.

BNF Nouv Acq Lat 211 [1469]

You might think that the smart transcription shortcut would be to grab a copy of the 1553 Giunta balneological compilation “De Balneis omnia quae extant” (fol. 43 ff.) and see how close that gets you. However, if you do, you’ll quickly find that the text has plenty of itty bitty Latin abbreviations while the OCR is far from perfect. And then you’ll find that there are plenty of places where the print version seems to have taken plenty of liberties with the text (presumably to make it more palatable to a print audience more than a century later). And the abbreviations are used in an entirely different way.

So rather than map this 16th century print rendering onto the 1469 manuscript copy, what I actually ended up doing was using the 1553 Giunta book to roughly guide me as I transcribed the 1469 manuscript (if that makes sense).

So, here’s a quick initial transcription (i.e. I haven’t corrected this at all) to give you a feeling of what we’re looking at here, in all its funky abbreviated glory. More to follow in other posts, particularly on the middle chapters:

ANTONII GUAYNERII PAPIENSIS DE BALNEIS AQUIS CIVITATIS
ANTIQUE QUE IN MARCHIONATU MONTISFERRATI SITA SU[N]T
TRACTATUS INCIPIT
Quia no[n]nulli viri doctissimi, quor[um]da[m] balneo[rum] i[n] Italia existe[n]tiu[m] virtutes desc[ri]pseru[n]t p[ro]p[ter] mirabiles ip[s]o[rum] effectus, h[ab]ita su[n]t adeo famosa, vt a re[m]otissimis p[ar]tib[us], caterua langue[n]tium dicti[ua] [con]fluat. Su[n]t ite[m] alia de q[ui]b[us] tum p[ro]p[ter] guerras, tum p[ro]p[ter] euenientes ta[m] febro[?]  pestes, apud modernos nulla sc[ri]ptura rep[er]it[ur]. Et n[isi] sup[er] excelle[n]tis virtutes essent, de eis a[m]plius me[n]tio nulla fieret.
[*] Haec quoq[ue] que dixi tam virtuosa balnea, i[n] marchio[n]atu Mo[n]tisferrati i[n] mobilissimo olim aeque sane co[m]itatu, in simulatio vni[us] ciuitatis, que ab ip[s]is aq[ui]s cal[d]is nome[n] retinuit sita sunt.
[*] Ea enim Aqui ciuitas illi[us] antiquissimi co[m]ptat[us] caput e[st].
[*] Et q[uia] illie aqui calide i[n] numerabilib[us] eg[ritudini]bus s[u]b ueniebant, aque sane antiq[ui]tus vocaba[n]t[ur]. Et ad huc aq[ui] sane co[m]itat[us] dict[us] e[st]. Fuit hec qua[m] dixi ta[m] antiqua ciuitas, a, siluio p[ri]mo latino[rum] rege, [con]dita, vt ei[us] i[n] analib[orum] legi. Et quo et tu[n]c syluia dicta e[st].
[*] Post adue[n]tum vero [Christi], hi semp[er] fidelissimi fuere [christi]ani: sic vt [?]esis i[n] eis nu[n]q[uam] rep[er]ta sit. Cui[us] c[aus]a beat[us] papa siluester ep[iscop]alem sedem sibi [con]donauit. A quo deinceps syluestris dicta e[st].
[*] Ve[rum] totie[n]s hec misella ciuitas euersa e[st]: vt tam silie, q[uam] siluest[r]e, no[min]ibus abolitis, antiquu[m] solu[m] aq[ui]s retinuit nome[n]
[*] Que octi[n]gentos tam a[n]nos sub dictione sup[er]illustris [...]

[...]

Capitulu[m] [secundu]m. De balneo[rum] ext[ri]nseco[rum] notificatio[n]e, at que et qualis sit tam ext[ri]nseco[rum] qu[em] i[n]t[ri]nseco[rum] minera, quib[us] quoq[ue] i[n] generali eg[ri]tudinib[us] [con][uener?]unt.

[...]

Capitulu[m] [tertiu]m. Que si[n]t balneo[rum] p[re]sc[ri]pto[rum] p[ro]p[ri]etates
ac quibus p[ar]ticularibus eg[ri]tudinibus [con]ueniunt.

