Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

Thanks to Newsweek, Fox News, The Daily Mail and The Independent [*sigh*], some techy Canadian Voynich research is currently enjoying its day in the media sun. (Hint to authors: sorry, but based on recent evidence, it would seem that you have ~48 hours to get your next funding request submitted and approved before everyone currently cheering starts booing.)

CompSci professor Greg Kondrak and graduate student Bradley Hauer presented their research at the 2017 ACL conference, and their paper “Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script” appeared in Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics Volume 4, Issue 1, pages 75–86 [though the PDF is freely downloadable, at least for now].

From the press coverage so far, you might think that they had CARMELed the Voynich (i.e. thrown a tame supercomputer and some kind clever-arse AI libraries at the problem): for, as the media incessantly repeat at the moment, All Human Problems Will Inevitably Yield To The Scythed Mega-Bulldozer That Is AI. But… is any of that true? Or useful? What’s actually going on here?

Behind the Kondrak and Hauer headlines

The initial question is obvious: what did Kondrak and Hauer actually do to try to crack the Voynich’s mysterious secrets that (they thought) nobody else had tried before? A quick snoop reveals that Bradley Hauer is a pretty smart crypto cookie: the simple substitution cipher solver presented in his 2014 paper “Solving Substitution Ciphers with Combined Language Models” outperforms many competing academic solutions. It does this by using both letter statistics and word lists at the same time (a) to solve Aristocrat cryptograms (i.e. ones where you know where the word boundaries are) even under mildly noisy conditions, and (b) to solve Patristocrat cryptograms (i.e. ciphertexts without spaces, though the recursive approach used to turn Patristocrats into candidate Aristocrats seems somewhat heavy-handed), before finally moving on to trying (unsuccessfully) to reproduce the kind of deniable encryption loosely proposed in Stanislaw Lem’s (1973) “Memoirs found in a bathtub”.

And here’s what Hauer looks like in real life:

So what happened before the Voynich paper was even written was that Hauer had built up a lot of software machinery for solving nicely-word-boundaried simple substitution ciphers at speed, and where some kind of mild text mangling had optionally taken place. And so it should not be a surprise that he carried this technology and approach forward, insofar as the 2016 paper tries to solve Voynichese as if it were a nicely-word-boundaried simple substitution cipher that had had its text mangled via anagramming plus optional abjad-style vowel removal. Given that as the paper’s founding presumption, all it is trying to do is evaluate which plaintext language was used if that entire presumption just happened to be correct (oh, and the transcription used was accurate).

Incidentally, the Voynich corpus used was 43 pages (“17,597 words and 95,465 characters”) of Currier-B text in the Currier transcription that one or both of Knight & Reddy had supplied, but the authors did not seem to have questioned the reliability or parsing choices behind that particular transcription. (More on this below.)

Voynich anagramming

Unlike Stephen Bax’s well-known Voynich 2014 paper (which began by gleefully flipping the bird at nearly all previous Voynich research), Kondrak and Hauer’s Voynich paper begins by covering what they consider related Voynich work (section 2.1) in a level-headed, if somewhat brief, way. The most relevant source they have for the notion that we might be looking at anagrammed text is Gordon Rugg’s 2004 paper: this floated the idea that there might be a similarity between alphabetically ordered anagrams (‘alphagrams’) and what we see in the Voynich Manuscript’s text.

Yet much has already been written about Voynich anagramming beyond this, not least William Romaine Newbold’s monstrously tangled ‘decryption’ (*shudder*). More recently, Edith Sherwood claimed both that it was a young Leonardo da Vinci who wrote the Voynich Manuscript, and that the Voynich text was written in anagrammed Italian (though so far she has mainly only tried to reconstruct Voynich plant names using her proposed scheme). As I pointed out in 2009 this seems extraordinarily unlikely to work in the way she proposes.

Arguably the most interesting previous Voynich research into anagrams (again, not mentioned by Hauer) has been that of London-based researcher and translator Philip Neal. In a (now long-lost) page he posted many years ago on the late Glen Claston’s voynichcentral.com website, Philip proposed:

Here is a transformation of plaintext into ciphertext which explains certain features of the Voynich “language”.

