Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

My last post discussed the various copies of Antonio Guayneri’s De Balneis still extant: since then, I have (with the kind help of Stefano Guidoni) managed to get phone scans of MS Torino 1200 (with the shelfmark H.II.16). I also found a nice site with solid information about Guayneri, including his epitaph from the Church of San Michele in Pavia, where he and his wife were buried:

Hippocrates medicae basis Galienus et Isach
Et quod Avicenna scivit humatur ibi
Haec est Antonius Guaynerius abditus arca
Philosophus medicae maximus artis honor
Famaque qua celebris par sibi nullus erat
Par sibi sola fuit veritate et nomine coniux
Antonia ut thalami sic tumulique comes
Hos Deus ad coelos exutos corpore traxit
Ne superis tantus abesset honor

Anyway, once I was able to see that the various versions of Guayneri’s text were broadly the same as each other (i.e. with only moderate differences), I transcribed the easiest one to read – which was the one that appears in the 1553 Giunta Venetian print edition – and placed my transcription on the Cipher Foundation site.

Naturally, this is where I started trying to make a breezy (i.e. Thorndike-style) translation of Guayneri’s five chapters, with the help of online translators and my schoolboy Latin: but given that I’m not in any way a full-on Latinist, a lot sits well beyond my abilities. 🙁

Rough Summary of Guayneri’s Five Chapters

Nonetheless, here’s a rough outline of the stuff I could make out:

• Chapter 1 is a load of wretched pseudo-historical patron-facing waffle. (Sorry, but it is.)
• Chapter 2 talks (after more waffle) about how the virtues of the waters change in May from limpid to green. This is like a lake in Macedonia that was reported by Pliny to change its virtues around the heliacal rising of Sirius (i.e. August-ish);
• Chapter 3 talks about how the Marquis of Mantua’s numerous medical conditions were sorted out by going to the baths, and how good the baths are for gout, gammy knees, swellings, and even for a paralyzed hand. There’s a fountain in the corner of a stone wall that enabled people to have a shower: this shower even cured one man of his tinnitus. Oh, and it’s good for catarrh, asthma, colic, constipation. Oh, and it also helps urinary problems, kidney stones, menstruation, and with conception. Oh, and it’s also good for long-standing headaches, paralysis, convulsions, trembling, lethargy, colds, loss of smell, loss of taste, gum softening, chronic coughs, asthma, stomach problems, dropsy, worms, sciatica, gout, and skin infections.
• Chapter 4 is just too tangled and difficult for me to make out, sorry. 🙁
• Chapter 5 includes some abbreviated recipes for remedies, which are also way beyond my school Latin: “Vel facias fic. recip. ol ei myrti.olei masti. ann drach.j pulueris myrtillorum: cypres. bistor. masti. terrae sigil. ana. scrup.ij ceraeparum: & fiat vnguentum.“, for example, and “Vel facias sic. recip. vnguenti al. Gal. vnc.ij.camphorae & hoc vbi magna affuerit flamma. drach. ij. sanda. ru. spodij ro. ann vnc. 5. incorporentur simul parum aceti commiscendo : & hepati vnctio fiat.“, as well as the much fruitier” Syrupi item aceto. drach.ij.vel de ribes, de succo acetosae de acetositate citri : de lymonibus, de agresta, vel consimilis cum.drach.iij.aquae endi exhibere in aurora multum confert” It also describes how to make and administer clysters effectively. The author once again reminds you that you should go to these baths in May when their powers are at their strongest.

Thoughts, Nick?

Well, even if Chapter 4’s Latin is a bit too messy for me to properly summarise, I think it’s overall pretty clear that even though this is an interesting first-half-of-the-fifteenth-century balneological text, the chances of a structural mapping between it and the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13B section seem painfully close to zero. So I think we can probably rule this out as a 15th century source text. (There are several more I’ll be moving onto, this was only the first one on my list.)