[...]

Capitulum [quartu]m. Qua[lit]er ta[m] balneis, q[uam] ceno, q[uam] stufa vti debe[amus],
& de modo bibendi aqua[m] fontis.

[...]

Capitulum [quintu]m. De mo[do] succurre[n]di, accidentib[us], q[uo] ex his balneis accidu[n]t, qn p[er]fectiora su[n]t. Et q[ua]ntu[m] sit tibi te[m]pus i[m]mora[n]du[m].

[...]

[*] Explicit tractatus pro balneis de aqu[ui]s. Editus p[er] claru[s] artui[?] et medicine doctore[m] magistru[m] Antoniu[m] de guaynariis papiensius
Finitus, die xxi maii, 1454, hora xvii. Laus deo.

Even if we can’t (yet) read the Voynich Manuscript’s inscrutable ‘Voynichese’ text, and even if many (if not most) of its bifolios appear to be misordered and misbound, there are still a handful of places where we can (I think) reconstruct its original bifolio nesting. (Despite my own intensive efforts to do this for the whole manuscript circa 2006, it seems that no codicologist has attempted to do this in any useful way in the 15 years since.)

In my opinion, these few places offer us far more structural information to help guide our search for a precursor (source) document than if we were looking at a single isolated bifolio. And if we can find a precursor document, then we (hopefully) have a what is effectively a Rosetta Stone for Voynichese: so the stakes are quite high.

In other posts, I’ve described (what Glen Claston termed) “Q13B”, which appears to be a two-bifolio illustrated balneological ‘book’ (i.e. what we would now call a ‘chapter’) misordered and misbound within the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (quire 13). This post attempts to deconstruct Q13B into its inner sections, to support the work of comparing Q13B with candidate treatises in future posts.

f84r

This first page of our two-bifolio set appears to depict three linked baths: the top bath level has six (probably stone) arches, the middle bath level appears elongated, while the lower bath is more broadly circular.

The top bath has some kind of piping at the left that seems to be funnelling water into it. The middle bath has three distinctive “pipe tops” or “circular pots”, which may possibly be connected to some medicinal practice. The lower bath’s second nymph from the left appears to be holding a ring or a circular object, which may again possibly be connected to some medicinal practice. The lower bath’s rightmost nymph appears to have orange-red hair.

To my eyes, the green, solid blue and solid red paint appear to be later additions, but the patchier blue, cheek rouge, and orange-red hair appear to be original colouring.

f84v-f78r

The many visual symmetries of this pair of pages strongly suggests (as I proposed back in 2006) that the two pages originally sat facing each other in the original (intended) nesting/binding order.

The pair of pages appear to be depicting a thermal bath complex made up of four natural baths, connected via some kind of (possibly terracotta?) piping. Each page appears to be made up of two sizeable paragraphs, with additional ‘label’ text attached to each of the four individual baths. Both pairs of baths appear to drain out to the bottom of their respective pages.

There is a curious unidentified detail close to the right hand edge of the lower bath on f84v (partially concealed by the ugly green paint). There is also a curious rock-like detail at the bottom-left edge of the lower bath on f78r.

f78v-f81r

This is the pair of pages that famously flagged (to John Grove many years ago?) that something tricky was going on with the bifolio order in Q13. The drawing crosses the central fold, strongly indicating that this was originally the central bifolio of a quire or gathering. It appears to depict a thermal bath complex, with a higher bath apparently with a plinth-like base (top right), a constructed bath (with seven arches), and where both baths feed into a lower bath also with a plinth (bottom right).

f81v-f75r

This pair of pages appears to depict two separate thermal baths. There is a pot at the bottom right of the left page’s bath. The right-hand page has two baths, the topmost with a vertical design and an exaggerated wolkenband at the top, possibly suggesting that it may be fed by rainwater rather than by a spring. This is connected to a smaller lower bath.

There is a large pot at the bottom of the top bath (with a nymph sitting in it); and a nymph halfway down the top bath appears to be holding a strange stake-like object.

f75v

The final page of the two-bifolio set depicts a pair of baths, the top one with an exaggerated wolkenband feeding into a horizontally elongated bath. The lower of the pair of baths appears more naturalistic.