1. Divide a plaintext into lines
2. Sort the words of each line into alphabetical order
3. Sort the letters of each word into alphabetical order

1. one thing led to another thing last night
2. another last led night one to thing thing
3. aehnort alst del ghint eno ot ghint ghint

The result has some of the statistical properties of the Voynich text.

A. The frequency distribution of words and letters is the same as in the natural language plaintext, but the distribution of two-letter groups and two-word groups is significantly altered.
B. Words at the beginning of a ciphertext line tend to start with letters at the beginning of the alphabet. Compare the high frequency of Voynich “d” at the beginning of a line.
C. If a letter near the end of the alphabet has a tendency to be word-initial in the plaintext (e.g. German “w”), it will have a strong tendency to be the last word in a line. Compare the high frequency of Voynich “m” at the end of a line.
D. The ciphertext versions of frequent words will tend to cluster together in a line. That is, where a word such as “thing” occurs twice in the plaintext line (as in the above example) the two word sequence “ighnt ighnt” will occur, but “ighnt” may also occur elsewhere in the line as an anagram of “night”.
E. A one-letter word of ciphertext can only be an anagram of a single word of plaintext (“a” can only be an anagram of “a”) and a two-letter word of ciphertext can only be an anagram of two possible words of plaintext (“et” can only be an anagram of “et” and “te”). This means that you cannot have a ciphertext line of the pattern “… i … i … ” or of the pattern “… et … et … et …”. This principle largely holds good in the Voynich text: there are only six exceptions in the corpus of Currier’s language B.

To his credit, Philip then immediately pointed out some problems with this suggestion:

1. Voynichese words do not conform to a strict alphabetical ordering of letters (there are quite a lot of words of the pattern dshedy).
2. Voynichese words have a strong tendency to contain only one instance of a given letter, unlike any obvious candidate language for the plaintext.
3. The enciphering described is not unambiguously reversible (however I think it would work as a private aide-memoire, or as a means of establishing priority like Galileo’s well known anagram announcing his discovery of the phases of Venus)

(Philip has since instead proposed a possible grid-like constraint on the position of Voynichese letters within Voynichese ‘words’, though problems with that alternative explanation remain.)

Incidentally, Philip has also pointed to a number of places within the Voynich Manuscript where entire lines appear to have been written in a non-one-after-the-other way (i.e. unexpected line transpositions): while nobody has yet come up with a powerfully convincing explanation for the presence of “Neal keys” (sections of text typically delimited by pairs of single-leg gallows) in the top lines of pages (typically embedded ⅔ of the way across). He is a sharp observer, and these anomalies are all inconsistent with the widely-held presumption that the text we are looking at here is completely unmangled.

Ultimately, though, it remains a sizeable step (or three, or indeed more) to go from anywhere here to Hauer’s presumption that what we are looking at is straightforwardly anagrammed text in a conventional European language, whether abjad or not.

The actual Voynich research gap

If asked for the single largest methodological problem with Voynich research, I would point to the way that Voynich researchers tend to make a series of unfounded assumptions:
(a) the transcription they are using is perfectly reliable;
(b) the way that they parse that transcription (i.e. into tokens) is correct – there are many hidden linkages here which are each probably sufficient to derail any decryption attempt;
(c) the candidate plaintext languages they consider are genuinely representative of the Voynich Manuscript’s plaintext;
(d) no other textual transformations are present;
(e) the putative hypothetical transformation that they just happen to have plucked from the air and which they are testing is precisely that which is present in the Voynich Manuscript; and
(f) the output of their reverse transformation will be straightforward text that can be read and marvelled over by historians.

In the case of Kondrak and Hauer, I hope it should be clear that they have fallen foul of every one of these issues in turn: and their paper is all the worse for it. It is one thing to note in passing that Esperanto’s “extreme morphological regularity […] yields an unusual bigram character language model which fits the repetitive nature of the VMS words” (p.83), but it would be quite another to point out that this might easily have arisen from the way that Voynichese needs to be parsed in order for it to make sense: and it is this apparent lack of perception of the practical difficulties that all Voynich decryptors face that devalues the genuinely good work that went into their paper.

