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:

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 XIVe et XVIe 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?

A recent post on voynich.ninja brought up the subject of differences / similarities between Voynichese words starting with EVA ch and those starting with EVA sh. But this got me thinking more generally about the difference between ch and sh in Voynichese (i.e. in any position), and even more generally about letter contact tables.

Problems With Letter Contact Tables

For ciphertexts where the frequency instance distribution has been flattened, a normal first test is William Friedman’s Index of Coincidence (IoC). This often helps determine the period of the cryptographic means that was used to flatten it (e.g. the length of the cyclic keyword, etc). But this is not the case with the Voynich Manuscript.

For ciphertexts where the frequency instance graph is normal but the letter to letter adjacency has been disrupted, the IoC is one of the tests that can help determine the period of any structured transposition (e.g. picket fence etc) that has been carried out. But the Voynich is also not like this.

So, when cryptologists are faced by a structured ciphertext (i.e. one where the frequency instance graph more closely resembles a natural language, and where the letter adjacency also seems to follow language-like rules, the primary tool they rely on is letter contact tables. These are tables of counts (or percentages) that show how often given letters are followed by other given letters.

But for Voynichese there’s a catch: because in order to build up letter contact tables, you have to first know what the letters of the underlying text are. And whatever they might be, the one thing that they definitely are not is the letters of the EVA transcription.

Problems With EVA

The good thing about EVA was that it was designed to help Voynich researchers collaborate on the problems of Voynichese. This was because it offered a way for them to talk about Voynichese that online was (to a large degree) independent of all their competing theories about what specific combinations of Voynichese shapes or strokes genuinely made up a Voynichese letter. And there were a lot of these theories back then, a lot.

To achieve this, EVA was constructed as a clever hybrid stroke transcription alphabet, one designed to capture in a practical ‘atomic’ (i.e. stroke-oriented) way many of the more troublesome composite letter shapes you find in Voynichese. Examples of these are the four “strikethrough gallows” (EVA ckh / cth / cfh / cph), written as an ornate, tall character (a “gallows character”) but with an odd curly-legged bench character struck through it.

However, the big problem with EVA is arguably that it was too successful. Once researchers had EVA transcriptions to work with, almost all (with a few heroic exceptions) seem to have largely stopped wondering about how the letters fit together, i.e. how to parse Voynichese into tokens.

In fact, we have had a long series of Voynich theorists and analysts who look solely at Voynich ‘words’ written in EVA, because it can seem that you can work with EVA Voynichese words while ignoring the difficult business of having to parse Voynichese. So the presence of EVA transcriptions has allowed many people to write a lot of stuff bracketing out the difficult stuff that motivated the complicated transcription decisions that went into designing EVA in the first place.

As a result, few active Voynich researchers now know (or indeed seem to care much) about how Voynichese should be parsed. This is despite the fact that, thanks to the (I think somewhat less than positive) influence of the late Stephen Bax, the Voynich community now contains many linguists, for whom you might think the issue of parsing would be central.

But it turns out that parsing is typically close to the least of their concerns, in that (following Bax’s example) they typically see linguistic takes and cryptographic takes as mutually exclusive. Which is, of course, practically nonsensical: indeed, many of the best cryptologists were (and are) also linguists. Not least of these was Prescott Currier: I would in fact go so far as to say that everyone else’s analyses of Voynichese have amounted to little more than a series of minor extensions and clarifications to Currier’s deeply insightful 1970s contributions to the study of Voynichese.

Problems With Parsing

Even so, there is a further problem with parsing, one which I tried to foreground in my book “The Curse of the Voynich” (2006). This is because I think there is strong evidence that certain pairs of letters may have been used as verbose cipher pairs, i.e. pairs of glyphs used to encipher a single underlying token. These include EVA qo / ee / or / ar / ol / al / am / an / ain / aiin / aiiin / air / aiir (the jury is out on dy). However, if you follow this reasoning through, this also means that we should be highly suspicious of anywhere else the ‘o’ and ‘a’ glyphs appear, e.g. EVA ot / ok / op / of / eo etc.

If this is even partially correct, then any letter contact tables built on the component glyphs (i.e. the letter-like-shapes that such verbose pairs are made up of) would be analysing not the (real underlying) text but instead what is known as the covertext (i.e. the appearance of the text). As a result, covertext glyph contact tables would hence be almost entirely useless.

So I would say that there is a strong case to be made that almost all Voynichese parsing analyses to date have found themselves entangled by the covertext (i.e. they have been misdirected by steganographic tricks).

All the same, without a parsing scheme we have no letter contact tables: and without letter contact tables we can have no worthwhile cryptology of what is manifestly a structured text. Moreover, arguably the biggest absence in Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma” is the lack of letter contact tables, which I think sent out the wrong kind of message to readers.

