Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

My recent “Pax Nax Vax revisited” post led me to a new Voynich hypothesis that I don’t recall reading anywhere. Given that (as Jan Hurych helpfully pointed out) our Voynich-owning chum Jakub Hořčický (Sinapius) became capitaneus / administrator of the properties of St George’s Convent in Prague Castle in 1606, might Sinapius have simply swiped the Voynich Manuscript from the convent’s library?

It’s a decent enough question, but is it one that can be answered?

St George’s Convent

As you’d probably expect, the Czech Wikipedia page on Prague’s St George’s Convent is the place to start. And, thanks to the magic that is Google Translate, we can see the broad sweep of the convent’s history clearly enough.

Culturally, the convent’s Golden Age was at the beginning of the 14th century. Under Abbess Kunhuta (who her brother Wenceslas II had previously kind-of-forced into an unsuccessful political marriage to the Duke of Mazovia), its scriptorium (founded in about 1294) produced many beautiful illuminated manuscripts (e.g. this one).

[This was also the period when a second convent (Ducha a Milosrdenství Božího, the Spirit and Mercy of God) was founded in Prague: administration of this was passed over to St. George’s Convent in the mid-16th century.]

However, the Hussite Wars marked an abrupt change in St George’s Convent’s fortunes. When the Abbess refused to sign an agreement handing it over, “the convent was plundered, the nuns were forced to flee, and the convent’s property was sold off”.

The convent was restored to use during the 16th century: a carving above a doorway dating to 1515 depicts St George defeating his dragon. A fire in 1541 then wrecked the convent, which was followed by more rebuilding, at which point the buildings were used as an armoury. It has a nice frontage:

Nuns only returned to the convent (in the western part of the nave) in 1608-1612 under Abbess Žofie Albínka z Helfenburku. According to (Czech) Wikipedia, “During her office the monastery library was restored and most of the older texts were provided with a new Baroque binding, during which the text and paintings were often disturbed. The binding from that period gave today’s appearance to the vast majority of manuscripts.“

Can This Theory Be Tested?

Right now, I’m not sure. Even though we have indirect evidence (specifically, a hole in the vellum made by a woodworm) that the Voynich Manuscript had a wood cover at around this period in its history, I haven’t yet read of anyone going looking for tiny fragments of wood embedded in its outermost bifolios. And then they’d have to take samples from the Baroque wood covers of the Kunhuta-period manuscripts for comparison. And then they’d have to work out how to compare them in a useful way.

Similarly, the next research step would be to read the earliest history of St George’s Convent, which (Wikipedia assures us) was written in 1715 by Jan Florian Hammerschmidt at the request of Abbess František Helena Pieroniána of Galiana. I believe this is his Historia  in qua primaeva fundatio Et Institutio Regiorum Ac Antiquissimorum  Monasteriorum S. Georgii In Castro Pragensi, S. Spiritus Vulgo ad  Misericordias Dei In antiqua Urbe Pragensi Ordinis SP Benedicti  Sancti-Monialium: Cum omnibus there Pontificijs, Quam Caesareus ,  Immunitatibus, Concessionibus, per distinctos Paragraphos recensentur.  Honori  celsissimae Franciscae Helenae Pyeronianae de Galliano, Dei Gratia  Principissae & Abbatissae supra fatorum Monasteriorum dicata / and  Joanne Floriano Hammerschmidt, SS.  Theologiae  Doctore, Proto-Notario Apostolico, Comite Palatino, Auratae Militiae  Equite, Regiae, Exemptae & Nullius Dioecesis Ecclesiae SS.  Petri & Pauli in Wissehrad, & SS.  Cosmae & Damiani Canonico, pt Regiae Urbis Vetero-Pragensis BVM in Coelos Assumptae in Teyn Curato. Catchy title. 🙂

It’s online here (as a PDF), though given that it’s made up of a long series of fragments diligently copied from old documents, anyone expecting to find a single timeline will quickly be disappointed. All the same, this does cover the right period, e.g. p.88 says (my corrections to the OCR):

Annô Domini 1606. Principissae ad S. Georgium Sophia Al-
bince de Hellfenburg rebellârunt cives Trzebenicenses, ei in nullo
voluerunt obedire, vineas pro oblata solutione excolere, Pa-
rocho decimas dare noluerunt, claves illi ab Ecclesia accepe-
runt, illum ab ingressu Ecclesiae excluserunt. De qua rebel-
lione vide §. sequentem in serie Abbatissarum.