What particularly frustrates me is that in spite of these many issues, there are plenty of ways Voynich researchers can make genuine progress towards understanding what is going on: but, rather, they instead persist in trying to airball their own personal Voynich match-winner from the other end of the basketball court. They seem seduced by the glamour of being The One Who Solved The Voynich, instead of getting on with the graft of making a difference to what we know. 🙁

Yet computational linguistics has such a rich toolbox (of which CARMEL is merely one small screwdriver) that it surely has ample capacity to at least try to bridge all the actual research gaps that people are falling into, e.g.:

* What is the right way to parse EVA into tokens? (e.g. is EVA ‘or’ two tokens or one? is EVA ‘cth’ three tokens, two tokens, or one? etc)
* How does Currier A map to Currier B? And what about all the subtypes of each of these?
* What are the differences between them and “Currier C”? (Rene Zandbergen’s term for labelese)
* Can we determine whether line-initial letters are likely reliable or unreliable?
* Are words abbreviated (e.g. is EVA y some kind of truncation symbol)? If so, are A and B abbreviated in exactly the same way?
* etc

If people had the intellectual good sense to stop trying to fly over all these separate hurdles all at the same time in a Steve Austin-style 100m leap of misplaced faith, we might start to make real progress. However, even when researchers do have the necessary brains to make progress (as Hauer clearly has), it seems they have insufficient strength of mind to not be tempted by the glamour of the big ticket “Researchers Crack Voynich Manuscript” headline. 🙁

Because last year’s Voynich research brought me a step closer to German calendars, I finally got round to reading Ernst Zinner’s epic “Regiomontanus: His Life and Works” (or, rather, to Ezra Brown’s 1990 translation of the same).

On the one hand, Zinner is crushingly magisterial, in both tone and deep attention to detail (though the appendices by other scholars do sometimes highlight Zinner’s occasional dependence on others’ unreliable translations). Yet on the other hand, it is a style of writing characterized by what is clearly a passionate drive to understand Regiomontanus within his cultural, scientific, and mathematical context.

Say what you like about Zinner, but you could never accuse him of skimming the surface of the subject: as the old joke goes, he’s definitely more bacon than eggs (i.e. where “the chicken is involved but the pig is committed”).

Peuerbach and nocturnals

I’ve written a number of times before about how I strongly suspect that the circular drawing on f57v had a ring of letter groups that was originally made up of 4 x 18 symbols, but where the first two letter shapes of each set of eighteen were subsequently joined together into odd gallows-like characters to turn the sequence into a (far more mysterious) 4 x 17 letter-group sequence. Quite why the author did that is not known, but it would seem to me to have been done to conceal the extrinsic 4 x 18 structure.

Why, you may ask, would a 4 x 18 ring be a giveaway? This, in my opinion, is because 360 degrees / (4 x 18) = 5 degrees, which is the kind of explicit marking you would see on an astrolabe-like instrument of some sort. And because one of the secret astrolabe-like instruments of the mid-fifteenth century was the “nocturnal”, “nocturlabe” or “stardial” (astrolabes themselves were hardly secret by that time), I have long wondered whether what was depicted here was this specific instrument.

And so I was fascinated to read the following brief note in Zinner (pp.26-26), in his discussion of Georg Peuerbach (Regiomontanus’ mentor and teacher):

From 1455 on, there existed “stardials” [nocturnals] to tell time at night by means of the Pole Star and two stars {the “pointers”} in Ursa Major.

The footnote reference Zinner gives for this is: “Ernst von Bassermann-Jordan. Uhren. Berlin, 1922. Figure on page 21.” And so I went off (eventually) to have a look for this specific edition.

It turns out that von Bassermann-Jordan was a well-known clock and watch collector, whose classic book (“Uhren”) on the subject was reprinted many times. I was therefore delighted to find out that I could order a relatively cheap print-on-demand copy of the exact same 1922 version that Zinner referenced, and speedily sent off my money.

I must admit to having been a little bit surprised when a padded envelope appeared covered in Indian stamps (I must admit to having wondered whether it was a coincidence that “Uhren” was an anagram of “Nehru”), but that’s globalization for you.

Even though the print-on-demand book cover was really quite nice, the quality of the scans inside was unfortunately more than a little disappointing in places. But even so, I could now try to find what von Bassermann-Jordan said on page 21 that Zinner remarked upon. Sadly, this was one of the many places where the scans became somewhat unrecognizable by the right-hand edge.

