And yes, you have me to blame for it.

So here goes…

It all starts in Frascati…

Today’s story begins in the Voynich Centenary Conference back in 2012, with – as I recall – a bunch of Voynicheros crowding around my Jean-Claude Gawsewitch Voynich Manuscript photo-facsimile. With the pages turned to some of the Q13A (medical) pages, Rene Zandbergen remarked that some of the pictures there looked eerily like slightly-disguised medical drawings.

The two diagrams I specifically remember Rene mentioning that day were (a) the “intestines” one:

And… (b) well, this piece of the male anatomy (which nobody can deny has a tube running through it):

Rene himself didn’t claim to have been the first to point out these similarities, but rather said that he had heard them mentioned many years before. As normal, a diligent trawl of the old Voynich mailing list archives would probably reveal more lineage (but it’s not hugely important for the purposes of this post).

Also, as I’m sure many (if not most) Cipher Mysteries readers know, countless Voynich theories have been constructed around the notion that Q13 (Quire 13) has some kind of connection with the female reproductive system, in particular this gloriously mad drawing, with all its oddly misplaced frilly wolkenbanden:

A few pages further on, there’s also a curious pulsating blue brain thing (I have no idea what this means, and I don’t know if anyone has yet looked for visual parallels for it in 15th century manuscripts, perhaps it’s the kind of thing Koen Gheuens would like to take a stab at?):

But you mentioned “testicles”, right?

I did. And so (at last) here’s the specific Voynich image from Q13 that I’m wondering about.

Putting aside the whole ‘nymph’ issue to one side, what – you might reasonably ask – has got into me to wonder if this specific veiled drawing somehow represents a gigantic pair of testicles?

Benedetto Reguardati

A few posts back, I gave a list of authors who wrote small works on thermal baths in the first half (or so) of the fifteenth century. One of those authors was Benedetto Reguardati, a doctor who spent many years attending to the newly-installed Sforza Duke’s family in Milan (and environs).

He wrote a number of small treatises, including a pharmacopoeia that can be found in Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS Ricc. 818. This commences (on fol. 2r) with:

Emplastrum optimum ad inflationem testiculorum…

i.e. “the best plaster [normally a paste or salve applied to the skin on a piece of linen or leather] for swollen testicles…“

Sadly, I don’t have access to a transcript of Reguardati’s pharmacopeia (merely its incipit), so don’t know how this continues. Obviously this would be a prime research target for anyone who wants to chase after 15th century recipes for enlarged testicles.

Medieval Writings on Testicles

(By which I don’t actually mean tattoos.)

Though I haven’t yet stumbled upon a literature specifically covering medieval recipes for testicular complaints, it would perhaps be unwise to assume such a niche thing doesn’t exist. Even a fairly cursory search revealed that most testicle-related medical mishaps and scenarios were written about in the Middle Ages.

For example, Arnald of Villanova wrote about testicular hernias; Thorndike (1936) mentions a medical “Experimenta” found in “fols. gr, col. i-gv, col. 2 (older numbering, 1-7) of Vatic. Palat. lat. 1174, a vellum ms of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century with alternating red and blue initials“, that has a section name “Ad tumorem testiculorum”. Similarly, Simon of Genoa discussed testicular abscesses in his medical dictionary.

John Bradmore also included several brief sections on testicular complaints in his “Philomena” (see Lang 1998):

• 70v 40 de Apostematibus Testiculorum
• 71r 41 de Apostemate hernia Aquosa testiculorum
• 72r 42 de Apostemate hernia ventosa testiculorum
• 73r 43 de (Apostemate) hernia Carnosa et varicosa testiculorum
• 73r 44 De Apostemate hernia humorali testiculorum

Also: p.196 of this book mentions Bodleian MS Selden B35 (circa 1465) as listing “Ydicelidos” = “i. habens testiculos inflatos”, with a footnote mentioning Simon of Genoa’s “Clavis Sanationis”: “Hydrocelici vel ut grecus ydrokilis, dicuntur qui aquam habent circa testiculos in oscum”.

So I think it should hardly be a surprise to find Reguardati writing about salves for swollen testicles. But it turns out that he was far from the only one.

Medieval Swollen Testicles

However, what did surprise me was that I was able to find a good number of different medieval recipes for swollen testicles.