At the same time, I will be unsurprised if the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13B turns out to have a broadly similar mix of balneology, patron-facing bumf, and annoyingly abbreviated recipes. So it certainly feels like I’m knocking on the right kind of door here, even if nobody was home on this particular occasion.

Triolets, Rondeaux, and Christine de Pisan

As an aside, Byron Deveson recently suggested in a comment here that the poem-like section in Q13 might possibly be a triolet, a (roughly-eight-line) repetitive poem form from the late Middle Ages.

A quick search revealed that it wasn’t technically called a triolet until nearer the end of the 15th century: and that before that it was a format only used for French language poems, and better known as a “rondel”.

Perhaps the most famous rondel poet was Christine de Pisan: though born in the Republic of Venice, she ended up in France with her father (who was an astrologer for Charles VI). She became a full-time French-language poet, often adapting the rondel’s 7-line or 8-line format to suit the needs of the poem at hand:

Dure chose est a soustenir
Quant cuer pleure et la bouche chante;
Et de faire dueil se tenir
Dure chose est a soustenir.
Faire le fault qui soustenir.
Veult honneur qui mesdisans hante,
Dure chose est a soustenir

(Translated rather nicely as)

Life’s a bitch, moving on with things,
Crying heart, with the songs so haunting,
Seeking help in what mourning brings.
Life’s a bitch, moving on with things.
Meeting needs, working hard, moody swings,
Honor’s mine, though the gossip’s daunting.
Life’s a bitch, moving on with things

Might this be what we see in the Voynich? Possibly, but it would (a) require the plaintext to be French, and (b) require a complicated enciphering system that was able to encipher the same plaintext in multiple quite different ways.

It’s perhaps (as I suggested a couple of years ago) more likely to be the poem by Claudian (370AD-404AD) (“Fons, Antenoreae vitam qui porrigis urbi, / Fataque vicinis noxia pellis aquis“) quoted by Ioannis et Iacobi de Dondis Patavinorum in their balneological work (also in Giunta). There, the first section runs like this:

Fons, Antenoreae vitam qui porrigis urbi
fataque vicinis noxia pellis aquis,
cum tua vel mutis tribuant miracula vocem,
cum tibi plebeius carmina dictet honos
et sit nulla manus, cuius non pollice ductae
testentur memores prospera vota notae:
nonne reus Musis pariter Nymphisque tenebor,
si tacitus soli praetereare mihi?
ludibrium quid enim fas est a vate relinqui
hunc qui tot populis pervolat ora locum?

Which the Loeb Classics translate as:

Fount that prolongest life for the dwellers in Antenor’s city, banishing by thy neighbouring waters all harmful fates, seeing that thy marvels stir utterance even in the dumb, that a people’s love bids poets to honour thee in song, and that there is no hand whose fingers have not traced for thee some lines in thankful witness of prayers granted, shall I not be held guilty alike by the Muses and the Nymphs if I alone sing not thy praises? How can a spot whose fame is on so many lips rightly be passed over by me in slighting silence?

Still, a fair few fifteenth century balneological texts to go yet…

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

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

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

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

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

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

MS Torino 1200 [1451]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BNF Nouv Acq Lat 211 [1469]

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

f84r

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

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

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

f84v-f78r

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

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

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

f78v-f81r

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

f81v-f75r

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

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

f75v

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

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

Q13B’s bath complexes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quire 13 = Quire 13A + Quire 13B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Constructing a Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benedetto Reguardati / Benedictus de Nursia

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

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

Ugolino da Montecatini

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

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

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

Antonio Guainerio

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

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

Michele Savonarola

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

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

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

I mentioned in a comment on Koen G’s recent post that I thought that Voynichese benched gallows (i.e. gallows that have a ch glyph struck through them) may well be nothing more complex than a different way of writing gallows+ch; and that I thought this was much more likely than the alternative notion that it was a different way of writing ch+gallows.