Yet because I was able to use Google to search for “Orientierung der Horizontalsonnenuhren” on the same page, this yielded three hits on archive.org, including the 1922 edition I had just bought. (There was also a 1914 edition and a 1920 edition). Unsurprisingly, the 1922 edition was (without any real doubt) the source of the somewhat mangled scans for the Indian POD company, so I can show you what I was trying to read, direct from the source:

Even so, this meant that I was able to find the same thing in the (much clearer, and significantly more readable) 1920 edition of “Uhren”, so that you can hopefully see the structure of the nocturnal (dated “1456”) much more clearly:

I presume that this is referring to the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich, which (encouragingly) has a collection of scientific instruments. However, I wasn’t able to find the one depicted in its object database (and I suspect Zinner wasn’t able to find it either), but perhaps one of my German readers will have more luck than me. 🙂

Other nocturnals

A very good source for the history of the nocturnal is Günther Oestmann’s (2001) “On The History of the Nocturnal“. Oestmann notes that the idea that the nocturnal was first invented in China has been comprehensively debunked, and that it is instead a European invention – there are no Arabic nocturnals from the Middle Ages. There was also a predecessor to the nocturnal (a sighting tube and disk, described by Pacificus in the 10th century), but the more compact hand-held nocturnal was clearly a far more usable version of the same thing.

The “V2.0” idea of nocturnals had actually been discussed as early as the 12th century (though few seem to have been actually built). Raymon Lull mentions the nocturnal in his Nova geometria (1299), and the device was made famous by Peter Apian’s 16th century printed book:

But documentation on nocturnals between Lull and the 1456 nocturnal noted by von Bassermann-Jordan and Zinner seems quite thin. Oestmann lists all the 15th century nocturnal manuscripts he is aware of, together with references (not included here) to where they are mentioned in Zinner’s (1925) “Verzeichnis der astronomischen Handschriften des deutschen Kulturgebietes“:

* Wolfenbüttel, HAB: Cod. Guelf. 81.26 Aug. 2°, fol. 144v (Use of the Nocturnal, Latin 1461)
* Göttingen, UB: 2° Philos. 42m, fol. 55r/v .00 (Johann v. Gmunden [?], Construction of the Nocturnal, in a collection of astronomical texts, 15th cent.)
* Würzburg, UB: M. ch. q. 132, fol. 153v-154v, 155v (Construction of the Nocturnal, Latin, in a collection of astronomical texts, late 15th cent.)
* Leipzig, UB: Cod. 1469, fol. 201r-207r (Construction of the Nocturnal, Latin, in a collection of astronomical texis, 14-15th cent.)
* Munich, Bayer. StB: Clm 24105, fol.65v-67r (Use of the Nocturnal, German, in a collection of astronomical texts, 15/16th cent.)
* Munich, Bayer. StB: Clm 214, fol. 167r-185v (Construction of the Nocturnal, Latin, in a collection of astronomical tables, 15th cent.)
* Bern, Burgerbibl.: Cod. 157 fol. 27v-28v (Construction and Use of the Nocturnal, Latin, 15th cent.)
* Zürich, Zentralbibl.: Ms. C 107, fol. 107r/v (Wilhelm Hofer, Carthusian monk and pupil of Georg Peuerbach), Construction and Use of the Nocturnal, Latin, Gaming (Lower Austria) 1472/79); see L. C. Mohlberg, Mittelalterliche Handschriften (= Katalog der Zentralbibliothek Zürich, vol. I), Zürich 1951, p.55f., 361).
* Ottobeuren, Klosterbibl.: Ms. II, 319, fol. 122-123 (Construction of the Nocturnal, 15th cent.)
* Meiningen, Landesbibl.: Pd 32.44, fol. 92r-98v, 104r-105v (Construction of the Nocturnal, 15th cent.)