Letter Contact Tables: v0.1

Despite this long list of provisos and problems, I still think it is a worthwhile exercise to try to construct letter contact tables for Voynichese: we just have to be extraordinarily wary when we do this, that’s all.

One further reason to be wary is that many of the contact tables are significantly different for Currier A and Currier B pages. So, because I contend that it makes no sense at all to try to build up letter contact pages that merge A and B pages together, I present A and B separately here.

The practical problem is that doing this properly will require a much better set of scripts than I currently have: what I’m presenting here is only a small corner of the dataset (forward contacts for ch and sh), executed very imperfectly (partly by hand). But hopefully it’s a step in the right direction and others will take it as an encouragement to go much further.

Note that I used Takahashi’s transcription, and got a number of unmatched results which I counted as ??? values. These may well be errors in the transcription or errors in my conversion of the transcription to JavaScript (which I did a decade ago). Or indeed just bit-rot in my server, I don’t know.

A ch vs B ch, Forward Contacts

A ch
(cho 1713)
—– of which (chol 531, chor 400, chod 196, chok 130, cho. 113, chot 94, chos 50, chom 28, choi 20, choy 18, chop 14, chof 12, choe 11, choa 7, choc 6, choo 5, cho- 4, chon 4, chog 2, cho??? 69)
(che 918)

—– of which (cheo 380, chey 229, chee 156, chea 64, chek 30, chet 19, ched 12, ches 8, chep 7, cher 2, cheg 1, chef 1, che. 1, che* 1, che??? 7)
(chy 544)
(cha 255)

(ch. 112)
(chk 60)
(chd 35)
(cht 31)
(chs 21)

(chch 5) (chp 5) (chsh 4) (chm 2) (chi 2) (chc 2) (chf 1) (chl 0) (chn 0) (chr 0) (chs 0) (ch- 0) (ch= 0)

B ch
(che 3640)
—– of which (ched 1482, chey 597, cheo 565, chee 537, chek 119, chea 82, ches 55, chet 42, chep 25, chef 15, cher 4, cheg 4, che. 2, chel 1, che??? 117)
(chd 725)
(cho 633)

—– of which (chol 200, chod 123, chor 83, chok 65, chot 44, cho. 34, chop 7, chos 22, choa 10, chop 7, choy 4, choe 4, chof 4, choo 4, choi 2, cho= 1, cho??? 26)
(ch. 403)
(chy 331)
(cha 185)

(chk 84)
(chs 50)
(cht 38)
(chp 20)

(chch 6) (chc 6) (chsh 5) (chf 2) (chi 0) (chm 0) (chl 0) (chn 0) (chr 0) (chs 0) (ch- 0) (ch= 0)

Observations of interest here:

  • A:cho = 1713, while B:cho = 633
  • A:chol = 531, while B:chol = 200
  • A:chor = 397, while B:chor = 83
  • A:che = 918, while B:che = 3640
  • A:ched = 12, while B:ched = 1482
  • A:chedy = 7, while B:chedy = 1193
  • A:chd = 35, while B:chd = 725
  • A:chdy = 21, while B:chdy = 504

As an aside:

  • dy appears 765 times in A, 5574 times in B

A sh vs B sh, Forward Contacts

A sh

(sho 625)
—– of which (shol 174, sho. 143, shor 105, shod 77, shok 32, shot 22, shos 11, shoi 9, shoa 6, shoy 5, shoe 4, shom 4, shop 4, sho- 1, shof 1, shoo 1, sho??? 26)
(she 407)

—– of which (sheo 174, shee 84, shey 81, shea 20, she. 19, shek 12, shes 8, shed 3, shet 2, shep 1, sheq 1, sher 1, she??? 1)
(shy 153)
(sha 58)

(sh. 39)
(shk 13)
(shd 7)
(shch 6)
(sht 5)
(shs 3)
(shsh 1)
(shf 1) (everything else 0)

B sh

(she 1997)
—– of which (shed 734, shee 386, shey 334, sheo 286, shek 78, shea 37, shet 18, shes 15, she. 13, shep 6, shef 5, shec 2, sheg 2, she* 1, shel 1, sher 1, she??? 79)
(sho 284)

—– of which (shol 89, shod 59, shor 43, shok 24, sho. 23, shot 8, shos 8, shoa 5, shoi 5, shoe 3, shof 2, shoo 2, shoy 1, shop 1, sho??? 11)
(shd 161)
(sh. 136)
(shy 104)
(sha 67)

(shk 35)
(sht 13)
(shs 12)
(shch 6)
(shsh 1)
(shf 1) (everything else 0)

Observations of interest here:

  • A:sho = 625, while B:sho = 284
  • A:shol = 174, while B:shol = 89
  • A:shor = 105, while B:shor = 43
  • A:she = 406, while B:she = 1997
  • A:shed = 3, while B:shed = 734
  • A:shedy = 2, while B:shedy = 629
  • A:shd = 7, while B:shd = 161
  • A:shdy = 3, while B:shdy = 100

Final Thoughts

The above is no more than a brief snapshot of a corner of a much larger dataset. Even here, a good number of the features of this corner have been discussed and debated for decades (some most notably by Prescott Currier).