There is a pot partially hidden behind the leftmost nymph in the top bath. A nymph in the middle of the lower bath appears to be holding a sponge, possibly cleaning another nymph’s back. The nymph at the top right of the lower bath also seems to have a very distinctive hair arrangement (not sure if this can be dated).

Q13B’s bath complexes?

Having gone through Q13B’s pages in this way, I’m struck by the high likelihood that each connected set of baths is visually representing a specific thermal bath complex. In which case, the ordered sequence of bath complexes would seem to be:

• a set of three baths, arches at the topmost level
• a set of four baths
• a set of three baths, one possibly with arched windows
• a set of one bath
• a set of two baths
• a set of two baths

Furthermore, the pot-like visual motif that appears in several of the baths also seems likely to me to be flagging some kind of medicinal usage / behaviour associated with that individual bath. Many thermal baths of the era had specific medicinal practices associated with them, so this would not be a huge surprise.

As with just about all historical research, simply wanting to find things out isn’t enough: you really have to have a plan to guide you. And while I can see an awful lot of people who want to crack the Voynich Manuscript, I can’t currently see many who are trying to do so guided by anything that could be described as a plan.

Me and plans? We go a long way back. I’ve spent a long time trying to understand the Voynich’s drawings; a long time trying to understand its heavily structured writing; a long time trying to understand its codicology and development; a long time trying to find historical precedents (in terms of both visual and structural parallels); and a long time trying to reconstruct its path “from vellum to Prague“. But I think it’s fair to say that these different trees have all yielded small, stony fruit.

So it’s time for a new angle, a new direction of attack: this post describes my new plan that I’ve spent a few months figuring out. Make of it what you will (but wish me luck).

Quire 13 = Quire 13A + Quire 13B

When I first started looking for balneological parallels to the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (Quire 13) back in the early 2000s, I found nothing remotely resembling it. Q13’s mix of balneo plus strange tubing plus strange body-function pieces seemed a world away from the (generally plaintext, generally unremarkable) documents of the first half of the 15th century (which are often little more than Latin “Rules of the Baths”).

However, since 2006 my codicological understanding of what happened to Q13 (i.e. to leave it how we see it now) has come a long way. It’s not enough to grasp (as per my discussion in Curse 2006) that Q13’s bifolios ended up misnested (and this certainly happened early on, even before Q13’s 15th century quire number was added). Rather, to make sense of Q13, you have to see that it was originally formed from two separate gatherings – my late friend Glen Claston called these Q13A and Q13B – that were then shuffled together into a single oversized gathering, and then (mis-)bound into an oversized quire.

For Glen (actually Tim Rayhel), Q13A was the three “medical – biological – Galenic” bifolios, while Q13B comprised the two “Balneological” bifolios. You may disagree about the precise nesting Q13A had in its original ‘alpha’ state, but I think Q13B’s nesting order looks pretty rock solid, with f78v-f81r in the centre and f84-f75 (i.e. reversed relative to its position in Q13’s final ‘omega’ state) wrapped around it.

Ultimately, the huge takeaways from this for anyone searching for a balneological match are (a) the balneological section (in Q13B) is only half as big as you might otherwise think (i.e. Q13), (b) the source document for Q13B probably ‘travels’ with (i.e. “was typically copied alongside”) medical documents, and (c) it’s probably a ‘pure’ balneo text that we’re looking for.

Also: because we’re apparently missing a (folio-numbered) bifolio from Q13, it could well be that what we’re looking at with Q13B is only two thirds of a balneological ‘book’. However – and I think this is important – because we have an illustration that seems to run across a gathering’s centrefold, we can be reasonably sure that if so, we’re looking at the eight contiguous middle pages of a twelve-page document.

So we now have a lot more (and better) information about what we should be looking for in a balneological match (which we would hope to use as part of a known-plaintext attack on Q13B).

It should therefore be no surprise that my new plan is to search for a pre-1460 balneological source document where the central section matches the general structure of Q13B. I predict that this will be unillustrated, will not have been widely copied, and will typically be found bound alongside medical manuscripts.

