The balneological Panteo…

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A nice email arrived from Paul Ferguson, pinging me about Giovanni Antonio Panteo/Pantheo (i.e. not the Giovanni Agostino Panteo who wrote the Voarchadumia as mentioned here before) and his book on baths & spas that is listed in the STC as Annotationes ex trium dierum confabulationibus (printed in Venice 1505).  According to The Story of Verona (1902), this balneological Panteo was “an author of various works in Latin, and a friend of all the learned men of his day“. His book begins:-

Annotationes Ioannis Antonii Panthei Veronensis ex trium dierum confabulationibus ad Andream Bandam iurisconsultum: […] in quo quidem opere eruditus lector multa cognoscet: quae hactenus a doctis viris desiderata sunt. De thermis Caldarianis: quae in agro sunt Veronensi…

There are a fair few copies around: for example, in addition to its other textual artefacts 🙂 , the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds one. Back in 1998, Christies sold one for £1,495, but a cheaper option is to get a microfilm copy (from NYU’s Reel #491). 

Panteo’s original manuscript has been dated to 1488, and is held in Verona as MS 2072 (about a page down):-

Giovanni Antonio Panteo, De thermis Calarianis; Andrea Banda, Sylva Caldariana suo Pantheo. Manoscritto cartaceo, ultimo decennio del secolo XV; mm.300 x 200; ff.150; scrittura corsiva e littera antiqua, inchiostri bruno e rosa; iniziali miniate decorate, tre grandi disegni a penna colorati; legatura recente in cuoio. Ms. 2072

The description given there says that this is a humanistic manuscript, and that it contains three large coloured diagrams “of great interest for the attention and documentary realism with which they represented the characters, landscapes and architectural details: the unknown artist was probably aware of the stories of Saint Orsola that just in those years (between 1490 and 1495) Carpaccio painted in Venice.” However, it’s not clear if those three drawings were reproduced in the Venetian book version: or if they were, how well they transferred across.

Of course, the reason this is relevant to Cipher Mysteries is because of the baths depicted in the Voynich Manuscript: for if the vellum radiocarbon date (1404-1438) is a reliable indicator of when the VMs was written down, then we should arguably be looking closely at 15th century texts on balneology to try to place these into their historical context. This is because the 15th century saw the medicinal cult of the hot springs’ rise to prominence, as well as its fall – by 1500, people believed (according to Arnold Klebs’ book, which I discussed here) that spas and baths were the source of syphilis, causing interest in them to rapidly wane.

Unfortunately, the impression I get is that balneological historians tend not to look very hard at this period: far more effort seems to have been invested on stemmatic analysis of the many manuscripts of The Baths of Pozzuoli than on compiling synthetic accounts of the development arc of balneology in the 15th century. Please let me know of any books that buck this apparent trend!

Anyway, what is interesting is that there is actually a recent monograph on this balneological Panteo: “Prime ricerche su Giovanni Antonio Panteo” (2003 or 2006?) by Guglielmo Bottari, published in Messina by the Centro interdipartimentale di studi umanistici, ISBN 8887541272. 185 p., [2] c. di tav. : ill. ; 22 cm. Not many out there, but 40 euros buys you a copy here. Perhaps that might have more to say about this matter, and possibly even a copy of the coloured drawings in MS 2072 (which would be nice). 🙂

* * * * * *

Update: Paul Ferguson very kindly (and swiftly) passed on a link to a low-resolution scan of an illustration from Panteo’s manuscript featuring debating humanists, baths, and swallowtail merlons – thanks very much for that! 🙂

panteo-illustration

The Birth of the Illuminati…

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OK, even though there’s a whole lot of Voynich-related stuff backed up here, I felt I really had to pass on this link to an excellent page on the birth of the Illuminati conspiracy before I do anything else.