But given that there is no shortage of EVA ch, sh, e, d in both A and B, why are EVA ched, chd, shed, and shd so sparse in A and so numerous in B?

It’s true that dy appears 7.3x more in B than in A: but even so, the ratios for ched, chedy, shed, shedy, chd, chdy, shd and shdy are even higher (123x, 170x, 244x, 314x, 20x, 24x, 23x, and 33x respectively).

Something to think about…

Anyone in Dublin this week with even a passing interest in Ethel Voynich could surely do no better than drop by Dr Angela Byrne’s talk: Ethel Voynich, Transnational Revolutionary at 5.30pm to 6.30pm on Thursday 10th October 2019, at EPIC (The Irish Emigration Museum), Custom House Quay, D01 T6K4 Dublin 1. And did I mention it’s completely free?

The talk’s synopsis:

Cork-born Ethel Voynich was raised in London, where she became involved in anarchist circles and translated the writings of exiled Ukrainian revolutionary, Stepniak. She travelled around Russia in 1887–9, teaching music and associating with radicals. Her novel, The Gadfly (1897) inspired communists worldwide for decades – but by 1917, she had moved away from radical politics. This talk details her transnational radical networks and asks, what was the extent of her involvement in the Russian revolutionary movement?

Ah, yes: and I can confirm that it’s a pleasure and a delight to finally have some Ethel Voynich-related news that isn’t related to lingerie.

The normal scenario for Voynich fashion is for some short-run digital-print textile house (whether making T-shirts, hoodies or whatever) to put some nice evocative Voynich image on the stuff they sell. You know, on sites such as RedBubble and the like.

Teito T-shirts

And this is basically the deal with classy Japanese T-shirt company Teito T-shirts, which I saw a few days ago. They sell one T-shirt with a nice balneo picture, one with a nice astro picture, and one with a nice Herbal B image (in fact, the concealed ‘car’ page I proposed back in 2006, Curse fans).

Siddhartha Tytler

If you want some Indian designer Voynich gear, controversial creator Siddhartha Tytler (son of Jagdish Tytler) has some rather livelier print-on-demand designs for your delectation and delight. For children, he offers a Voynich printed skirt with choli/shirt kurta (though the design isn’t that Voynichy to my eyes, I have to say):

Tytler also has a multicolour Voynich kurta with patiala pants combo, which is a bit more in the right kind of direction, I think:

Ajour Lingerie

So far so (reasonably) predictable. But… then I stumbled upon a Voynich range of lingerie, courtesy of Anna-Bella Lingerie of Alpharetta, GA. From there, Pam McKinzie kindly redirected me to Tetyana Kravchuk of Ajour Lingerie in Ukraine, the company who designed and made the range, some of which is below:

Now: having looked very closely (in the name of primary evidence, of course, why else would anyone do such a thing?) at these, I honestly couldn’t see any design elements linking these with the Voynich Manuscript at all. And so I asked Tetyana Kravchuk why they chose the name. She replied:

“The line name [is] Voynich because the general theme of the collection was names of the writers and novelists. Especially this line named Voynich, because it’s so much different from others. Seductive and modest, revolutiona[ry] & calm.

So there you have it. It’s actually Ethel Voynich lingerie.

And now you know.

If asked who the greatest historical codebreaker was, would I point to Jim Reeds, Jim Gillogly, or even William Friedman? No! That accolade would surely have to go to Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon.

Like, why? Well, despite the twin handicaps of (a) being accompanied by much younger, sexy sidekicks, for whom his awkwardly lustful old-guy feelings constantly get in the way, and (b) being a thinly drawn fictional character being played by a thinly drawn actor who was much better in ‘Big’, Langdon does solve some kick-ass cipher mysteries. Which is cool.

And so I recently set out to solve the kick-ass cipher mystery that is the Voynich Manuscript using Robert Langdon’s historical cipher playbook as my only guide. And boy oh boy, you’ll never guess where that led…

Birds of a Feather / Flock Together

So how would Langdon begin? Duh! Obviously, he’d turn to the very first page of the manuscript, where an obscure detail (that everybody had looked at before but glossed over) would, in his cavernous brain, trigger some insanely erudite / off-the-wall connection that nobody else could ever make, ever. And he would then have the intellectual courage to follow its trail of breadcrumbs through to its logical end, no matter what awful truth (usually guarded by some millennia-spanning conspiracy) it revealed.