Oestmann also mentions Chartres MS 214 (olim 173; destroyed in 1944), which looked like this, though note that it actually belongs to the earlier “sighting tube” tradition from Pacificus:

But because Oestmann relies on Zinner, who in turn was only looking at astronomical manuscripts within the German cultural orbit, there are doubtless many more to be found. For example, there’s a nice volvelle nocturnal in fol. 25r of MS Ashmole 370, an English manuscript dated ~1424 that I’d really like to see the rest of one day:

If anyone is aware of a better / more recent / more pan-European source on the 12th-15th century history of the nocturnal / nocturlabe than Oestmann, please let me know!

“Stretched out arms”

For Voynich researchers, I would argue that the single most extraordinarily interesting paragraph in Oestmann’s paper is as follows:

Closely connected with the history of the nocturnal are certain diagrams in nautical texts, which served as mnemonic devices for the correction of the measured altitude of the Pole Star. The position of α and β Ursae minoris respectively α and β Ursae maioris, often called ‘Guards’, indicated the correction to reduce the observed Pole Star altitude to obtain latitude. A man with stretched out arms standing in the Pole was used. If the Guards were found over his head the Pole Star stood 3°5′ under the Celestial Pole and vice versa. The two arms marked the side deviations and also intermediate positions were recorded in mnemonic verses.

Given that f57v specifically depicts people with stretched out arms (at the top and the bottom), I suspect that this is an avenue of research that is well worth pursuing further:

Oestmann’s footnote #17 gives as his source:

See for example the Regimento do Norte (probably composed in the 15th century; München, Bayer, StB: 4° Inc., 1551). On the nautical ‘Regiments’ see Joaquim Bensaude, L’astronomie nautique au Portugal à l’époque des grandes de couvertes (Bern, 1912/17, repr. Amterdam 1967), pp. 136-145, 223f.; Hermann Wagner ‘Die Entwicklung der wissenschaftlichen Nautik im Beginn des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen nach neuern Anschauungen’, Annalen der Hydrographie und Maritimen Meteorologie, 46 (1918), pp. 215-220.

Here’s another Voynich-themed art show to add to what is already a medium-sized list: “Drawing Close – Voynich Series”, by Sabina Sallis. It’s at the Customs House art centre in Mill Dam conservation area in South Shields, close to the River Tyne south bank ferry landing until March 2018.

Helen Shaddock seems to like it, noting that “Sabina uses drawing, video, performance, sculpture and narrative in a multimedia transdisciplinary approach that interweaves fact and fiction”, and that her Voynich Series “attempts to bring forward knowledge and thoughts that are enmeshed with life processes and invites the audience to decipher their own meaning”.

In some ways, we already have more than enough people ‘deciphering their own meaning’ from the Voynich Manuscript: even if (miraculously) one of the existing set of Voynich theories turns out to be essentially correct, that would still mean that the other 999+ theories out there are just plain nonsense.

But if artists want to do the same thing in the name of Art, that’s fine by me: at least it’s not like a certain anonymous Italian writer who claimed that his fanciful Voynich novel revealed the true nature of both the Voynich Manuscript and the Titanic disaster etc etc. What a mess. 🙁

Elsewhere on Tyneside

I wonder what Tynesider Wor Cheryl would make of all this: though she does sometimes lurch a bit close to Cockney Star Trek, as in this reicent puurst…

Reinventin meiself az a grime awtist.
Look oot faw a new album bein released bei Cherylzee

🎼Gannin oot
Oot an aboot
Coppah divint shoot!🎼

…Wor Cheryl would surely have sumthin ta sei: mebbe…

Tha Voynich manyiscript, Pet? Izunt that some medicul instruckshun manyual fer medyievul womun, leik? It wuz in tha TLS, so it merst be true, uthaweiz therra bunch uv reit idyits.

Well, all ah can say is that ah wunce hadda groin itch, but dinna leik menshunin it in perleit compny. An ah certainly wouldna reit a herl buik about it.

A week or more ago, I started writing up a fairly hefty post on John of Sacrobosco’s famous “De Sphaera” (which is one of the books Nicole Oresme translated into French, adding his commentary). I was particularly interested in the diagrams that appear in many of the manuscripts, and so began with Lynn Thorndike’s account “The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators”, which describes the drawings found in three specific “De Sphaera” manuscripts:

* Oxford, Bodleian, Canon. Misc. 161, fols. 9r-19r
* Princeton University, Garrett MS 99, fols. 124ra-136vb [‘a’/’b’ means 1st/2nd column] [may have been sold to Garrett by Wilfrid Voynich!]
* Cambridge, University Library Ii.III.3, fols. 25r-35v

“Most excellent!”, I thought (thankfully silently) to myself, and so went off to try to find copies of any of the three to illustrate the post. Which… proved impossible, despite trying quite hard. And so the help I’d really like is – if anyone can find such a thing, which I have singularly failed to do – a link to an online illustrated copy of John of Sacrobosco’s “De Sphaera“.