When Koen asked me what evidence I had for this, I thought that I ought to write a brief post explaining how I got there (i.e. rather than cramming my “truly marvelous demonstration” into a Fermatian margin). So here goes.

Yes, It’s Contact Tables (Again)

The evidence I’d point to is from (you guessed it) contact tables for glyphs following benched gallows. The notable feature of these I mentioned recently on Cipher Mysteries (though the obeservation is, of course, as old as the hills) is that benched gallows are only very rarely followed by -ch.

Here’s a simple parsed count example (Takahashi transcription), showing how very rare benched gallows + -ch are as compared to both -e and -ee:

Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (che 4138), (chee 742), and (chch 18)

Furthermore, as I noted in that post, almost all of the places where benched gallows are followed by ch seem to be Takahashi’s transcription errors (sorry Takahashi-san).

Compare and contrast with the contact tables for the preceding glyph, where the ch- instance counts hugely outnumber the counts for e- and ee-:

Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (ech 143), (eech 33), and (chch 18)

As a sidenote, the interesting things in this particular table are (a) how rarely benched gallows are preceded by ee- (far less than by just e- or ch-), and (b) how frequently benched gallows are preceded by ch- when ch itself is very rarely preceded by ch-.

So, What’s Going On Here?

I think it’s safe to say that there is probably a really basic reason why benched gallows preceded by ch- are found so much more often than benched gallows followed by -ch. But what might that reason be?

For me, the suspicion is simply that c+gallows+h is just a different way of writing gallows+ch. The contact tables I quote above certainly don’t seem to offer anything to support the alternative scenario where c+gallows+h is a different way of writing ch+gallows.

To my eyes, replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would match the statistics baseline for che/chee/chch far more closely than replacing benched gallows with ch+gallows would match the statistics baseline for ech/eech/chch. That is, the benched gallows right contact tables (i.e. the contacts that benched gallows have with glyphs immediately following them to the right) seem to me to broadly match the ch right contact tables, but the benched gallows left contact tables don’t obviously match the ch left contact tables.

The big issue here – as always, though – is one of proof. It’s all very well my speculating that it would be better to replace benched gallows with gallows+ch rather than ch+gallows, but how can this be made stronger?

Though I’m not sure that it would be possible to turn this gallows+ch replacement hypothesis into a smoking-gun proof, I do suspect that it could be tested much more rigorously. Perhaps CM readers will have good suggestions about how to carry out a suitable test (or three). 🙂

Finally: Might ch Be Enciphering U?

To me, Voynichese’s various families of shapes and glyph behaviours look (much as John Tiltman suggested) like a grab-bag of contemporary cipher tricks. As a result, it would make a lot of sense to me if the distinctive benched gallows was simply one of the set of slightly older cipher tricks that were artfully combined to form Voynichese.

Along these lines, I’ve previously floated the idea (based mainly on the look of the benched gallows, but also on my long-held suspicion that e/ee/ch/sh might somehow be vowels) that Voynichese ch might in fact encipher plaintext U/V. This is because I can easily imagine that c+gallows+h may have begun its life as an early 15th century steganographic trick used to disguise or visually disrupt QU patterns before being absorbed into the Voynichese Borg mind.

Replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would be entirely consistent with this idea (though note that the gallows need not necessarily be enciphering Q, even if the trick started that way), so it’s possible that both ideas might turn out to be true simultaneously.

Incidentally: in “The Curse of the Voynich” (p.177), I mentioned a strikethrough trick that appeared in an “otherwise unremarkable” 1455 cipher (Ludovico Petronio Senen) to encipher the Tironian-style ‘subscriptio’ shorthand sign (e.g. that turns “p” into “p[er]”). My speculation here is therefore that the strikethrough trick may have first emerged in this general era, though instead used to visually disguise plaintext U’s.