So let’s channel our inner Langdon, and look in the upper left side margin of the first page of the Voynich Manuscript (folio 1r). This is what we see:

“Why, that couldn’t be…”, Langdon would muse, “or… could it?” Yes, it can!

I think you (and Robert Langdon) would surely agree that what is on the first page of the fifteenth century Voynich Manuscript is, without any doubt, essentially the same logo used by Californian children’s faux surf-wear company Hollister. But how? Wasn’t Hollister founded in 1922?

Now, Langdon would immediately know (as sure as if he had Wikipedia open on his leather-bound tablet) that Hollister was a fake brand concocted by Abercrombie & Fitch in July 2000 to help them target a younger market, and that all the talk of it having been created in the 1920s was just made up.

But at this point, Langdon’s eyes would narrow and his forehead would furrow slightly, and he would say something enigmatic in Italian: eppur si muove – “…and yet it moves clothes“. Or something like that.

Despite the logical difficulties, he would be immediately convinced that the two seagulls shared a subtle connection, one that he would have to travel to a long stream of good-looking locations to pursue. After all, what does Langdon ever have to lose, apart from his stellar reputation, his cushty academic job, and the lives of his ex-lovers and oldest friends as they accidentally get caught in the (literal) cross-fire?

And once he had reviewed all the available evidence (say, ten minutes later), he would conclude that there was only one possible way that the propositional variables of the Voynich Manuscript and the Hollister logo could be connected. How? You guessed it – a centuries-old conspiracy one of his nutty old mentors (who probably originally worked with Edgar Wind, but let’s not hold that against him) had once mentioned to him in hushed breath after an exhilarating iconographical lecture at the Warburg Institute… a conspiracy with a terrible, awful, powerful name he could never forget, no matter how hard he tried…

“The Secret Order of the Seagull”

Langdon would also instantly recall that Abercrombie and Fitch had been founded in 1892 by Establishment favourite David Abercrombie, initially selling outdoorsy apparel and related stuff from his Manhattan shop. Yes, Langdon would muse (thinking out loud over a Bellini to an old girlfriend who he had just randomly met on a traghetto in Venice, and who would be sadly heading to her doom in a couple of reels’ time) David Abercrombie was clearly the inheritor of a terrible age-old secret. Look, it’s obvious – you can tell by his moustache and sad mouth, for sure.

But who had been the Grandmaster of The Secret Order of the Seagull before Abercrombie? Well, only Anton Chekhov (not the Star Trek navigator, but the Russian playwright, *sigh*) could fit that bill. And after the disastrous 1896 debut of his play “The Seagull”, Chekhov must surely have sold the dreadful secret he had been looking after to Abercrombie on a outdoors goods buying trip to Moscow.

And yet… might some aspect of the secret also be embedded in The Seagull? In its Act II, which Langdon inevitably has memorized in the original Russian, we find the following:

Nina lingers behind after the group leaves, and Konstantin shows up to give her a seagull that he has shot. Nina is confused and horrified at the gift. […] Trigorin sees the seagull that Konstantin has shot and muses on how he could use it as a subject for a short story: “A young girl lives all her life on the shore of a lake. She loves the lake, like a seagull, and she’s happy and free, like a seagull. But a man arrives by chance, and when he sees her, he destroys her, out of sheer boredom. Like this seagull.

“Now, wait a minute”, notes Langdon to a mysterious young lady who has easily sidled into his stuffy, egocentric life, “I’m sure that’s something I’ve seen in the Voynich Manuscript”.

“I think you could be right”, replies the sexy lady whose paper-thin backstory didn’t really make much sense, now you come to mention it. But given that she arrived at a point when Langdon had his mystery-solving head wedged several miles up his mystery-solving ass, he wouldn’t even have noticed if she had seven heads and ten horns. “It certainly looks like a woman by a lake. Even if she is apparently being eaten by a giant fish.”

Homer, But Not Simpson

But Langdon is wracking his colossal brain yet further, like a Greek fisherman beating squid on a rock to tenderize it. “Why is it”, he asks plaintively, “that Homer compared Hermes to a seagull?”

“[he] sped on over the waves like the seagull that hunts for fishes in the frightening troughs of the barren sea and wets his thick plumage in the brine; like such a bird was Hermes carried over the multitudinous waves. But when he had reached that far-off island he left the violet ocean and took to the land until he came to a great cavern; in this [Kalypso] the Nymphe of the braided tresses had made her home, and inside this he found her now…”

“That’s very strange”, says the young girl, whose curious accent really should have flagged her to Langdon as a strange mix of German rifle champion, Sorbonne arts student and Estonian prostitute, had he not been so distracted by her pert body. “I believe”, she continues, passing him a Beinecke printout from her oddly capacious handbag, “that scene is also depicted in the Voynich Manuscript.”