Note that because I’d like to specifically compare these diagrams with the (slightly different) diagrams that appear in Nicole Oresme’s French translation (of which, oddly, I have a good number of illustrated copies), I’m focused on illustrations of the original Latin version that appear in the context of the text.

All That I Have

No prizes for guessing the subheading reference: but all that I have so far isn’t a great deal.

Firstly, there’s BNF MS Latin 7197 that Ellie Velinska kindly linked to a few days ago: this was (mostly) copied by 15th century Zurich physician Conrad Heingarter, and the De Sphaera is on ff.39-50, e.g. this from fol. 39r:

Unfortunately, Heingarter seems to have been copying from a largely unillustrated manuscript, because that was the only diagram there. 🙁

The other interesting set of De Sphaera illustrations is from the fascinating and beautiful Estense “De Sphaera” manuscript. However, the PDF of this available online only includes the drawings, not the drawings in their textual context. (Note: technical description here.)

Can anyone help? All tips and suggestions gratefully received! 🙂

The problem with proposing BNF Franc. MS 565 itself as the source of the Voynich Manuscript’s inverted T-O figure is that we know that it stayed put in France (in the Dukes of Bourbon’s library, to be precise) for the whole of the 15th century. And with the Voynich Manuscript, we’re dealing with an object that has genre connections to Northern Italy (herbals, balneo) and Germany (zodiac calendar).

So it is natural to wonder not just about Oresme’s manuscripts being copied (the flow of physically copied letters) but also about Oresme’s reception (the flow of his ideas): which marks the transition from codicology and bibliophily into the realm of Intellectual History. So how did Nicole Oresme’s ideas flow out of France, and where did they end up?

Thorndike Vol IV and Oresme

Aside from chapters on Oresme’s works in Volume III of his History of Magic and Experimental Science, Thorndike often has recourse in his Volume IV to mention Oresme’s reception. For example, on pp.235-6, Thorndike describes the defence of astrology composed by John de Fundis in Bologna in 1451, “which showed that [Oresme]’s attack was still remembered, if not accepted”. Cardinal d’Ailly’s attack on Oresme in 1414 was very much along the same lines.

Blasius of Parma (1365–1416), a university professor well known for his interest in French philosophers, commented on Oresme’s work as expressed in a document “De latitudine formarum”, though this was (Thorndike p.73) “probably not by Oresme but a resume by some disciple of his De difformitate or De configuratione qualitatum, compared to which it is a dry compendium”. Interestingly, Giovanni da Fontana (whose enciphered books of machines I have mentioned here numerous times) was a pupil or friend of Blasius: and he “repeats the comparison of the universe to a mechanical clock which God had set running” [p.169], as previously put forward by Oresme. It therefore seems likely that Oresme’s influence on Fontana’s Liber de omnibus rebus naturalibus was via Blasius, rather than directly from his mss.

Moving the clock further forward through the 15th century, Pico della Mirandola referred to Haly (Ali ibn Ridwan, known in the Middle Ages as as Haly Abenrudian]’s commentary on Ptolemy and also to Oresme, who had translated that commentary into French (this is BNF Ms Franc 1348) [p.536], and also to “his precursors at the university of Paris in attacking astrology” [p.539], a list that specifically included Oresme. So I think it reasonably clear that Oresme’s shadow (or at least his anti-astrological shadow) still hung over the 15th century in a number of different ways.

Oresme: “To Infinity, And Beyond”?

Zbigniew Krol’s interesting 2016 paper on Mathematics and God’s Point of View traces practical uses of mathematical infinity back to Nicole Oresme. Krol points out [p.89] that Bernardus Torni of Florence’s In capitulum de motu locali Hentisberi (pulbished 1494) drew directly on Oresme’s work on mathematical infinities. According to Krol, “in the reception and application of Oresme’s ideas, Italy was the main territory which explains why the development of infinite methods emerged exactly there.”