Though I already knew a little bit about nutty Adam Weishaupt and his Bavarian Order of the Illuminati (with all its speculative Freemasonesque ceremonies and faux classical code names for initiates), what I didn’t know before reading this is why anybody ever thought the Illuminati were smart enough to dress themselves, let alone control the destinies of nations. So really, where did that all come from? How did the Illuminati make the leap from effete pseudo-Masons to political puppetmasters?

Of course, the answer is that they never did: rather, the perception that they did sprang from a well-respected Scottish Professor of Natural Philosophy called John Robison. His sensational (1797) book “Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe” proposed that the big, unanswerable madnesses of the day (mainly the French Revolution, but plenty of other stuff besides) had all been deliberately orchestrated by a shadowy international cabal – the Illuminati. History was bunk: conspiracy was all: read all about it, then get over it. Thus The National Enquirer was born (in spirit, at least).

Yet behind the scenes, the real story playing out here was that since 1785 Robison had suffered from “a mysterious medical condition, a severe and painful spasm of the groin“, which “seemed to emanate from behind his testicles“: and so he dosed himself up heavily on opium, making him “vulnerable to melancholy, confusion and paranoia“. Good job he didn’t have the option of taking ecstasy, otherwise we’d all now think the French Revolution was some kind of over-enthusiastic love-in. 😉

Even so, the excitement over his whole account might well have waned just as quickly as it had waxed, had it not been for the multi-language publication soon afterwards of Jesuit Abbé Augustin de Barruel’s huge “Memoires pour Servir a l’Histoire de Jacobinisme”. Even more than Robison’s paranoid opus majus, Barruel’s slab-like book was like a relentless encyclopaedia of Illuminati denunciations: the French Revolution had been ‘foreseen, premeditated, plotted, planned, resolved; everything that happened was the result of the deepest wickedness, because everything was prepared and managed by men who alone held the threads of long-settled conspiracies’. Basically, Dan Brown on acid. 🙂

Actually, Barruel was furious at the way the Revolution had unceremoniously chucked the Jesuits out of France: and so the blackest irony of the whole story is that to channel this anger, he co-opted the form and substance of all the anti-Jesuit propaganda of the previous two centuries to slander the Illuminati (where Weishaupt himself was a former Jesuit)… thus the slandered became the slanderer.

In the end, the whole story boils down to a set of conspiracy Top Trumps cards to play with how you like: to me, the unavoidable conclusion is that Weishaupt, Robison and Barruel were all wildly delusional in different ways – but the bizarre Illuminati mythology meme that emerged from them only came about because their respective political, pharmacological and religious delusions somehow overlapped and intertwined, and in doing so took on a composite mad life of its own. Really, you couldn’t make it up, eh Dan? 🙂

Parchminers, scriveners, lymners, bookbinders, stationers…

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Since the recent Austrian Voynich Manuscript documentary (where the age of the VMs’ vellum was tested using radiocarbon dating), there has been debate about how vellum was created, stocked, sold, stored and used in and around the 15th century. The #1 issue is that if uncut pieces of vellum were routinely held for long periods (years? decades? centuries?), Voynich theories that require a later use dating still stand. Conversely, if you acknowledge that the manuscript itself displays many of the attributes of a copy, Voynich theories that require an earlier creation dating still stand. In which case, hard science would appear to have gone fairly soft on us.

However, simply relying on the possibility of storage is historically imprecise (if not actually woolly): we might well do better to try to understand the medieval parchment ‘ecology’ – that is, the set of trade, guild, and use behaviours associated with parchment – and see how parchment worked within (and for) the broader economy.

An accessible starting point for this is the first chapter of Cyprian Blagden’s (1960) “The stationers’ company: a history, 1403-1959”. According to this, the word stationarius (“stationer”) is mentioned in Oxford and Cambridge in the 13th century, and in London and York in the early 14th century, and denoted a permanent stall-holder (and so “stationary”, though we now spell it as “stationery”) rather than a hawker or peddler: the word quickly became associated with the book trade. The main people involved in 14th century book production in London were:-

  • parchminer – supplied the parchment
  • scrivener – wrote the text
  • lymner – added the illustrations
  • bookbinder – sewed gatherings into quires, and bound quires and covers into books
  • stationer – “arranged for the manufacture of a book to a customer’s order” (p.21)

Of course, these were the trades most directly affected by the introduction of printing: but interestingly, Blagden notes that “even parchminers and text-writers were only gradually squeezed out of the book business” (p.23), and that there was “no evidence of unemployment or of organized opposition” (p.23) to mechanical printing presses in England (unlike in Toulouse in 1477).