“Clearly the second nymph from the left is Kalypso”, notes Langdon, flexing his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Classics. “Because, as the daughter of the Titan Atlas, she’s bound to be the fittest.”

“So you have reconstructed The Secret History of The Secret Order of the Seagull, all the way from Homer to Hollister”, sneers the girl, suddenly pointing her diamante-encrusted Mauser HSc at Langdon. “This arcane and dangerous knowledge will do you no good when you are (dramatic pause) dead. As a dead dodo who has died. And is dead.

But just as the conspiracy gun girl is about to shoot, Langdon’s old girlfriend, returning from the bar with their next round of Bellinis, trips on the conspiracy girl’s handbag and falls between Langdon and the gun. She dies, Langdon lives (he is merely grazed by the bullet, of course), the gun girl escapes, and the Secret Conspiracy goes ever on.

You know it makes sense. You’ve read the book, right?

Yes, It’s All As Plain As Day, Fer Sher

So, will the Voynich Manuscript turn out to be linked to some ancient shady symbol-obsessed cabal, of the kind whose dusty evil doors Robert Langdon is doomed to forever find himself accidentally knocking on? Clearly only a fool (maybe even a fool with a History degree) would think otherwise.

Here, I’ve tried to stand shoulder to shoulder with Robert Langdon, letting his indomitable spirit and continent-spanning leaps of faith guide me as we trace the roots of the Voynich Manuscript together. For to one like him (and I can confirm that there are indeed very many like him, because they keep sending me their Voynich Theories, and then snarling that I’m an idiot for not being able to grasp their ineffable brilliance), these things are Easy Peasy.

Perhaps you can learn some important lessons from him too!

I’ve recently been researching 15th century copies of Johannes Hartlieb’s German translation of Andrea Capellanus’ “De Amore“. My plan is to try to work out if any includes a predecessor of the hand-crossing drawing that appeared in the three 1482/1484 incunabula…

…which, if you recall, is the drawing that Koen Gheuens cleverly suggested might well be linked with a Diebold Lauber workshop drawing and the Voynich Manuscript’s Gemini zodiac roundel…

This is all going OK so far (I now have Alfred Karnein’s magisterial book on the subject, and a copy of his 1985 book should land on my doorstep soon), and as always I’ll post more on this in due course.

However, there’s one other German “De Amore” described by Frank Fürbeth in his more recent book “Johannes Hartlieb: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk” that I can’t find anything about. This manuscript, which doesn’t appear in either of Karnein’s books, was (says Fürbeth) Number 3 in American antiquarian bookseller Philip J. Pirages’ 1985 catalogue. But when I emailed the bookseller, Phil Pirages himself kindly replied, saying that he had no record of any such book.

It would seem that something a little odd is going on here. 🙁

Can I therefore please ask any Cipher Mysteries reader who just happens to have easy access to a stupendously good academic library with a copy of Frank Fürbeth’s book “Johannes Hartlieb: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk” (currently £80+ on bookfinder.com, somewhat out of my range, sadly) to photograph or scan pages 62 and 63 for me? (This is, according to Google, where Fürbeth discusses the Pirages manuscript.) Thanks very much!

Note: I believe that the 2011 edition of the book is simply a reprint of the 1992 original, but please check to see if these two pages do mention Philip J. Pirages, thanks!

There are now, courtesy of Koen Gheuens and others, numerous web pages exploring possible / probable connections between the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac roundels and 15th century scribal workshops in German Alsace (most notably that of Diebold Lauber).

In one of my own contributions to this (small) canon, I discussed the McKell calendar, an astrological / medical calendar made in Hagenau between 1430 and 1450 by Lauber’s workshop (it has more recently been dated as c. 1445). Though I only knew of black and white scans online, commenter Helmut Winkler very kindly posted up a link to a webpage from BNU Strasbourg, the institution that recently bought it.

This included colour scans of the pages, including the gold-leaf sun/moon framing device at the top of the medical pages, which surely makes it clear what a top-end manuscript this must have been:

The colours too turn out to be remarkably vibrant, notably the red and blue clothes and gold wings on the calendar’s page for August (Virgo):

The McKell Aries

Though the McKell Aries page scan is now (apparently) missing from the website, I found a copy of it online that Darren Worley had posted in a comment to Stephen Bax’s website. Note that the Aries page’s tree is drawn and coloured very similarly to the Virgo page’s tree (above):

Can you spot anything wrong with this image? Having once lived next door to a goat for a few months (who would happily eat your washing given half a chance), I have to say that this looks to me less like a sheep or a ram than a greedy goat with a goatee doing what goats do best (i.e. climbing up to eat anything it can sink its teeth into).