Egritudines Tocius Corporis, written by a physician names Copho in the second half of the 11th century, includes the following section:

De inflatione testiculorum — Ad inflationem testiculorum sine materia, interiora labarum trita optime coquas, et ut comeduntur calida superponus; vel, quod melius est, galbanum in vino coque et cola et in colatura spongiam marinam diu bullias et superponas; vel ebuli seu sambuci summitates diu in vino bullias, et postea cum axungia teras, et hoc totum super testiculos ponas. Si autem maxima duricia sit in testiculis duas pelliculas incide et in tercia stamina pone, et tam diu teneat durice materia que duriciem operatur recedut.

According to Monica H. Green, four versions of the Trotula include an extra section “Ad inflatione testiculorum”:

• 34: Harley 3407
• 70: Digby 29
• 74: Wood empt. 15 (SC 8603)
• 80: New College, 171

I don’t have access to the full text of this section, but it begins:

Ad testiculos inflatos fomentum, accipe maluam, absinthium, uerbenam, bismaluam, cassillaginem, arthimesiam, caules.

13th century Portuguese physician Pedro Hispano’s (Petrus Hispanus) Liber de conservanda sanitate (book by Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira (1973), p.233) has a Chapter XXXV, “De inflatione testium”:

1. Si testes inflentur, farina fabarum distemperata cum suco ebuli et oleo communi statim inflationem soluit. Dyascorides.
2. Item idem faciunt folia ebuli uel parietarie torrefacta.
3. Item idem faciunt folia ebuli et sambuci. Hoc ego.
4. Item fimus caprinus cum uino solutus omnem tumerm soluit, Kyrannus.
5. Item folia et semen iusquiama trita cum uino et emplastrata omnem tumorem soluit. Macer.
6. Item betonica trita et cocta in uino et apposita dolorem et tumorem aufert testiculorum. Dyascorides.

(Note that da Rocha Pereira also includes a quite different version of that same basic chapter in a footnote.)

From Guillem de Béziers (fl. ~1300), we have another recipe “Contra inflationem testiculorum” (on. p.27):

Item. Contra inflationem testiculorum. Fiat primo subfumigium de aqua calida ad apertionem pororum et postea immittatur agrippa, deinde fiat emplastrum de fimo caprino et sepo arietino et thure, et ad ulti[mu]m minutionem vene sophene fac aperire interiori et sic multi curati sunt.

“Three Receptaria from Medieval England” (Hunt & Benskin) includes a couple of items:

• p.26: [207]: Uncore ad inflacionem testiculorum: Recipe malvam, artemisiam, jusquiamum, et caules veteres. Et si non potes habere hec omnia, accipoantur absinthium et malve tantum, et decoquantur et in illa decoctione epithimentur testiculi.
• p.27: [210]: Item paritoria frixa in patella et testiculis superposita removet inflationem testiculorum.

Thoughts, Nick?

Books on baths and medicine were often bound together, so suggesting that the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 might well contain both balneological and medical bifolios should cause no great tremors. And indeed the bifolios do – as Glen Claston pointed out many years ago – seem to be thematically divided between balneo and medical (in some way).

If you accept this is right, then the idea that a late medieval medical book like this might contain a short section on swollen testicles is surely not a huge stretch, given the number of different sources listed above that contain recipes or treatments for the same.

Might one of these recipes – or something very much like them – be the plaintext for some of the text on f83v? It’s a pretty good challenge, and definitely not a load of balls. 😉

I’ve just found a very intriguing reference to Anthony Petti’s (1977) book “English literary hands from Chaucer to Dryden” (a copy of which which I have of course ordered, and which I hope will arrive within the next month).

It was mentioned by Isabel De la Cruz-Cabanillas and Irene Diego-Rodríguez of the University of Alcalá in their (2018) “Abbreviations in Medieval Medical Manuscripts”, downloadable via Researchgate. They rely mainly on Petti (1977) pp. 22-25 for their functional description of how abbreviation works in manuscripts: so yes, it is indeed true that I have once again blown £40+ of my book budget on four measly pages. (Possibly even just one.)

Note that they also cite:

• Hector (1958) “The Handwriting of English Documents“, pp. 28–38
• Denholm-Young (1964) “Handwriting in England and Wales” pp. 64–70
• Brown (1993) “A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600“, p. 5
• Preston & Yeandle (1999) “English Handwriting 1400–1650. An Introductory Manual“, pp. ix–x
• Clemens & Graham (2007) “Introduction to Manuscript Studies“, pp. 89–93

Michelle Brown’s book I already have here (somewhere, *sigh*), so I’m pretty sure I’ve already seen her page 5. But the obvious reason I haven’t looked at the rest (bar Ray Clemens’ book) is that they talk specifically about English manuscripts, which is something that I’ve never particularly considered in the context of the Voynich Manuscript.