Hence one thing I have been meaning to do recently is to trawl carefully through Mark Knowles’ fascinating haul of 1400–1450 Northern Italian ciphers to see if there is any indication there that a strikethrough trick was ever used in one of those ciphers to disguise the U in QU pairs. You might have thought that encipherers would have added a special token for “QU”, or might have simply chosen to omit the U after Q: but neither of these options typically seems to have happened in this general timeframe (outside of the most complicated syllabic ciphers).

I recently mentioned in a comment that my working hypothesis was word-initial EVA l- was a different token to EVA l elsewhere: and Emma May Smith asked me what evidence I had for that statement. So I thought I’d post a few stats to throw onto the fire.

The Evidence

Just to be clear, though: because I’d rather not mess up my stats with line-initial EVA l- stats, all the following figures relate to word-initial (but not line-initial) stats. And to keep everything as clear as practical, the comparisons are solely between words beginning l-, ol-, and al-.

So, here are the raw instance counts according to the Takahashi transcription for word-initial (but not line-initial) l-, ol-, and al-. For example, there are 1267 word-initial (but not line-initial) l- words, of which 58 are just EVA l (on its own), along with 433 word-initial (but not line-initial) words beginning with lk-. (Note that the “(-)” line is an estimate, my app unfortunately couldn’t calculate it.)

To compare these three columns, we now need to turn their values into percentages. What this following table is saying, then, is that word-initial (but not line-initial) l- is followed by k 34.18% of the time, t 2.68% of the time, etc. (Note that I didn’t try to capture all of the values.)

In short, this table is trying to compare the contact tables for three word-initial (but not line-initial) contexts: l-, ol-, and al-. So… what does it say?

Though the +f and +p rows are broadly the same for all three contexts, I think just about every row presents significant differences. For example:

• Only one word in the VMs begins with EVA alt (on f72v2, Virgo)
• Comparisons between the ch and sh lines seem to imply that tehre is vastly more similarity between ch and sh (ch seems to occur 3x more often than sh) than between l-, ol-, and al-.
• l- is typically followed by k (34.18%) and ch (23.13%), but this is quite unlike ol- and al-.

However, the biggest difference in all these counts is where l, ol, and al form the whole word (the “(-)” row). So here’s the last table of the day, which is where the whole word counts are removed from the totals, i.e. word-initial but not line-initial and also not word-complete:

Even though taking out all the word-total instances has damped down some of the larger ratios, there are still plenty of big ratios to be seen.

Perhaps the most surprising is the comparison between ly- (1.08%) and aly- (14.48%). (Interestingly, all but one of all the places where the ly and aly instances occur in the text are at the end of a line or butted up against a mid-line illustration. Which I think points strongly to ly and aly being abbreviated in some way, but that’s an argument for another day.)

The Conclusion

For me, I simply can’t see anything systematic or language-like about the comparisons between any of the three columns. When their contact tables are so different, what actual evidence is there that l-, ol-, and al- are all presenting the same (right-facing) linguistic context? Personally, I simply can’t see any.

My conclusion from the above is therefore that l-, ol- and al- are (without any real doubt at all) three different tokens, i.e. they are standing in for three different underlying entities.

Since posting about Voynichese’s strange single leg gallows behaviours a few days ago, I have continued to think about this topic. On the one hand, it’s clear to me how little of any genuine substance we actually know about how they work; and on the other, I’ve been wondering how I can start some broadening conversations about them (by which I mean ones that ask more questions than they answer).

As today’s experimental contribution, I’m going to write a post listing a load of the questions I have in my head to do with single leg gallows but without really trying to answer any of them. I can’t tell how this will work, but here goes regardless. 🙂

Incidentally, for anyone who wants to run their own statistical experiments on single leg gallows, I would strongly recommend using Herbal-B + Q13 + Q20 as their basic test corpus, because I’m acutely distrustful of any Voynich stats that combine Currier A and Currier B. Even though I’m basically doing the latter here. 😉

Questions: final flourish

Rather than finishing with a second vertical leg on the right hand side, single leg gallows instead cross over the left hand leg and finish with a slight flourish to the left. This final flourish can be (1) short, (2) long and straight, or (3) long and curved (i.e. finishing with something like an EVA c-shape).