I’m also expecting to have my search biased towards Northern Italian balneo sources (much as in 2006, I still suspect the Voynichese “4o” ligature was a Northern Italian palaeographic ‘tell’, one that was appropriated by numerous Northern Italian cipher keys 1440-1460), though I’ll initially cast my research net wider.

Constructing a Bibliography

Having said that, a key part of any historical research plan is working out an active bibliography (i.e. finding all the related scholarly works that have already done a significant part of the heavy digging), and then (somehow) getting access to them.

An excellent help in this regard proved to be the (open access) article “Le thermalisme médiéval et le gouvernement des corps : d’une recreatio corporis à une regula balnei ?” by Marilyn Nicoud, in Le thermalisme, by John Scheid, Marilyn Nicoud, Didier Boisseuil, et al. (pp.79-104).

Nicoud highlights numerous different sources on thermal baths, including a letter by Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolo Niccoli: and many different attitudes towards them, ranging from sexual indignation to Pope Pius II’s long sojourns to thermal baths in the 1460s, to mentions of thermal baths in the Datini correspondence (from the famous Merchant of Prato). [Interestingly, “The Duke and the Stars” by Monica Azzolini speaks approvingly of Nicoud as a kind of historiographical fellow-traveller.]

In terms of the actual treatise author Nicoud mentions, one might helpfully pick out a reasonable starting list:

• Gentile da Foligno (died 1348) – [though Gentile seems somewhat early for us]
• Francesco Casini da Siena, who around 1399-1401 wrote a huge treatise on Tuscan baths dedicated to Gian Galeazzo Visconti
• Jerome of Viterbi, who wrote a treatise on thermal baths of his region dedicated to Pope Innocent VI
• Benedetto Reguardati (one of Francesco Sforza’s most highly regarded doctors) wrote down the rules of the Bormio thermal baths, plus various other small books
• Ugolino da Montecatini wrote a treatise on thermal baths at the start of the 15th century (in Tuscan, unusually)
• Antonio Guainerio (died 1458) wrote a treatise on the thermal baths of Acqui Terme. (I remember reading about him in Thorndike, he also wrote a “tractatus de venenis” i.e. on poisons)
• Michele Savonarola

See also Marilyn Nicoud, “Les Medecins Italiens et le bain thermal a la fin du moyen age” (Medievales 43, automne 2002, pp.13-40) on JSTOR, which mentions Florence Biblioteca nazionale XV. 189 and BnF nouv. acq. Lat. 211.

Of course, it goes without saying that many of the books cited by Nicoud are out of my meagre book budget price range. But it’s a starting point, and the British Library has recently reopened so… lots to do here.

In the meantime, here are some early rough notes, which I plan to expand into separate blog posts over the next few months.

Benedetto Reguardati / Benedictus de Nursia

De sanitate conservanda, to Astorgius episcopus Anconitanus. Salzburg St. Peter M 1 265, 15c, ff. 3-93 (Kr III 42)

De conservatione sanitatis. Paris BN lat. 14028, 15c (Kr III 233) [same as “De sanitate conservanda”]

Ugolino da Montecatini

De balneorum Italiae proprietatibus ac virtutibus (1417) – AKA Tractatus de balneis

Paris BN n.a. lat 211, 15c, ff. 54-70 (Kr III 277)

Tractatus de Balneis. Traduzione a cura di M. G. Nardi. 1950

Antonio Guainerio

The Bodleian helpfully lists a number of manuscripts from this Pavian doctor, many of which were later printed as incunabula and early books:

• “De aegritudinibus propriis mulierum”
• “De arthetica”
• “De febribus”
• “De peste”
• “De uenenis”

Michele Savonarola

His Wikipedia article lists a number of his works, including “De balneis”.

See also: Crisciani, Chiara and Gabriella Zuccolin. Michele Savonarola, Medicina e cultura di corte, Micrologus’ Library. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011. This includes a chapter by Marilyn Nicoud (of course) on his De Balneis.

See also: Arnaldo Segarizzi, Della vita e delle opere di Michele Savonarola medico padovano del secolo XV (Padua: Fratelli Gallina, 1900)… errrm… if you can find a copy of it. (Google’s copy appears to have disappeared, oddly.)