Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

A recent comment by Marco Ponzi on Voynich Ninja helpfully highlighted a 2019 comment there by Linda which pretty much everyone else had overlooked. She had previously suggested visual parallels between the Voynich Manuscript’s drawings and the ones in Erlangen-Nürnberg, Universitätsbibliothek MS B7, but when Marco (and then Koen Gheuens too) looked a little further, they found some unusually strong matches.

In my opinion, the first excellent match is Marco’s bird:

The second is Marco’s fish:

And the third is Koen’s child (from Heidelberg Cod. pal. germ. 330)

So what do we know about this manuscript?

A Welscher Gast mini-bibliography

The text of the Welscher Gast was written around 1215/1216 by Thomasin von Zerklaere (a cleric from Friuli), and is the first known code of conduct written in German. The ‘Italian Guest’ of the title is the Italian-speaking Thomasin himself, who apologizes for shortcomings in his German.

Given that numerous copies of the WG still survive today, it seems to have been a much-copied text. There is also, it has to be said, an ample secondary literature on the subject.

The great-granddaddy of this particular bibliographic tree was Heinrich Rückert, ed., Der walsche Gast des Thomasin von Zirclaria, Deutsche Neudrucke ; Reihe : Texte des Mittelalters (1852 ; rpt. Berlin : De Gruyter, 1965), which discussed twelve versions of the text.

This was then heartily supplanted by F. W. von Kries’ “Textkritische Studien zum Welschen Gast Thomasins von Zerclaere” in Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte der germanischen Volker, Neue Folge, 23 (147) (Berlin : De Gruyter, 1967), which expanded the study to twenty one mss, and included a partial stemma.

Books and articles since have discussed other WG mss and fragments unknown to Rückert and von Kries, such as those given the titles Si, F, and N. For more, you might check ARLIMA’s nice long list, though anyone thinking this is even 10% of the total set of WG articles is likely to be in for a bit of a shock.

Welscher Gast Manuscripts

For clickable links, the basic starting point here is the HandSchriftencensus Welscher Gast page, which lists twenty five manuscript copies.

Helpfully, Judith-A. Davidson’s “The Contamination of MS D of Der Welsche Gast” (Dresden, Sächs. Landesbibl. M 67), A Comparative Study of Text and Illustration Cycle, nicely lists these alongside their modern Sigles:

Parchment manuscripts

• A : Heidelberg, Universitätsbibl., Cod. pal. germ. 389.
• G : Gotha, Forschungsbibl., Membrana I 120.
• S : Stuttgart, Wùrttemberg. Landesbibl., Cod. poet. et philol. f. 1.
• E : New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, Glazier Ms. 54.
• H : East Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibl., Hamilton Ms. 675.

Parchment fragments

• Gr : Formerly in Berlin, Preussische Staatsbibl., Ms. germ. 4° 978. (The MS, lost in 1945, was presumably destroyed by fire).
• Bü : Fürstliches Ysenburg-Büdingsch. Rentkammerarchiv.
• Pe : Budapest, National Szechenyi Library, Ms. Clmae 210 (formerly Cod. Misc. Hist. Hung, et Germ. Nr. 1559 f. lat). (The fragment was stolen, but had been published by R. M. Werner prior to the theft).
• Wo : Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibl., 404 9 (6) Novi.
• Wa : Watzendorf bei Coburg, Evangelisches-Lutherisches Pfarramt.
• Erl : Erlangen, Universitätsbibl., Ms. B7.
• Ma : Berlin, Staatsbibl. Preussisch. Kulturbesitz, Ms. germ. f. 757.
• Si : Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Rumanian State Archive, GG 3/X Tomus A.