1. Have the variations in the finishing flourish of single leg gallows been catalogued and/or transcribed?
2. Are these variations found uniformly throughout the manuscript, or are they strongly correlated with the various scribal hands (as recently proposed by Lisa Fagin Davis)?
3. If they have been transcribed, is each flourish type statistically associated with any neighbouring textual behaviours (e.g. contact tables, etc)?

Questions: followed by EVA e?

One huge difference between single leg gallows and double leg gallows is that non-struckthrough single leg gallows are very rarely followed by EVA e. If you count strikethrough gallows separately from normal gallows, the statistics are quite, umm, striking:

• k:ke = 9758:3809 = 39.03%
• t:te = 5802:1748 = 30.13%
• p:pe = 1383:5 = 0.36%
• f:fe = 416:3 = 0.72%
• ckh:ckhe = 876:242 = 27.63%
• cth:cthe = 905:190 = 20.99%
• cph:cphe = 212:64 = 30.19%
• cfh:cfhe = 73:14 = 19.18%

Moreover, looking at the eight instances in Takahashi’s transcription where EVA p and EVA f are followed by EVA e, I suspect that many of these may well be transcription errors (i.e. where Takahashi should have instead written EVA pch / fch).

Hence it seems to me that Voynichese has a secret internal rule that almost completely forbids following EVA p and EVA with EVA e. This is a massively different usage scenario from EVA t / EVA k (which are followed by EVA e 39.03% and 30.13% of the time respectively).

OK, I know I said I was only going to ask questions in this post, but looking at these numbers afresh, I can’t help but speculate: might it be that EVA p/f are nothing more complex than a way of writing EVA te/ke?

1. Has anyone looked closely at the eight places where pe/fe occur?
2. Why is there such a huge difference between pe/fe and the other six gallows?
3. Might this be because EVA p and EVA f are optional ways of writing EVA te and EVA ke?
4. Has anyone considered this specific possibility before?
5. How similar are the contact tables for EVA te/ke and EVA p/f?

Questions: Followed by EVA ch?

Similarly, comparing the stats for instances where gallows are followed by the (almost identical looking) EVA ch glyph reveals more differences:

• k:kch = 9758:1074 = 11.01%
• t:tch = 5802:975 = 16.80%
• p:pch = 1383:733 = 53.00%
• f:fch = 416:190 = 45.67%
• ckh:ckhch = 876:5 = 0.57%
• cth:cthch = 905:3 = 0.33%
• cph:cphch = 212:1 = 0.47%
• cfh:cfhch = 73:0 = 0.00%

Here, we can see that both p and f are followed by ch about half the time (53% and 45.67% respectively), which is significantly more than for k and t (11.01% and 16.80% respectively).

At the same time, the dwindlingly tiny number of places where strikethrough gallows are followed by ch (only nine in the whole manuscript) again raises the question of whether these too are either scribal error or a transcription error.

As an aside, I previously floated the idea here that c + gallows + h may have simply been a compact (and possibly even playful) way of writing gallows + ch, which would be broadly consistent with these stats.

1. Is there anything obviously different about Voynichese words containing EVA kch / tch and Voynichese words containing EVA pch / fch?
2. Has anyone looked in detail at the eight instances where strikethrough gallows are immediately followed by EVA ch?
3. If you remove paragraph-initial p- words from these stats, do the ratios for p:pch and f:fch settle down closer to the ratios for k:kch and t:tch?
4. How similar are the contact tables for EVA tch/kch and EVA cth/ckh?
5. How similar are the contact tables for EVA tech/kech and EVA pch/fch?

Questions: Double Leg Parallels?

Some researchers (perhaps most notably John Tiltman, if I remember correctly) have wondered whether EVA p / f might simply be scribal variations of (the much more common) EVA t / f.