There’s more of the same on pp.107-112, but I was completely unable to find any trace of Hořčický / Sinapius there. All the same, perhaps other people’s eyes will prove to be sharper than mine. 🙂

Incidentally, the prize for Best Name In This Book surely goes to Abundantia Bukowskin dе Hustirzan.

In a 2017 post, I listed the copies of Nicole Oresme’s (1368) “Treatise of the Sphere” (“Traité de l’espere“) that are still extant:

* BNF MS Franc. 1350 (ff. 1r-38v) [formerly owned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683)]
* BNF MS Franc. 2240 (ff. 61r-95v) [ARLIMA description]
* BNF MS Franc. 7487
* BNF nouv. acq. 10045 (ff. 1-39) [ARLIMA description]
* BORDEAUX, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 0531 ff. 90r-127r [1454-1458]
* FIRENZE, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 1604 [end 14th century]
* LEIDEN, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS Vossius gall. f° 010, ff. 1r-31v [15th century]
* OXFORD, St. John’s College, MS 164, ff. 1r-32r [around 1364-1373]
* VATICANO (CITTA DEL), Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, MS Reg. lat. 1337, ff. 29r-44v [last quarter of the 15th century]

According to Mackley (2012), the earliest of these is Oxford SJC MS 164, because “[t]he ornate illustrations and marginalia, as well as horoscope tables personal to Charles and his family, suggest that [this] manuscript belonged to Charles himself.” (pp.4-5).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my next challenge here is to find whether any historian has constructed a cladistic tree for these nine Treatise of the Sphere manuscripts.

Simultaneously, I’m still strongly considering my 2017 suggestion that the person most likely to have helped diffuse Oresme’s ideas out of France was Blasius of Parma (who was in Paris for a while prior to 1388). So the follow-on question there would be: can we determine which of these nine manuscripts was closest to the one copied by Blasius to take back with him to Italy? Might Blasius’ copy have in fact formed part of this tree?

Clearly, some good basic historical legwork needs to be done here.

The Importance of Oresme’s Treatise

Before proceeding any further, I think it should be said that Oresme’s treatise isn’t just yet another summary / translation of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera (e.g. BN Lat 7267, 7363 and 7400, as Rene Zandbergen once pointed out here). Even though his treatise follows the general sequence previously set out by Sacrobosco, Oresme is quite scathing about some of Sacrobosco’s claims (e.g. his estimate of the Earth’s diameter). [There’s more technical discussion of this in “Nicole Oresme et les Voyages Circumterrestres”, by M. Lejbowicz.]

More generally, in “Heaven and the Sphaera Mundi in the Middle Ages” (2000), Edgar Laird points out that Oresme’s account marked a turning point in the history of accounts of the spheres. This is because Oresme tried to force a definitive split between that which can be physically studied and that which should be treated as simply religious speculation: (p.25)

We also expect that at this point Oresme will explain what theology can contribute to the study of the sphere, but he writes instead, ‘Then some say that above it [i.e., the ninth sphere] there is an immobile heaven, then a heaven of crystal, and then the empyrean heaven in which is the throne of Solomon, and such things as pertain to neither physics nor astronomy. Therefore it will be sufficient for us to speak only of the nine spheres mentioned above’.

Oresme’s writings therefore mark him out as something of a rationalist (though pitching him as a ‘proto-scientist’ would be a modern back-projection). All the same, despite his small treatise’s similarities to previous works, it has to be said that there is something intensely new going on in the commentaries, thoughts and glosses he stitched through it.

As always (even with Copernicus), Oresme pulls his horse up before accidentally jumping over the Heresy puissance wall. But I’m sure the direction he was heading in was clear to many of his readers at the time.

Towards a Cladistic Tree…?

Almost certainly, the definitive work here is Lillian Margaret McCarthy “Maistre Nicole Oresme, ‘Traitié de l’espere’“, critical edition, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1943.