Some Voynich theorists have posited that the parchment trade suddenly collapsed, so that old vellum was readily available many years later. Well… it’s true that paper eventually killed the parchment trade, just as video eventually killed the traditional radio star: but the suggestions that circa 1450 parchminers ‘suddenly’ found themselves with warehouses full of uncut parchment that would subsequently sit around unsold for decades or centuries seems just plain wrong. As paper manufacturing slowly evolved (and as madly expensive incunabula gave way to quite expensive books, and as the later gradually became affordable), parchment usage did experience a slow decline – but I can’t see obvious evidence of any rapid ‘phase change’ or ‘parchment catastrophe event’.

For sure, we’re still waiting for the raw radiocarbon dating values so that we can validate the headline dating calculation (and make a sensible assessment of the various uncertainties that would be implicit in it) in a transparent kind of way. But if the date range is basically as claimed, I’m finding it grasp to glimpse the economic mechanism by which sufficient uncut parchment to make the VMs would be stored for even a decade, let alone 50, 100, or 150 years. The numbers don’t seem to add up… all in all, a tricky history challenge.

Coming soon to your TV: “The Voynich Channel”?

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Stephen Chrisomalis, “anthropologist, linguist, historian, and all-around numbers guy” (oh, and author of the soon-to-be-released “Numerical Notation: A Comparative History“), recently blogged about being interviewed as a talking head for a Canadian TV documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, a show that will apparently be hosted by none other than (as he delicately puts it) “WILLIAM FREAKIN’ SHATNER“.

Chrisomalis seems pretty well clued up on the structural properties of Voynichese (which is nice to see), but somehow omitted any mention of whether the documentary makers asked him about the VMs’ curious quire numbers (“abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals”, technically speaking), which appear to be a unique historical feature of the codex. I mean, he is Mr ‘History Of Numbers’, right? D’oh!

No more significant details about the documentary itself as yet… but given that documentary makers are excited enough to be wheeling in Captain Bloomin’ Kirk, it seems pretty safe to conclude that the Voynich Manuscript has suddenly become the lowest-hanging fruit upon the giant TV tree of enigmas. Expect a blizzard of TV Voynich documentaries to air around December 2010 – OK, perhaps not quite enough to make up an entire “Voynich Channel“, but a relatively cornucopic amount nonetheless. 🙂

Hmmm… the image of countless documentary teams being scrambled worldwide to film the VMs brings to my mind Nina Hagen’s #1 “99 Luftballons“, whose lyrics hinge on the idea that a set of toy balloons could trigger a nuclear armageddon. When does reaction become overreaction?

99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a super hero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

🙂

Bert Hall’s 1979 article…

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The ever-reliable BibliOdyssey blogger has posted up some more manuscript images, this time of Giovanni Fontana’s “Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber”, who you may remember mentioned on Cipher Mysteries and in The Curse (p.129 & p.141). Sadly, my favourite Fontana drawing (the rocket-powered rabbit on a skateboard, folio 37r) is missing from the set, but plenty of other splendid ones make up for that omission. 🙂

BibliOdyssey’s description of Fontana’s book included a reference to a great little paper by University of Toronto history professor Bert Hall to which I’ve been meaning to post a link here for a while: “Writings about Technology ca. 1400-ca. 1600 A.D. and their Cultural Implications” (1979). Hall outlines his own odyssey into the history of science 1400-1600, and how many of the technical / scientific manuscripts from the 15th century he examined effectively fell halfway between drawing and describing:-

When I first began to examine the documents I am discussing, I noticed that the more interested a particular text was in mechanics or architecture, the more likely it was to be profusely illustrated. As I studied them further, I realized that I was approaching them with the wrong presuppositions. I did not have in hand a group of illustrated texts, but rather a group of pictures with running commentaries.