Paper manuscripts

• U : Munich, Bayerisch. Staatsbibl., Cgm 571.
• W : Wolfenbuttel, Herzog-August-Bibl., Ms. 37.19 Aug. 2°.
• a : Heidelberg, Universitätsbibl., Cod. pal. germ. 320.
• c : Heidelberg, Universitätsbibl., Cod. pal. germ. 338.
• K : Karlsruhe, Badisch. Landesbibl., St. Peter pap. 35.
• M : Munich, Bayerisch. Staatsbibl., Cgm 340.
• b : Heidelberg, Universitätsbibl., Cod. pal. germ. 330.
• D : Dresden, Sachs. Landesbibl., M. 67.
• N : Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Hs. 86035.
• F : Stift Schlierbach, Hs. 28. (Grubmüller, who identified the MS., used the sigle « C »).

Paper fragment

• Tü : Berlin, Staatsbibl. Preussisch. Kulturbesitz, Ms. germ. 2° 718.

Note that, according to Davidson (who I heavily rely on in the following), “The thirteen illustrated MSS are A, G, S, E, H, Gr, Bu, Erl, U, W, a, b and D.”

Messy Stemmas

Given that we’re specifically interested in the illustrations in the 15th century ‘Erl’ copy, what we’d really like to see now is a nice neat Lachmannian stemma, to point us at related manuscripts (and to help bracket out all the 12th and 13th century copies that are unlikely to be of interest). And here’s the stemma that Davidson gives, adapted from von Kries’ stemma (she had access to all his photographs and collations):

Yet I should caution that the whole reason for Davidson’s article is that there are problems taking too literal a view of the WG stemma. Her argument is that the D copy was “contaminated”, in that it suffers from “horizontal transmission” (von Kries also highlights that book 10 of H is similarly contaminated) between that original (left) half of the tree and the S** (right) half that branched off in the mid-13th century. Her modified sub-stemma looks like this, with an extra (lost) D* manuscript feeding in to D as well as the (lost) AD* copy:

Davidson also argues that the earliest description of the WG illustration tradition by Adolf von Oechelhäuser, “Der Bilderkreis zum Walschen Gaste des Thomasin von Zerclaere” [Heidelberg : Gustav Koester, 1890] got quite a lot of important stuff wrong. Which is important because she thinks that the illustration contamination of D there parallels the textual contamination of D.

All the same, the two obviously later manuscripts on the right hand side half of the tree to consider are b and N:

• b : Heidelberg, Universitätsbibl., Cod. pal. germ. 330.
• N : Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Hs. 86035. (which, annoyingly, has blank areas left for drawings that were never copied in)

Cod Pal germ 330 was made in Nordbayern (Eichstätt?) in 1420, according to the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg description. Here are its birds:

Incidentally, the Erlangen bird page in context looks like this:

Initial Thoughts

Anyone who thinks using stemmae for tracing illustrations are innately easy should have a look at the Welscher Gast. The Welscher Gast digital project has patiently catalogued all the illustrations across all the known manuscripts (though I must admit I found the ways they cross-linked things more than a little confusing at times). However, the illustrations vary so enormously that it’s often hard to see (if you discount all the easy pages, like Euclid etc) how X’s illustrations relate to Y’s illustrations.

My thoughts are therefore that the German scribal copy shops putting together all these copies had so many drawings to make that they, exactly like the Alsace scribes we have discussed before, simply copied whatever material they had at hand to get the job done. (And what a sadly banal phrase that has now become, *sigh*.)

So, whereas I went into the Welscher Gast world wondering if there might be some kind of scribal transmission of the images to pick up on, I now think that – for the very most part – the WG simply wasn’t that kind of a beast. That is, its diagrams weren’t implicitly interesting: rather, they were window-dressing the text, because this was a text-centric gig, not an illustration-centric one.

Hence I confidently predict that the bird, the fish and the child were all taken from other 1420s German manuscripts done in these and similar copy shops, and which were happily reused when these kinds of copying commissions came in. But the Welscher Gast was probably a recipient of these images, not a source.

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

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

St George’s Convent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can This Theory Be Tested?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Oresme’s Treatise

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a Cladistic Tree…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q13A vs Q13B (again)

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

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

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

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

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

Arnold C. Klebs

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

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

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

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

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

Giunta’s (1553) De Balneis Omnia

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

• Copy #1
• Copy #2

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

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

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

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

Pavia, MS Aldini 488

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.