…and unfortunately that’s where this post stops, because I can’t see how to get access to it. The University of Toronto has lots of digitized dissertations from 1950 onwards online here, but 1943 is just before their cut-off date.

So… does any Cipher Mysteries reader have any suggestions as to how I can get a copy of this?

It’s that time of year when a Voynich researcher’s mind turns to life’s most important questions. Such as whether it is possible to use Father Christmas to decrypt the Voynich Manuscript.

For a start, it’s entirely possible that there is Christmas-related imagery hidden in plain sight in the Voynich Manuscript, but we’ve just been too distracted by the details to notice them:

Before I go any further, I should say that I do know full well that what we now think of as ‘Santa Claus’ was in fact a 19th century faux-historical mash-up of loads of other stuff, and that he originally wore green clothes (not red). But I would – as spin doctors now tell us all the time – say that, wouldn’t I?

All the same, it’s probably safe to say that we would have zero luck using a 19th century cultural crossover to decrypt a 15th century object. However, we might have more luck with the layer that preceded him – by which I mean St. Nicholas.

This might be interesting because the zodiac roundel drawings in the Voynich Manuscript’s ‘zodiac’ section bear a strong resemblance to the zodiac roundel drawings found in early fifteenth century Alsace calendars (specifically 1420-1430, it’s all in the sleeves and the necklines). Hence I think there’s a reasonably good chance that what we’re looking at there is some kind of calendar – and the most important details written on calendars were feast days celebrating local saints.

If this section is indeed some kind of calendar (and it’s still speculation, remember), there’s a decent chance it was arranged not by zodiac degree but by month. But what day did the year start on in the 15th century?

Back then, this was not universally 1st January, not at all. In fact, as Rafal Prinke pointed out in 2001 (I quoted him in 2009), the Venetian year instead started on 1st March, while the Florentine year started on 25th March. The reason this is relevant is that the first zodiac sign depicted on a Voynich zodiac roundel is Pisces, which (though it astrologically / zodiacally starts in late February) was typically associated with March. (We are sufficiently certain of the folio order that we can be sure Pisces came first.)

So let’s make today’s educated guess: that the Voynich ‘zodiac’ section is actually a calendar of feast days that starts on 1st March. (It might even be some kind of wonky Cisioianus, nobody knows.) Does that give us a Father Christmas attack on the Voynich Manuscript?

Well… it might do. On the page for (according to our guess) December (it has a Sagittarius crossbowman roundel drawing in the centre), there are thirty ‘labels’ (attached to the thirty ‘nymphs’). And one of these labels might just be saying St. Nicholas, right?

As an aside: to my eyes, there are plenty of annoying (or at least slightly unsettling) details on this page:

• It seems that the labels were added in a different ink and by a different quill
• It seems that most (but not all) of the nymphs’ breasts were added by that same different hand
• Some of the nymph outlines were also updated with that same quill
• There’s a particularly badly drawn barrel outline added behind the top-left nymph just outside the largest ring
• There’s green paint contact transfer from the facing page BUT that would seem to imply that the now-missing folio immediately afterwards (Capricorn and Aquarius) was not there when the green paint was added. Which would seem to imply that the green paint (at the very least) was added some time (probably a century or more?) after the initial composition phase(s).

But, getting back to Cisioianus (feast day mnemonics), a German 15th century Latin version for December run as follows:

• December Barba Nico Concep et alma Lucia
• Sanctus abinde Thomas modo Nat Steph Jo Pu Thome Sil.

We can decode this syllable by syllable to reveal the list of feast days that the mnemonic was trying to help people memorize (with a little help from Grotefend’s 1891 “Zeitrechnung des deutschen Mittelalters“, p.35):

1. De-
2. cem-
3. ber
4. Bar- – Feast of St Barbara
5. ba
6. Ni- – Feast of St Nicholas
7. co
8. Con- Feast of the Immaculate Conception
9. cep
10. Et
11. Al-
12. ma
13. Lu- – Feast of St Lucy
14. Ci-
15. a
16. Sanc-
17. tus
18. Ab-
19. in
20. de
21. Thom- – Feast of St Thome Ap
22. as
23. mo-
24. do
25. Nat – Nativ. Domini
26. Steph – Feast of St Stephen
27. Jo
28. Pu
29. Tho- – Feast of St Thome Asp (St Thomas a Becket)
30. me
31. Sil – Feast of St Sylvester

What immediate emerges is that if we’re looking for St. Nicholas in the 15th century, his feast day was actually on December 6th, neatly sandwiched between St Barbara (December 4th) and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8th).