Many of the “texts” (and that word is now to be understood as having quotation marks) from Kyeser to Ramelli, including Leonardo, are very nearly “picture-books” of technology with verbal comments. At times, the primacy of the picture is made unmistakably clear, as for example in a German work of the 1430’s [Vienna, Waffensammlung des kunsthistorischen Museums, MS P 5014] which dispenses with text altogether.

Note that MS P 5014 is also mentioned on p.166 of “The Enigmatic Water Wheel” by Bradford P. Blaine, as “a German manuscript of ca. 1437” that contains a drawing of a water-powered mill-arrangement to power a wooden pipe boring machine. Incidentally, the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna is famous for owning (then losing in 2003, and then regaining in 2006) Benvenuto Cellini’s exquisite salt cellar (valued at £36m) – “Waffensammlung” means Weaponry Collection, though I don’t know whether this MS reference is current.

Upcoming crypto talk by Lawren Smithline…

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Just in case you thought my recent list of upcoming talks was too UK-centric, here’s a nice one from the US…

A while back on Cipher Mysteries, I mentioned the 200-year old challenge ciphertext sent to Thomas Jefferson by UPenn maths professor Robert Patterson. But in a PhysOrg.com article (linked from the Daily Grail), there’s news of a lecture being given at the University of Oregon by Lawren Smithline (the person who finally cracked the transposition cipher) at 4pm Tuesday 26th January 2010, in Room 100 of Willamette Hall, 1371 E. 13th Ave., Eugene OR. Free admission.

(As always, please drop me a line if you happen to go along.)

Interesting history talks for early 2010…

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Here are some upcoming events that Cipher Mysteries readers might well enjoy:-

  • A nice little bit of codicology to start with: Dr Kathryn M. Rudy, “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer” – 5.30pm, 20th January 2010, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Research Forum South Room. Free.

    “Medieval manuscripts carry signs of use and wear. The priest repeatedly kissed the canon page of the missal, leaving his greasy nose print behind. The devotee regularly touched the image of Mary out of veneration, but inadvertently rubbed the paint off the vellum. Medieval readers of books of hours and prayerbooks – the largest surviving category of late medieval books – often held their manuscripts open for reading by resting their thumbs at the lower corners of the opening. The more often that readers used a text, the darker the thumbprints became.”

  • A talk on the Antikythera Mechanism by Professor Mike Edmunds at the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society – 7pm, Wednesday 26th May 2010, MANDEC, Higher Cambridge Street, Manchester. Free (but “a donation is requested“).

    “What may well be the most extraordinary surviving artefact from the ancient Greek world was discovered just over a century ago. Found in 1900 in a wreck off the coast of the Mediterranean island of Antikythera, the device contains over thirty gear wheels and dates from around 100 B.C. Now known as the Antikythera Mechanism, it is an order of magnitude more complicated than any surviving mechanism from the following millennium, and there is no surviving precursor.”

  • A talk on ‘Cosmography and Cartography in the Renaissance: Their Relationship Revisited‘, by Dr Adam Mosley – 5pm, Thursday 15th April 2010, Warburg Institute, London. (Free)

    This is part of the ‘Maps and Society’ series of lectures at the Warburg: you may remember Adam Mosley from the review here of his “Bearing the Heavens” book on Tycho Brahe’s research community, so should be very interesting!

  • Professor Michael Farthing –  “Nicholas Culpeper: London’s first general practitioner?“ Gideon de Laune Lecture: 6pm, Wednesday 28th April 2010, Apothecaries Hall, London. Not sure whether or not this is only open to Society of Apothecaries members!