But to be clear, the three simplest ways to tell a sheep from a goat are:

  1. tail direction (goats’ tails go up, while sheep’s tails go down)
  2. what they’re doing (sheep usually graze grass, while goats tend to prefer munching everything else)
  3. goats stereotypically have goatees (the clue’s in the name)

So even though the McKell Aries illustrator got the tail direction right for sheep, I’m still happily scoring this 2-1 in favour of the goats.

The Voynich Aries

As Prof. Ewa Sniezynska-Stolot wrote to Rafal Prinke in 2001, having examined the Voynich Manuscript: “The genre scenes, eg. Aries eating a bush, suggest that the signs were redrawn from a calendar”. And just as with the McKell calendar’s Aries, it has long been argued that the animal depicted is less like a ram or sheep than, as Albert Howard Carter seems to have first pointed out back in 1946, a goat.

Moreover, there are two of the same animals on consecutive pages, firstly a dark Aries…

…followed by a light Aries…

Incidentally, on the VMS list in 2004 Pamela Richards argued that this must be a goat because “[s]heep don’t have dew claws, those tiny hard horns above the hooves; goats do. And those dew claws are very clearly depicted on each foot.”. However, as Rene Zandbergen pointed out much later, sheep actually have dew claws too (though horses and giraffes don’t, so please be reassured that we can at least rule them out), so this isn’t a great argument.

So… is this actually a goat? By my (albeit simplified) scoring system in the preceding section (tail down, no goatee, but grazing), I ought really to instead score this 2-1 to Sheep United. But it’s a game of two halves, I’m sick as a parrot, the seagulls follow the trawler, etc etc.

Model Books and Calendars

In many ways, though, I think it doesn’t greatly matter if either/both is/are a sheep or a goat, because I think we can tell broadly what happened here.

The McKell Aries was (I believe) most likely copied from a previously made goat drawing exemplar, probably from a model book. And perhaps the artist straightened the tail to make it better resemble a sheep, who knows? I also think that the McKell Virgo tree was copied from the same goat picture (the tree was surely integral to the goat design).

Similarly, I think the Voynich Aries was almost certainly copied from an Aries roundel in an existing calendar. Perhaps the score in that original illustration would have been scored 2-1 to the goats or 1-2 to the sheep after extra time, it’s almost futile to try to say.

Incidentally, I have a recollection of Rene Zandbergen once pointing to an Aries calendar roundel where there was a tree in the background that was almost like an optical illusion of something being eaten by the animal in the foreground. But I am unable to dig that up from anywhere, sorry. 🙁

Goats in the Buch der Natur

Finally, Ulrike Spyra’s book might once again be an interesting resource here, because her Synoptic Table of Illustrations lists (on p.384) a number of drawings of goats (“Gaiz / Capra“):

  • M590 – 61rb (Munchen, BSB, Cgm 590)
  • A497 – 115va (Augsburg, SuStB, 2o Cod. 497)
  • GW – 66ra (Gottweig, Stiftsbibl., Cod. 389 rot)
  • SG – 69rb (Strasbourg BNU Cod. 2264)
  • HD311 – 79v (Heidelberg UB Cpg 311)
  • M684 – 84r (Michelstadt, Nic.-Matz-Bibl. Cod D 684)
  • WU – 67r Wurzburg, UB M ch f 265

As an example, here’s Strasbourg BNU Cod. 2264’s goat, which I’d say scores a comfortable 2-0 win:

The small point I’m making here is that 15th century artists were clearly more than capable of drawing goats in a semi-realistic way if they so chose.

I am referring, of course, to the opinion (put forward by the highly respected herbal historian Sergio Toresella) that the Voynich Manuscript was in some way connected with the family of “alchemical herbal” manuscripts. Might Sergio have been basically right about this, but not in the way he expected?

If you weren’t actually taking notes during the Alchemical Herbal 1.0.1 lecture, here’s a quick recap to bring you up to speed:

  • there are about seventy known examples of alchemical herbals
  • most were made in the 15th century (a few 14th, some 16th)
  • all bar two were made in the Veneto area in Northern Italy
  • the plants are mostly real, but accompanied by nutty visual puns
  • the plant names are, essentially, evocative nonsense
  • some copies have recipes attached to some/most of the plants
  • such recipes are often magical spells or incantations
  • nobody knows why the alchemical herbals were made at all

Given that Toresella thinks the Voynich Manuscript was written in a North Italian humanistic hand typical of the second half of the fifteenth century, it’s hard not to notice the long list of similarities between it and the alchemical herbals. However – and here’s the tricky bit – the question I’m posing here is whether Toresella might have been right about this connection, but not at all in the way he expected.

The Layout Is The Message

Over the years, I’ve discussed a good number of places in the Voynich Manuscript where it seems to have been copied. My argument for this (running right back to The Curse of the Voynich) is based on places where I believe voids in the predecessor document have been copied through to the Voynich Manuscript itself.