Moreover, “Clagett describes examples of the use of Oresme’s diagrams, e.g. Antonius de Scarparia, Angelus de Fossambruno, Jacopo da Forli; cf. (Clagett 1968), pp. 101–10.” [p.90]. Krol also mentions Oresme’s influence on Paul of Venice (d.1429) [p.92]. Again, Jacopo da Forlì (1364-1414)‘s close connection with Blasius of Parma makes it likely that Blasius was again the middle man in the transmission.

A 1936 paper by (that man again) Lynn Thorndike called Coelestinus’s Summary of Nicolas Oresme on Marvels: A Fifteenth Century Work Printed in the Sixteenth Century Osiris 1 (Jan., 1936) talks about Coelestinus work (which Thorndike dates to 1478), and points out that it seems to derive from Oresme’s Quodlibeta. (Though this is still in France.)

Finally, We Get To Oresme’s Reception

Though the preceding text is more of a random sampling of Oresme’s reception rather than a complete picture (which would take a decade or more to build), I think the overall tendency is already reasonably clear: that to a very large degree, Oresme’s ideas failed to take root in France in the 14th century, and that it would seem to be Italy where they were to gain acceptance during the 15th century (but then only in places).

Having said that, one particular non-Italian strongly influenced by Oresme was his contemporary in Paris Henry of Langenstein (Henry of Hesse the Elder), whom Thorndike discusses in his Chapter XXVIII. All the same, Henry’s influence on the broader history of ideas seems to me to have been fairly minor: I leave it to far better read historians of science to determine the size of that influence. Incidentally, one Henry of Hesse work mentioned briefly by Thorndike at the end of this chapter “seems to have been composed at Paris, since its author states that at Paris from the time that the sun enters Aries until it enters Libra a rainbow cannot appear in the south. These very questions were ascribed to Oresme by Amplonius Ratinck in the catalogue of his library which he drew up in 1412, and the manuscript containing them is still preserved in Erfurt.” [Amplon. F. 380, 14th century]

For me, the key takeaway from all this is simply that for all his rationality, Oresme’s ideas – his infinities, his anti-astrologies, his opinions on the Greats – didn’t comfortably fit the intellectual world around him. Which is not to say he was in any honest sense of the word ‘modern’: his curious-sounding ideas about medicine are often quoted as examples of how non-modern parts of his thinking were. Yet I think it would be a mistake to cast him as an eccentric (whereas he thought very clearly) or as an outsider (whereas he worked at the French Royal Court for many years), as some accounts tend to do. Oresme seemed to think he was right at the centre of the mainstream: the problem was simply that it was at almost all times a one-man mainstream.

As for his reception, the key ‘vector’ via which many of Oresme’s ideas eventually gained currency (and, ultimately, a new intellectual home in Italy) was undoubtedly via Blasius of Parma. For Blasius, once again (and for the last time in this post), Thorndike is a good source: he notes in his 1928 article that “a manuscript of BLASIUS’ commentary on the Sphere of SACROBOSCO calls him ‘Blasius of Parma the Parisian’, and so was perhaps written when he was in Paris.”

I Lied: Here’s Thorndike Again

Reviewing all the above before posting it, I’m again struck by the tension between Thorndike and our “Roger Bacon Manuscript”. It was fine in 1929 for Thorndike to stomp heavily on Newbold’s foolish theory, but why was he so down on what he called “an anonymous manuscript of dubious value”?

That the Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious artefact yet with genuine historical interest is surely a comfortably bland point of view that can be split away from Newbold’s sensationalist (Roger) Baconian theorizing and crazy craquelure microwriting? Yet Thorndike was apparently so horrified by the nonsensical non-thinking around the VMs that the baby in the dirty bath-water never stood a chance.

But as we start – at long last, and long overdue – to collectively mine the scientific manuscripts of the late 14th century and early 15th century, who but Thorndike would you want as your wingman?

Having gone away and read (most of) Millard Meiss’s splendidly comprehensive “French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry”, and having also gone through Menut’s 1966 bibliography of Oresme’s works, I think I’m now in a slightly better position to make sense of things.