1. Beyond mere visual similarity, is there any actual evidence that supports this view?
2. I would have thought that the pe/fe stats described above would have meant this was extremely unlikely, but am I missing something obvious here?

Questions: Paragraph-Initial?

Yes, single-leg gallows (mainly EVA p) are very often found as the first letter of the first word of paragraphs. But…

1. How often do single leg gallows (and/or strike-through single leg gallows) appear in the first word of a paragraph but not as the very first letter of the word?
2. Do these these paragraph-initial -p-/-f words show any pattern?
3. Are there structural similarities between paragraph-initial p-/f- words and other paragraph-initial?
4. Might there be some kind of numbering system embedded in paragraph-initial p- words (particularly in Q20)?

Questions: vs Double Gallows?

Yes, single-leg gallows are to be found mainly in the top line of paragraphs, but that’s imprecise and unscientific.

1. Are the number of gallows characters (whether single or double) per line roughly constant for both the first lines of paragraphs and for the other lines of paragraphs?
2. Do these statistics change between sections?

And Finally…

Please feel free to leave comments asking any other single leg gallows questions, I’m sure there are plenty more that could sensibly be added to this page. 🙂

All answers happily received too. 😉

Anyone who proposes that Voynichese works in a ‘flat’ (i.e. straightforward) way has a number of extremely basic problems to overcome.

For a start, there are the Voynichese’s ‘LAAFU’ (Emma May Smith’s acronym for Captain Prescott Currier’s phrase “Line As A Functional Unit”, though she now prefers to talk about “line patterns”) behaviours to account for. These relate to the curious ways that letters / words work both at the start of lines and at the end of lines, many of which are discussed by Emma May Smith here:

• Line-first words have a quite different first-letter distribution from the main body of words’ first-letter distribution
• Line-first words are slightly longer than expected
• Line-second words are slightly shorter than expected
• Line-final words frequently end in EVA ‘m’ / ‘am’

At the same time, there are also some odd PAAFU (“Paragraph As A Functional Unit”) behaviours to consider. The most famous of these is the way that the first letter of a paragraph (and even more so of the first paragraph on a page) has a significantly different distribution from elsewhere, one that strongly favours gallows characters (and in particular the single leg gallows EVA ‘p’).

But the other major PAAFU behaviour is that single leg gallows glyphs appear predominantly on the first line of paragraphs, and only rarely elsewhere (these are known as Tiltman lines, after my hero John Tiltman). You can see this throughout the Voynich Manuscript, right from Herbal A page f3r…

…to the Herbal B page f43r (which has an extra single leg gallows, but the remaining ones all sit on the first line of their respective paragraphs)…

…to the Q13 Balneo page f76v (where there are two extra single leg gallows, sure, but the rest of the page slavishly follows the pattern)…

So, even though the internal structure of Voynichese words changes significantly across the different sections (and that’s a separate topic entirely), this single-leg-gallows-mainly-on-top-lines-of-paragraphs Tiltman behaviour seems to remain essentially constant throughout them all.

This is an issue that has been floating round for decades, and I would be surprising if it had originated even from John Tiltman. More recently, Rene Zandbergen discussed it on voynich.ninja back in 2017, pointing out that this behaviour appeared – in his view – to be inconsistent with any model for Voynichese that was inherently uniform (which I call ‘flat’ here), whether linguistic, cryptographic or whatever.

So, the challenge to anyone trying to come up with some kind of theory for the Voynichese text is simply to explain why this unexpected behaviour is the way it is. What kind of mechanism could be behind it?

Q20 Paragraph-Initial Glyphs

For the rest of this post, I’m going to restrict my discussion to the twenty-three Voynich Q20 (‘Quire 20’) pages, simply because their lack of drawings make them particularly easy to work with.

The first thing to point out is that we have two single leg gallow behaviours (very frequent at paragraph starts, and very frequent on the top line of paragraphs) which overlap somewhat.