Some online herbals…

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Blogger of the visually bizarre BibliOdyssey has a number of nice online herbal scans you might well enjoy: each page has a brief description of the related manuscript and links to other places you can read more about the subject, while each picture links to its own Flickr page (which is handy).

  • ‘Arzneipflanzenbuch‘ [BSB Cod.icon. 26], Augsburg circa 1525. Herbal with lots of eccentric roots (sounds familiar, eh)
  • Hieronymous Braunschweig’s Distillerbuch, Strasburg circa 1500. Distillation manual, with plenty of alchemy, chemistry, botany, medicinal tips, etc.
  • Rembert Dodoens’ Cruydeboek, Belgium 1554. Hugely popular herbal built on Leonhard Fuchs’ equally famous herbal (but with many additions).
  • Tacuinum Sanitatis, 15th century copy owned by the Bibliotheque Rouen. An extremely nice-looking herbal book of medicine with herbal bits, exactly the kind of high quality artefact the Voynich Manuscript plainly isn’t.

Kicked out of the Independent Researcher Guild…?

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Technically, I shouldn’t disclose that I was ever a member: but here’s the letter I received today kicking me out of the IR Guild:-

Dear Mr Pelling,

I am sorry to inform you that the Independent Researcher Guild’s Ethics and Behaviour Committee has recommended your honorary guild membership be withdrawn. The specific grounds cited are:-

  1. Treating facts as “useful stepping stones towards the truth“. This is wholly incompatible with Guild Article #2, which explicitly states that facts are to be viewed as “politically motivated deceptions designed to hide doubts“.
  2. Attempting to frame “research questions“. While it is acceptable for Guild members to grandstand using scientific-sounding phrases (particularly in TV interviews), actual use of the scientific method is expressly prohibited under Articles #18 and #19.
  3. Trying to actively falsify parallel research hypotheses, particularly those of fellow Guild Members. The committee suggests you meditate further upon the Guild’s founding principle of The Cornucopia of Truths: that history only makes sense as a church broad enough to accommodate everyone’s individual truth.
  4. Your reaching out to mainstream academics is plainly wrong-headed: their primary responsibility – even in the postmodernist wing – is to close down debate, the diametric opposite of what the IRG stands for.
  5. Preferring probability and human judgment over possibility – really, you should be fully aware that, as Guild Article #7 clearly states, probability is the primary tool used by academics to forcefully silence historical dissenters such as us. This is the line in the sand we draw to separate Them from Us: it seems that you are now on Their side.
  6. Finally: the committee notes that your proposing a bourgeois (even, dare we say it, ‘middle class’) reading of a mystery object (and with no heresy and no centuries-long political conspiracy behind it) is just plain ludicrous. ‘Lone gunmen’ should be the subjects of our collective derision, not of our individual research.

You now have 7 (seven) days to remove all the IRG logos and graphic devices concealed in your website graphics. Your invitation to our 2010 secret conference in Aldwych Underground Station has also been withdrawn. Your ability to use the IR Guild’s copyrighted phrase “independent researcher” in conjunction with your name has also been revoked. We now suggest you look to Academe for accreditation: certainly, you are no longer welcome here.

Yours in equal parts sadness and annoyance,

<scrawly signature>

Senior Membership Services Manager
Independent Researcher Guild

Honestly, could my year have got off to a worse start? I think not! 🙁

Pre-1450 German Voynich possibility…?

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The recent Austrian Voynich documentary gave a nice clear radiocarbon dating (1404-1438 at 95% confidence) for the vellum, and finished by suggesting (based on the swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle) a Northern Italian origin for the manuscript. But I have to say that as art history proofs go, that last bit is a little bit, ummm, lame: it’s a single detail on a single page, that might just as well be a copy of a previous drawing (or a drawing of a description, or an imaginary castle) as a real castle.