Hence if the text on this page is some kind of Cisioianus mnemonic for December, we might hope to find labels in a sequence that looks vaguely like “Bar Ba Ni Co Con“. Now, I personally can’t see anything there that quite fits this pattern at all. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. 😉

But, sadly, this is just about as far as St Nicholas’ Christmas sleigh can carry us into the speculative world of Voynich research. Happy Christmas to you all! 🙂

When a comment landed here today from Diane O’Donovan about the (sometimes asserted, sometimes denied) connection between the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (the ‘balneo’ folios) and the late 12th century De Balneis Putolanis by Peter of Eboli, it reminded me that there’s a 15th century balneological manuscript out there I really want to know a lot more about – MS Aldini 488 “Collectio de balneis”.

Q13A vs Q13B (again)

However, before I launch into all that, I first need to recap various codicological features of Q13 before we start trying to work with it.

The first thing to know about Q13 is that its bifolios have ended up bound in the wrong order. We can tell this because a bifolio that was originally at the centre of a quire / gathering has ended up not at the middle. Moreover, following the logical through to the end leads (as per The Curse of the Voynich back in 2006) to a situation where you can reconstruct the central two bifolios’ nesting order: f84 – f78 (centre) f81 – f75.

The second thing to notice is that the drawings on these two nested Q13 bifolios (which are all about bathing ‘nymphs’) seem to sit in a quite different category from the drawings on the other three Q13 bifolios (which largely revolve around plumbing, though whether this is real or imagined is hard to say). Voynich researcher Glen Claston proposed that the first two bifolios form a balneological quire on their own (which he called “Q13B”), while the other three form a medical quire (which he called “Q13A”). Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his specific interpretation, his basic codicological division into two separate artifacts has stood the test of time: so it seems we are looking at two separate (though similar-looking) things whose constituent bifolios have ended up interleaved. Glen also proposed that Q13B was constructed before Q13A.

The third thing to be aware of is that on the Voynich Manuscript’s page f81r (in Q13B, the bathing nymphs section), there is apparently a poem. I raised this poem section as something which we might look for parallels with in other texts when I started discussing the ‘block paradigm’ approach (where you look for structural matches between a page of enciphered text and plaintext pages from similar contemporary or earlier manuscripts). Interestingly, it seems (from the line-initial gallows characters) that the f81r poem has a 7 / 8 / 8 / 8 line structure, which would be consistent with the writer / copyist having accidentally skipped past a line within the first block of the poem.

Putting all these pieces together, the implication is that we should be looking for a block-sized match between the contents of the two “bathing nymphs” bifolios and 14th / early 15th century balneological texts (which are possibly but not necessarily illustrated). The poem embedded in the middle (it’s on the right half of the central bifolio) seems to be structured as three verses, each containing four couplets (i.e. eight lines). This is because if we can find a source match that’s tolerably close to this basic ‘block specification’, we might just be in business.

Arnold C. Klebs

Back when I was writing The Curse of the Voynich in 2006, to be honest I hadn’t yet found much balneological source material at all. It was only a little later (in 2009) that I found an online version of the (1916) article “Balneology in the Middle Ages” by Arnold C. Klebs. This mentioned a number of late medieval / early modern people who had written on the subject of baths, e.g.:

• Giovanni de Dondis
• Gentile da Foligno (d. 1348)
• Ugolino Caccino of Montecatini (d. 1425)
• Matteo Bendinelli (1489)
• Michele Savonarola (who I already knew about)

Klebs also mentioned the printed book “De Balneis omnia quae extant” Venice, Giunta, 1553, fol., 447 leaves, which he describes as “the first text-book on balneology“.