For example, f103r (the first bound page of Q20), has 19 starred paragraphs, of which 9 begin with the single leg gallow EVA ‘p’ (i.e. 47.3%). And if you count all the paragraph-initial p’s and f’s in Q20, you get:

The values for Q20 as a whole are remarkably consistent: there is a 161/292 = 55.14% chance that a paragraph starts with EVA p, and 16/292 = 5.48% chance that a paragraph starts with EVA f.

Given that ‘p’ makes up 1.03% of the glyphs in Q20 (‘f’ makes up 0.19%), ‘p’ is ~55x more likely to appear as the first glyph of a Q20 paragraph than it is to appear in any other glyph position: even ‘f’ is 28x more likely to appear paragraph-initial than elsewhere. That’s striking, and not at all flat.

Q20 Tiltman Lines

Q20 contains about 10700 words across about 1100 lines (I don’t have the exact figures to hand): 643 of these contain a single leg gallow, i.e. the raw chance any given Q20 word contains a single leg gallow = 643/10700 = 6%.

But whatever the explanation for p being so strongly biased to this paragraph-initial position, I think we should try to separate the single-leg-paragraph-initial behaviour from the single-leg-top-line (Tiltman) behaviour.

So if we remove the 292 paragraph-initial words, the raw chance that any non-paragraph-initial Q20 word contains a single leg gallow goes down to (643-292)/(10700-292) = 3.3%, which is our baseline figure here.

But what of top-line-but-not-initial Q20 words? Given that Q20 has 292 paragraphs, each with a first line containing (say) ten words, and we are removing the first word, we have 292 x ~9 = ~2628 top-line words of interest. Of these (by my counting), 353 contain a ‘p’, and 80 contain an ‘f’. Hence the probability that any given Q20 paragraph-top-line-but-not-initial word contains a single leg gallows is 433/2628 = 16.5%.

Similarly, the probability that any given non-top-line Q20 word contains a single leg gallows is roughly (643-177-433)/(10700-292*10) = 0.4%. So if we discount all the paragraph-initial words, words containing single leg gallows are about 16.5%/0.4% = ~41x more likely to appear on the top lines of paragraphs than on the other lines.

Q20 Neal Keys

One of the interesting things that has been noted about these single leg gallows on the top line of paragraphs is that they seem to often appear in adjacent words. This is something that Voynich researcher Philip Neal first mentioned in a Voynich pub meet a fair few years ago that he had noticed: at the time, I christened them Neal keys.

But even though this is a visually striking thing, is it statistically significant, particularly if we remove all the paragraph-initial single leg gallows first?

For non-paragraph-initial-top-line words, the raw (expected) probability that a pair of adjacent words both contain a single leg gallows would seem to be 16.5% x 16.5% = 2.7%.

My counts for the actual number of pairs of adjacent non-paragraph-initial-top-line Q20 words both containing single leg gallows (i.e. ignoring all paragraph-initial words) were 5/5/6/1/8/12/7/6/7/4/5/0/8/6/3/5/9/4/12/5/1/5/2 = 126 instances out of (353 + 80) = 433.

So, of the 292 x (9-1) = ~2336 potential adjacent pairs (discounting the end word of each top line), 126 instances points to a chance of 126/2336 = 5.4%.

So my conclusion from this is therefore that the phenomenon of Neal keys (pairs of words containing single leg gallows on the top line of paragraphs) is, while visually striking, only 2x the expected value.

To be clear, the phenomenon is definitely there, but the main factor driving it appears to be the very strong tendency for single leg gallows to appear on the top line of paragraphs, rather than the adjacency pairing per se.

Verification

I’ve done a lot of this manually, because I didn’t have sufficient automated tools to hand. So can one or more other Voynich researchers please verify these figures?

• I used the Takahashi EVA transcription
• I counted ch / sh / ckh / cfh / cph / cth as individual glyphs
• I didn’t count space characters in the percentages