The Treatise of the Sphere

Even though Oresme made his translation of Aristotle’s “De caelo” in 1377 (it was one of the last things he wrote), he noted in his commentary at the end of Livre II that his previous book “Traictie de l’espere” (“Treatise of the Sphere”, which though ostensibly a translation from Latin into French of John of Sacrobosco’s famous De Sphaera, also adds many of Oresme’s thoughts) should be considered as a useful introduction to his translation of De caelo: and so suggested that the two books should be bound together.

This seems largely to have happened: for of the six known manuscript copies of “Du ciel et du monde”, four have his Treatise of the Sphere bound with them. Though this list doesn’t include BNF MS Franc. 1082 (the first of the six to be written), it does include BNF MS Franc. 565, which is the copy with the inverted T-O figure surrounded by the wolkenband: and the first of the inverted T-O figures is right at the start of the Treatise of the Sphere portion of the book (ff. 1-22).

Hence if we are looking for manuscripts containing the inverted T-O shape, I think we should look not only to the six copies of Du ciel et du monde (at least half of which are bound with the Treatise of the Sphere), but also to the other copies of the Treatise of the Sphere that (according to Menut, ARLIMA and JONAS) still exist:

* 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 (though this ends with Chapter 17 out of the book’s fifty short chapters)
* BNF nouv. acq. 10045 (ff. 1-39) [ARLIMA description]
* BORDEAUX, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 0531 ff. 90r-127r [1454-1458] (bound following a Medieval health manual)
* FIRENZE, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 1604 [end 14th century] (owned by Iohannes Le Begue 1368-1457)
* 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]

Images

MS 1350 starts in completely the wrong way, with a non-inverted T-O figure (though tiny, it’s clear enough to make out its orientation):

Alas, 2240 commences with an empty rectangle where the same kind of picture would be; I can’t find BNF MS Franc. 7487 at all; ARLIMA doesn’t think BNF nouv. acq. 10045 has yet been digitized; BAV MS Reg. lat. 1337 doesn’t seem to have any kind of T-O figure, inverted or otherwise; and the rest I’m still working on.

Bibliography

I found a straightforward summary of the Treatise of the Sphere online: this says that Oxford, St. John’s College, MS 164 is the earliest copy, and was without any doubt presented to Charles V:

Mackley, J. S. (2012) Nicole Oresme’s treatises on cosmography and divination: a discussion of the Treatise of the Sphere. Paper presented to: Starcraft: Watching the Heavens in the Early Middle Ages, University College London, 30 June – 1 July 2012.

There’s more discussion on Oxford, St. John’s College, MS 164 in a 1990 paper by Edgar Laird:

LAIRD, Edgar: “Astrology in the Court of Charles V of France, as Reflected in Oxford, St. John’s College, MS 164”, Manuscripta 34 (1990): 167-76.

The JONAS page includes a single-entry bibliography:

LEJBOWICZ, 1988: “Nicole Oresme et les voyages circumterrestres ou le poème entre la science et la religion”, in : Archives Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age, 55, 1988 : p. 99-142.

Though I haven’t yet seen this article, I found that it was cited by (amongst others):

GRELLARD, Christophe: “Nicole Oresme et l’élaboration d’une science pour les laïcs, entre esbatement et contemplation”, uploaded to academia.edu

…which, among other things, compares the two very different interpretations of Du Ciel Et Du Monde put forward in…

GRANT, Edward : Nicole Oresme, Aristotle’s On the Heavens and the Court of Charles V., in : SYLLA, Edith/MCVAUGH, Michaël Rogers (éd.): Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science. Studies on the Occasion of John E. Murdoch’s Seventieth Birthday. Leiden: Brill 1997, 187–207

…and in…

CAROTI, Stefano : Nicole Oresme : dalla questio alla glose. La presenza del dibattito universitario nelle glosse di Le Livre du ciel et du monde, in: BRAY, Nadia/STURLESE, Loris : Filosofia in volgare nel medioevo. Atti del convegno della società italiana per lo studio del pensiero medievale, Lecce, 27–29 settembre 2002. FIDEM : Louvain‐la‐Neuve 2003, 155–190.