A source Klebs also refers to specifically for German bath history is:

• Martin, Alfred “Deutsches Badewvesen in vergangenen Tagen,” Jena, Diederichs, 1906. With 159 illustrations from old originals.

Giunta’s (1553) De Balneis Omnia

Google Books lists two separate copies of Giunta’s (1553) “De Balneis Omnia Quae Extant apud Graecos, Latinos et Arabas” (etc etc), both of which freely downloadable:

• Copy #1
• Copy #2

The bad news is that this is a super-heavyweight Latin compendium of balneological sources (the PDF runs to 1033 pages). However, the good news is that Giunta has assembled it from just about everyone pre-1553 who had written about baths, water etc: so there are large sections excerpting books from early authors such as Pliny, Avicenna, Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, along with selections from 16th century authors such as Gesner, Fuchs etc.

One thing I found was that, Pietro d’Abano’s “De Balneis” aside (which is written in hexameters), almost none of the balneo sources quoted by Giunta seem to appear in verse form. Even the promising-looking verse section on p.90 by “Ioannis et Iacobi De Dondis Patavinorum” turned out to be a poem by Claudian (370AD-404AD) (“Fons, Antenoreae vitam qui porrigis urbi, / Fataque vicinis noxia pellis aquis“).

Having said that, Giunta’s selection is entirely in Latin and far from complete. So it may well be that, if we can somehow go back to some fifteenth century collection of balneo manuscripts, we can see these in their original form – which may well be in Tuscan (rather than Latin), in verse (rather than in prose), and illustrated (rather than just text).

But where on earth would we find such an unlikely-sounding text?

Pavia, MS Aldini 488

It turns out that there really is such a text: and it is at the University of Pavia. Sadly, this “Collectio de Balneis” hasn’t yet been digitized (or if it has, its digital pages have not yet been shared outside the University of Pavia). But we do know the contents of MS Aldini 488:

Aldini 488, Collectio de Balneis. Cart., sec. XV, cc. 78 n.n., 232 x 154 mm.
c. 1: Savonarola Michele, De balneo et termis naturalibus omnibus Italiae sicque totius orbis proprietatibusque earum
c. 45: Ugolino da Montecatini, De balneis mineralibus et artificialibus
c. 61: Epigrammata de balneis puteolanis
c. 66: Consilium pro balneis de Corsena in comitatu luchano pro domino Lanzaloto de Crotis ducali consiliario
c. 67: Tura di Castello, Regula et tractatus balnei de poreta
c. 68v: Tractatus pro balneis de aquis per Petrum de Tussignano
c. 70v: Antonii Guaynerii papiensis de balneis aquis ciuitatis antiquissime que in marchionatu montisferrati sita sunt tractatus
c. 74v: De balneis secundum Petrum de Ebano
c. 75v: Tractatus de balneis secundum Gentillem
c. 76v: De balneis de Burmio secundum magistrum Petrum de Tussignano
c. 77v: Regula balnei loci de Aquaria in territorio regii
c. 78v: De balneo aque porrete
Collocazione cd: Mediateca nas bu 269
Collocazione vol. originale: Aldini 488

Because this is not yet available online, it is where – unless you happen to know better? – our current breakneck tour of balneological sources stops,

Note that there are a fair few monographs on individual balneo authors:

• This Spanish Prezi presentation by Sergio P on Michele Savonarola lists eight manuscript versions of his book on baths (including Paris BNF Nouv. Acq. Lat 889, dating to 1452), seven printed versions of the same (1485-1562), plus four separate monographs.
• Pietro da Tossignano’s (d. 1401) “Tractatus de regimine sanitatis” was printed in 1535 (his medical recipes are online here). Giuseppe Mazzini wrote “Vita e opera di maestro Pietro da Tossignano” in 1926 (reprinted in 2007).

As an aside, I also found an interesting chapter (in French) on the balneo literature – “Les traités médicaux sur les bains d’Acqui Terme, entre XIV^e et XVI^e siècles“, by Gabriella Zuccolin – from a recent book, “Sejourner au bain”. Zuccolin further notes that many of the treatises are covered at speed by Lynn Thorndike, but… they would be, wouldn’t they?