So: why might a Voynich researcher suddenly be so interested in English manuscripts?

“How to deal with this pompous loop?”

Basically, what Cruz-Cabanillas & Diego-Rodríguez are talking about is 15th century English scribal abbreviation mechanisms: but in terms of those mechanisms’ “Marvel origin stories”, these were – for the most part – Latin scribal mechanisms which English scribes had appropriated for abbreviating English.

In C-C & D-R’s section on contractions (p.170), they mention the macron-like suspension mark used (very widely) to indicate that letters have been removed (usually a nasal ‘m’ or ‘n’). However, they also describe a very specific stroke I hadn’t heard specifically mentioned before:

The usual form to mark the omission is a bar, but Petti (1977: 22) mentions an older variant, “though still in use in the late 15th century, was a crescent-shape, often with a dot below”.

That’s interesting in itself: but it’s immediately followed by something even more interesting:

When the abbreviation takes place at the end of a word, “in cursive hands there was a practice of making either the bar or the apostrophe part of the upward curve on the final stroke of a letter” (Petti 1977: 22) When the word ends in <n> this poses the problem whether the mark above the final letter is to be extended or it is just an otiose stroke. This happens very often with words containing the suffix in <-ion>, such as decoccion in Hunter 328. Here the editor must decide whether the stroke going up and backwards is a decorative flourish or should be expanded.

They continue their high-speed summary of Petti’s discussion in their section on “Curtailments and suspensions” that appears next (p.171):

Often final <n>, as it happened in the case of suffix <-ion> above, may show a bar on top of it or a kind of pompous stroke going up and backwards. It is always troublesome how to deal with this pompous loop. Alonso-Almeida (2014: 98), in the case of Present-day English gallon in Hunter 185 f. 51r, interpreted it as galoun. Nevertheless, some other editors, when the final stroke parts from the line level of letter may consider it an otiose stroke and the word would be rendered as galon instead.

Other examples of this “pompous stroke” noted by Cruz-Cabanillas & Diego-Rodríguez are:

• Harley 2378, f7r, “Saturn[e]” – see Means (1993: 246)
• Additional 12195, f187v, “mon[e]” – see Taavistainen et al (2005)

What are you thinking about here, Nick?

Plainly, the reason I’m so interested here is that Petti (via C-C & D-R) seems to be flagging exactly the kind of 15th century scribal abbreviation mechanism I’ve been searching for over the last 15 years or so, that other sources had talked about (but just not in a specific enough way to be helpful).

If you look at the glyphs that appear in the Voynich Manuscript, I’d argue that there’s something of the opportunistic jackdaw about their choice. For instance, EVA’s choice of letter-shapes notwithstanding, the EVA n on the end of the “aiin” group looks more like the v in “aiiv”: which I think matches up with the (fairly common) “aiir” group we also see to provide a visually striking “a ii r[ecto]” and “a ii v[erso]” pair.

Similarly, I’ve long believed that the “4o” pair (EVA qo) was almost certainly a pre-existing (late 14th century) letter pair appropriated by the Voynichese alphabet designer in order to solve some kind of writing/ciphering problem (because we see exactly the same 4o pair appearing in multiple cipher keys from around Northern Italy from this period.)

So: what I’m now wondering is whether the scribal loop we see at the end of “aiiv” group going upwards and backwards may well be a Voynichese appropriation of the same abbreviating pompous loop that Petti is describing.

Incidentally, the earliest examples of similar scribal ‘tics’ that I’ve seen are in some documents from Rome dating to the early 1450s that I found in a palaeographic source book at the BL. But even there I’m 90% sure that those would be characterised as “otiose loops” rather than “pompous loops”.

Where next from here?

The list of manuscripts that Cruz-Cabanillas & Diego-Rodríguez specifically mention as having pompous loops are:

• Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 185 – early 15th century (book of recipes etc)
• Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 328 – late 15th century
• British Library, Harley MS 2378 – mid 15th century
• British Library, Additional MS 12195 – around 1477 (“A great part of this volume would appear to have been written by John Leke, of Northcreyke, in Norfolk, in the reign of Edward the Fourth”, saith the BL)

Unsurprisingly, the kind of things I now want to know are:

• What exactly did Petti say about this pompous loop?
• Where can I see examples of this pompous loop?
• Are there pompous loops in other languages / countries?
• Do palaeographers writing in other languages have their own names for this pompous loop?
• etc

But rather than overload this post yet further, I’ll continue this discussion in a follow-on post…

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.)