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of sensible art history reasons to suspect Northern Italy 1450-1470, for example:-

  1. Swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette castle are reminiscent of those on many Northern Italian (and Southern Italian, too) castles of the 14th and 15th centuries
  2. The rendering of the sun faces on f67v1 and f68v1 are reminiscent of the Visconti sun raza, most notably as per  in the Milan Duomo’s “Apocalypse” apse window (1420), so arguably point to a post-1420 dating
  3. Voynichese seems to be a more advanced version of those ciphers in Sforza / Urbino cipher ledgers that have the same verbose ‘4o’ character pair
  4. Handwriting is strongly reminiscent of Milanese “humanist” hands circa 1460-1470
  5. Dots on ‘pharma’ glassware (f89r1 and f89r2) are strongly reminiscent of post-1450 Murano glass decoration
  6. Decoration on barrels / albarelli is most reminiscent of 1450-1475 Islamic-influence maiolica
  7. The kind of baths apparently depicted in the balneo quire became most fashionable in Italy between 1450 and 1490
  8. The costumes and hair styles of the many Voynich ‘nymphs’ have been dated as belonging to the second half of the 15th century (and typically dated later rather than earlier)
  9. Parallel hatching only appeared in Florence in 1440, and in Venice (and elsewhere in Italy) from about 1450 onwards, before giving way to cross-hatching from about 1480 onwards.
  10. (etc)

But Northern Italy 1404-1438? Actually, apart from the first two above (which I have to say are probably the least persuasive of all), the evidence falls away to almost nothing, rather like an oddly disturbing dream fading away as you wake up in the morning.

But what about Germany circa 1404-1438? After all, Erwin Panofsky thought a German origin most likely (though perhaps he took a little bit too much notice of Richard Salomon’s readings of the marginalia), and there’s a touch of Germanic influence in the “augst” marginalia month name for the Leo zodiac page. Others have suggested Germany over the years, most recently Volkhard Huth (though I somehow doubt it’s Jim Child’s pronounceable early German, or Beatrice Gwynn’s left-right-mirrored Middle High German, while Huth’s 1480-1500 dating now seems a little adrift as well).

Art history links with Germany are thin on the ground in the Voynich Manuscript: it’s a (very) short list, comprising the general stylistic similarity between the VMs zodiac’s central rosettes and early German woodblock calendars, and the recent (but very tenuous) cisioianus comparison with f67r2: Panofsky also pointed to Richard Salomon’s reading of some clumps of marginalia as German, and to the fact the VMs eventually surfaced in Prague… but this is all pretty optimistic (if not actually hallucinatory) stuff. Basically, you’d need to do a lot better than that to build up any kind of plausible case. (Though I don’t know if Volkhard Huth added any new observations to this list).

But one thing that emerged since I wrote my parallel hatching history page is that the technique actually seems to have emerged in Germany before it appeared in Florence. I mentioned that there was a German master engraver known as “Master E.S.” (also known as the “Master of 1466”), who produced a number of hatched and cross-hatched pieces in the period 1450-1467: and I was content with the generally accepted art history notion that the technique probably spread northwards from Florence to Venice and Germany at roughly the same time (i.e. 1450).

However, the problem with this presumed ‘Italy → Germany’ model is that there was another German engraver (“Meister der Spielkarten”, “The Master of the Cards“) who was active (1425-1450) a generation or so before Master E.S., and who includes fine parallel lines in his work, most notably in the oldest known set of copperplate playing cards (1440). Anyone who wants to read up on this should probably rush to get themselves a copy of Martha Anne Wood Wolff’s 1979 Yale PhD thesis “The Master of the playing cards: an early engraver and his relationship to traditional media”. (Please let me know if you do!) Alternatively, you might well find things of interest in Martha Wolff’s paper “Some Manuscript Sources for the Playing Card Master’s Number Cards” , The Art Bulletin 64, Dec. 1982, p.587-600.

Of course, I don’t think for a moment that The Master of the Cards’ clear line and nuanced material rendering has anything directly to do with what we see in the VMs. Rather, it just seems worth noting that the existence of parallel hatching in the VMs is consistent with a post-1420 origin if German, with a post-1440 origin if from Florence , or a post-1450 origin if from elsewhere.