For example, I would argue that the man-made hole (the same one that Toresella concluded [quite wrongly, I think] had been rubbed through the vellum in a sexual frenzy) was in fact a copy of a hole that had had been elaborated around in the predecessor document. Similarly, I think a large space running down the page edge in Q20 was highly likely to be a copy of a (probably stitched) vertical tear in the predecessor document. (Which is also why I think we can tell that the predecessor document was also written on vellum, because you can’t stitch paper.)

Codicologically, the overall conclusion I draw is quite subtle: from all this, I believe one of the key design criteria driving the way the Voynich Manuscript was constructed was to allow the writer to retain the predecessor document‘s layout. In short: Layout Is King.

But this has a rather odd logical implication. Similarly to Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “The Medium Is The Message”, might it be the case here that, in fact, The Layout Is The Message? By which I mean: might it be that Voynich researchers have spent such a long time looking for matches with the plants, when in fact the important detail was actually the shape of the void on the page that had been filled in by the plants?

What I’m suggesting here is not only that the plants chosen to fill in the voids on the Voynich Manuscript’s pages might largely be meaningless filler (literally), but also that I suspect we might possibly also be able – with a bit of herbal help from Sergio Toresella and others – to use the shapes of these voids to reconstruct the plants that had originally filled them.

And if we can identify any page’s original plant, we would have a gigantic source crib that would suggest a block paradigm match with any recipe associated with that plant, particularly from any of the (relatively small) number of herbals that have recipe text attached to that plant. So you should be able to see where I’d like to go forward with this. 🙂

The 98 Secret Herbs And Spices

All the same, I suspect more than a few Cipher Mysteries readers are now thinking something along the lines of “well, even if that kind of approach is theoretically possible, it must surely be impossible in practice“.

And without any additional information to work with, I’d basically agree. However, I also think we have a large number of additional angles we can pursue in combination with this that might offer up the kind of additional information we would need to narrow down our overall search space.

The first one is the list of 98 named plants that Vera Segre Rutz lists as being present in the bulk of alchemical herbal manuscripts. Philip Neal helpfully offers up a list of these 98 plants:

  • Herba Antolla minor
  • Herba Bortines
  • Herba Torogas
  • Herba Nigras
  • Herba Stellaria
  • […]

…all the way through to Herba Consolida mayor and Herba Consolida minor. On the face of it, these might appear to be of no use to us at all. However, I have long argued that the way that Herbal A pages are mixed up with Herbal B pages tends to confuse many issues: and it is a little-known fact that there the Herbal A pages contain 95 drawings of plants (and that there is also a Herbal A folio missing, bringing the total up to 97 or so drawings).

And so I strongly wonder whether the 97 or so Herbal A drawings (or rather their underlying voids) correspond to Segre Rutz’s 98 plants in the mainstream of the alchemical herbal tradition. Otherwise it’s a coincidence, for sure, and nobody likes coincidences much.

Again, you may object that this is not specific enough to be helpful. However, I’d point out that the alchemical herbal plants were very often included in specific orders: and that even if all the Voynich Manuscript’s bifolios have ended up in the wrong order, every pair of images on consecutive pages is guaranteed to be in the right order (i.e. the recto side then verso side of the same folio).

It might well be that an inspired guess plus a bit of cunning detective work will be enough to build the crucial missing linkage here. After all, we don’t need much.

Punning Clans

Puns (specifically visual puns) are another key way we might able to find a way in here. Toresella, in his “Gli erbari degli alchimisti”, lists examples where alchemical herbal drawings reflect the name of the plant, e.g. Herba Brancha Lupina can have its root stylized to look like a wolf. Here’s a wolf-root from Vermont MS 2 (as discussed by Marco Ponzi):

Note I’m not suggesting here that we should literally look for exact parallels in the Voynich Manuscript. However, my guess is that the intellectual temptation offered to the author by the chance to include / adapt / appropriate visual puns when creating filler plant drawings would be almost impossible to turn down.

And so I’m wondering whether there might turn out to be entire families (nay, clans) of Voynich herbal drawings that contain curious punny echoes of the original (though now invisible) herbal drawings.

One visually striking example of the kind of thing I have in mind is the pairs of red-outlined eyes in the roots of Voynich Manuscript f17r. I’m specifically wondering here whether these eyes might be a punny reference to Herba Bososilles (one of the alchemical herbal set of 98), which is – according to the paragraph of text in BNF Latin 17844 – good for the eyes. Here’s a picture with the coloured drawing from Canon Misc 408 with the text from BNF Latin 17844 cut’n’pasted below it:

Reminding vs Remembering

Ultimately, though, I have to say that I don’t believe that the plants we see on the pages of the Voynich Manuscript are likely to directly help us in the way that Voynich researchers over the last century (and more) have hoped. Calling them “phantasmagorical” (as I think Karen Reeds once did) may be technically accurate, but it is certainly practically unhelpful: we do not have long lists of phantasmagorical 15th century mss to compare it with.

The primary function of these plant drawings, I therefore suggest, may well lie not in their literality (i.e. in their ability to encode external information, to remember information for the author), but in their evocativity (i.e. their ability to stimulate recollection, to remind the author of that-which-was-there-before).

If this is right, we must find ways of resisting the temptation to try to literally read what we see in these plant pages, and instead attempt to start looking at them far more indirectly. Who know what we will see out of the sides of our eyes?

Given that I couldn’t find any page on the Internet providing links to scans of alchemical herbals, I thought it would be good to try to fill that gap. Not as many as I hoped turned out to be fully accessible, but there are still a good number.

The basic list I used was the one given by Philip Neal (summarizing Vera Segre Rutz, of course), but extended to include the manuscripts discussed by Alexandra Marracini in her “Asphalt and Bitumen, Sodom and Gomorrah: Placing Yale’s Voynich Manuscript on the Herbal Timeline” paper.

Segre Rutz’s & Marraccini’s trees

Before I begin, it’s important to remember that Vera Segre Rutz reconstructed the cladistic tree of alchemical herbal manuscripts: this framework has dominated discussion of alchemical herbals ever since. The root of this tree was a Manuscript X (now lost), which begat Manuscripts Y and Z (both of which are also now lost). All the “direct tradition” manuscripts derived from Manuscript Y or Manuscript Z.

In addition, here’s Alexandra Marraccini’s tree, which laid out where she thought the Voynich Manuscript sat in relation to alchemical herbal manuscripts. Note that the top part of the tree is Segre Rutz’s direct tradition, while the bottom (yellow) part contains Marraccini’s proposed two groups of derived manuscripts:

Manuscripts in Segre Rutz’s Direct Tradition

The four Z-family alchemical herbals are:

  • Fermo, Biblioteca Comunale MS 18 (2 pages on YouTube?, 2 more pages here)
  • Florence, Biblioteca di Botanica dell’Universita MS 106book by Stefania Ragazzini (as Rene Zandbergen has pointed out, this ms has a simple cipher key on fol. 1r)
  • Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Misc. 408 (166 plants, Latin)
  • Pavia, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldini 211 (this is the herbal that Segre Rutz wrote “Il Giardino Magico degli alchimisti” about)

The four Y-family alchemical herbals are:

Manuscripts in Segre Rutz’s Indirect Tradition

  • Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldrovandi 151(1)
  • Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldrovandi 151(2)
  • Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldrovandi 152 (1550-1605)
  • Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria MS Aldrovandi 153 – catalogue entry
  • Brescia, Biblioteca Queriniana MS B.V.24 – a page discussed by Marco Ponzi
  • Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Ashb. 456 – catalogue description
  • Florence, Biblioteca Marucelliana MS 168/C – discussed in the book “I Segreti della medicina verde nell’epoca medicea, da due manoscritti inediti della città di Firenze : (secoli XV e XVI)
  • London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 261 – catalogue entry
  • London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 334 – catalogue entry – ‘A contemporary copy of a famous MS herbal preserved at [the] Laurentian Library in Florence. Bought for 700 fr. by Woynich [Voynich] 1912‘.
  • London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 337 – catalogue entry
  • New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS 22.222 – I believe this is actually “PML 22222.4” – catalogue entry – “Text derives from an herbal in Pavia, see Bühler, “An anonymous Latin herbal.
  • Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Add. A. 23
  • Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 604 – manuscript reference looks incorrect (see here)
  • Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Hebr 1199
  • Trent, Museo Provinciale d’Arte MS 1591 – some images are online here
  • Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS It. III.11 (MS 5004)
  • Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS It II.12 (MS 4936)

Tractatus de Herbis Tradition

The herbals forming the “Tractatus de Herbis” tradition deriving from Firenze MS 106 are divided by Marraccini into two groups. Firstly, the group she calls the “Non Flattened Asphaltum” group:

  • Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chig F VIII. 188 (not yet digitized)
  • London, British Library, Egerton MS 747

There’s also a late (1450) copy of Egerton MS 747 which commenter bi3mw thought should be included here:

Secondly, the “Flattened Asphaltum” group (which Marraccini believes may well include the Voynich Manuscript):

  • London, British Library, MS Sloane 4016 – this is described in the catalogue entry as “An Italian Herbal, classified by Baumann as one of the ‘North Italian group’ and as a copy of Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, MS Masson 116 (see Baumann, Das Erbario Carrarese, 1974).
  • Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chig F. VII. 158
  • Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Lat. 6823

To this group I expect we should also add the herbal from which MS Sloane 4016 was copied (according to some, though Alain Touwaide vigorously disagrees):

…and also a closely related herbal manuscript that Rene Zandbergen thinks gets somewhat unfairly overlooked: