I recently found this page from last year (2015) on Quire 13 (Q13) of the Voynich Manuscript, where the writer asks if anyone knows how the late Glen Claston got to his (2009) idea that the quire was originally written in two halves.

I still have the emails Tim sent me (both dated 7th March 2009), so I thought it would be nice to share them here (only very lightly edited)…

Glen Claston on Quire 13 (Part 1)

[Block quotes here are from my reply to him]

Basic VMS rule – “Major topics always start with a page of text – okay, at least almost always, except when they don’t”.

76r is the only full page of text, so it should be the beginning.
76v is medical, and there is only one other medical bifolio to line up with.
80r – medical, and when placed against 76v, the little guy pitching star dust at the top right of 76v works with the line of women on 80r.
80v- the last purely medical page, so all medical pages are now in order with the text page first.

This leaves 79r/v and 83r/83v on the back of this section with the topic of Galenic humors/astral fluxes. The only bifolio that fits in between these that of 77r/77v/82r/82v. Put in that order we transition from medical to biological to Galenic humors.

Per John Grove, 78v and 81r are the center of the quire, identified by the connected drawing across the pages. I agree with that assessment, but the only problem here is that the two remaining bifolios do not deal with topics related to the other three bifolios, and therefore appear to form a separate quire. This has nothing to do with the order of binding, it has everything to do with the flow of connected thought coming from a rational mind.

By my judgment, two sections were originally composed, set completely apart from another, and later interleaved. I would have to call them Q13a and Q13b. Here is the order:

Q13a – medical – biological – Galenic

76r/76v – bifolio 2 > medical
80r/80v – bifolio 5 – flipped > medical
77r/77v – bifolio 3 > biological
82r/82v – bifolio 3 > Galenic
79r/79v – bifolio 5 – flipped > Galenic
83r/83v -bifolio 2 > Galenic

Q13b – Balneological

84r/84v – bifolio 1 – flipped > balneological
78r/78v – bifolio 4 > balneological
81r/81v – bifolio 4 > balneological
75r/75v – bifolio 1 – flipped > balneological

There are a couple clues that say Q13b was written after Q13a, but I’d have to do some research to make this claim firm. A scatter plot of these pages from my transcription would be desirable to see if the text separates along the same lines as the visuals do.

Anyway, I’ll look at it a bit more, but spending a few minutes on it and refreshing my memory, this is where I sit on the nature of Q13.

Glen Claston on Quire 13 (Part 2)

Thanks for the notes on Q13. First thing is that I completely agree there is definitely a difference in kind between Q13a and Q13b. For a start, Q13a has nymphs doing weird stuff in just about every margin (apart from the text-only page), while Q13b just has nymphs in bath-type scenarios.

In short, Q13b does indeed look like a two-bifolio bath quire, while Q13a looks like a three-bifolio weird-stuff-with-pipes quire (not sure if I can quite get all the way to “medical” from where I currently am, but we’re motoring in the same kind of direction). So, good call, very well done! 🙂

As far as the page order goes, Q13b seems locked down, so we can put that to one side for now. For Q13a, f76r looks to me like the first page as well (as it would), so I’m very cool with that: but what of the final two bifolios?

You suggest that f76v faced f80r because of the top-right man apparently throwing stuff over to the people at the top of f80r, and that that would place f76v, f80r, f80v (three similar “medical” pages) in order in a block. Conversely, I suggested that f76v faced f77r because of the wiggly lines in both drawings (Curse p.64); because that would make the “rainbows” on f82v face the similarly arched pipe on f83r; and because they are currently adjacent (though that’s by far the weakest of the three reasons, admittedly).

But actually, I’m pretty comfortable with both orderings, because I suspect we’re pretty much bumped right up against the limits of what it is possible to infer from these drawings (in the absence of further evidence). All the same, splitting Q13 into /a and /b does make it very easy to narrow down what to go looking for in the codicology (basically, contact transfer from the very earliest layers of ink and paint) that might support or refute these basic ideas.

Incidentally, looking at f83v as the back page of Q13a does make me wonder whether this was quire X of the manuscript, as the big (and rather incongruous) drawing 1/4 of the way down does happen to have a giant ‘X’ visually embedded in its design. Just a thought! 🙂

I sort of anticipated your comment that you can’t tell medical from anything else at this point, I know I didn’t bring you up to speed on how and why I’m making such distinctions. It’s really a rather lengthy presentation of evidentiary procedure, something I’m having to write up in bits and pieces because I hate concentrating on it too long. Basically it started with looking at drawings such as the “four seasons”, or the “four winds” drawing on f86v3, and realizing that there is an underlying methodology of symbolism to the drawings that opens doors to the other drawings. For instance, if I were to ask a modern to draw a cloud, we’d probably all now draw a cloud similarly, since we all know the standard representation. But this guy didn’t have many standard guidelines that I can find. The four winds were commonly depicted as bellows, and the basic bellows structure is evident here as well, but the bellows are also drawn as cloud-like structures. The winds are evident and can be discerned, with the warm southern wind, the icy northern wind, and the eastern and western winds that bring snow and rain. So we can then determine what a cloud looks like in this guy’s mind, and what a bellows or strong gust/influence looks like. We know what ice looks like, we know what rain looks like.

The next part, and the lengthy part, was going back to Galenic books and matching the symbolism in the writings to the symbolism of the drawings. It’s just one of those things that when you start to nail one thing down, another and another follows, until you can finally understand the imagery to some degree. I never had much use for art appreciation classes, and I don’t think they were meant to do this kind of forensic discovery, but I think this is along those lines.

The three “medical” pages I’m keeping together all have medical instrumentation and treatments depicted in the drawings, with the same color scheme and sometimes multiple examples of the same device, so these clearly stay together as one single line of thinking. There’s the fumary treatment and syringe (douche bladder) on 76v, on 80r the suppository tool, the tweezers, the herb balls (or pessaries), and that ring thing I’ve been asking about, which I’m doing research on right now and think may also be an early vaginal pessary. The last purely medical page, 80v, has the syringe, the ring and at least two examples of aromatic baths. This page also has a drawing of some kind of hair or scalp treatment. These three pages are very heavily medical in their imagery, and since they are all on the same topic of treatments, they should be together.

The biologicals aren’t really about human biology, they represent the Galenic medicine view of the influences of humors on the internal organs. The artist depicts humors differently from astral influences, and astral influences differently from meteorological influences. Smoke is drawn differently from a cloud, and astrological bellows (forces) are drawn differently from wind bellows. This works not just for one drawing but across the spectrum of drawings, which I really like. If I were to write about this on the list it would go unheeded, but only in understanding the nature of the representations made by the author can one understand what he’s drawing, and once that level of understanding is reached, this all starts to have parallels in other medical writings, when no other approach finds enough parallels to be credible. But then again, had I actually started out with some degree in medieval codicology or something like Panovsky had, it wouldn’t have taken nearly this long to reach conclusions he’d already reached through brief examination, eh? 🙂

As another aside, looking at f84r and f75v as the outer two pages of Q13b, I don’t really get any kind of outer-side-of-the-quire feel from them. So I strongly suspect that there was once an additional outer bifolio to this (otherwise very small) quire which has got lost along the way.

Yes, it does seem to be incomplete.

Additionally, seeing Q13 as having been formed by merging two smaller quires would perhaps help explain another odd thing. If the two pharma wide bifolios (Q15’s f88-f89 and Q19’s f100-f101) originally sat side-by-side (100-101-88-89, as per the apparent progression of the jars), then that would be another example of two small quires sitting adjacent to each other, but having subsequently been turned into conventional nested quires in order to be bound.

My suspicion there is that the absence of original quire numbers on Q19 and Q20 could simply be because (a) as the final quire, Q20 was never actually numbered, and (b) when the quire numbers were first added, there might well not have been a Q19 at all – the bifolios in Q19 might well have been bound up inside other quires completely.

I think the next section I need to re-examine for my notes is the pharmaceutical section. I too have some unanswered questions about this section.

If you look at all the different handwritings used for the quire numbers (Curse p.17 is quite handy for this), do you get any kind of feeling that bifolios were on the move both before, during, and after the quire numbers were added?

Ah yes, well it just so happens that I’ve had your book handy just for such discussions. See, I’m not entirely ignoring you! 🙂

Basic differences of opinion, Q5 comes out in Jon Grove’s filter has having the same black ink component as that of Q6, when what you call Quire Hand 1 has no black ink component. Q19 and Q20 are definitely afterthoughts of someone, but because of ink and hand differences, we are in agreement that the quire marks are not all in the same hand. Some are probably added by binders in the same style, and I think I can probably match up the quire marks of this nature with the ink and hand of the particular binder. As we’ve seen with Q8 though, the quire marks (at least some of them) existed before the foliation, so this makes me think that the basic order was established before the two major binding sessions. I *think* (suspect without evidence) that the first three quire marks may be from the author himself, placed there in the first three herbal quires before the herbal-b’s were added, and no other quire marks are his, they were added by binders because the first three quires had quire marks, and the addition would have added a look of consistency to the bound book. I’ve always been of the opinion that if it was bound at all while in possession of the author, this would have been one of those loose bindings so common to workbooks, and nothing at all permanent. Just a thought. Speaking of quire marks, what scenario did you come up with to explain Q5 extended to Q3? It’s probably in your books somewhere, but please refresh my memory.

I think you understand what lies beneath that drives my quest for knowledge, I think you share this. I get so frustrated with people who say “we can’t know”, and usually invoke this phrase in defense of their own positions. I don’t think we can know everything, even after the book is read, since I think we both know there are substantial missing parts that will never be discovered. I think however that careful, educated examination and a rational approach can yield enough information that what we don’t know will be little.

Yes, a positively huge thank you to the London Fortean Society for having me along for one of their evenings. I had a lot of fun covering the Voynich Manuscript and I hope the 100-strong audience managed to walk away with a reasonable feel for what I find entertaining, intriguing and frustrating about it.

What I particularly appreciated was that when (during the Q-and-A section) anyone right at the back asked a question, the entire room went pin-drop quiet so that everyone could hear what was being said. That’s exactly the kind of audience every speaker would like to have. And the questions were really good too!

Oddly enough, I’d never given a talk on the Voynich Manuscript to non-specialists before, so the evening also offered me a nice opportunity to cover a lot of material that I’d thought about over the years but hadn’t really found a way of presenting in Cipher Mysteries.

At the same time, I did deliberately steer well away from Voynich theories (and indeed from almost all Voynich theorists): and noted that as time has gone by, my interest in (and desire to try to answer) any historical question that involves the word “why” has ended up so close to zero that you’d need Roger Bacon’s non-existent microscope to tell the two apart. (Frankly, I find trying to work out what genuinely happened more than difficult enough for me.)

As a salutory tale of what happens when Voynich theories go really bad, all I can really do is point to Dan Burisch and his wonderfully recursive timelines, catastrophes, J-Rods, DNA inventions, etc – here, here, here, and finally here.

Back in the present, the big problem I’m facing is that history tells us that a typical Voynich researcher will study the manuscript for twenty years before being stopped, either by choice (has this ever happened?) or by being forcibly raised to that nymphily balneological structure in the sky. No wonder I’m feeling an increasing sense of urgency, given that it would seem I now only have about four years left to crack it. (And as for Rene Zandbergen, he must be made of awesomely stern stuff, methinks.)

Oh well, all I can do is hope that I’ll be able to come back to the LFS for an update lecture in less than four years with some good news. Fingers crossed! 🙂

I’ve blogged before about the Voynich Manuscript talk I’ll be giving to the London Fortean Society this coming Thursday, but I need to make sure that anyone going realises that the venue has changed.

The new venue is The Pipeline, 94 Middlesex Street, London E1 7EZ, which is located in the City-style Bermuda Triangle of Liverpool Street, Aldgate, and Aldgate East; the last of which three always made one of my grandfathers laugh his head off: he’d once heard a Cockney bus conductor say “Aldgit East, all git aht“.

As to the contents of the talk… anyone expecting a regurgitatory recap of what you read in Wikipedia will (I sincerely hope!) be sadly disappointed, because I plan to cover a great deal of stuff to do with the Voynich Manuscript that you wouldn’t find there, or in fact hardly anywhere on the web. Such as the real deal with Voynich theories, for which I produced a special commemorative meme:

Anyhoo, I’m looking forward to the evening, and (barring any disasters) it should be fun. Very reasonably priced and timed (7.30pm for an 8pm start, £4/£2 concs), and I hope to see some of you there! 🙂

Statistical and cryptanalytical analyses tend to assume that ciphers will fit one of a small number of well-known and well-researched pigeonholes (e.g. Vigenère, autokey, etc). Unfortunately, this kind of “backwards attack” can often be stopped dead if the encipherer includes one or more additional steps sideways, unless the backwards attacker happens to be cunning or lucky enough to reconstruct those tiny steps.

But as they knew in Bletchley Park, it is sometimes possible to “forwards attack” cryptograms. There, a “crib” was the name BP codebreakers used to describe where you already had the plaintext, typically obtained by decrypting the same message enciphered using a different cipher system: having this would help the code-breakers reconstruct daily settings for the second cipher etc. Just so you know, this is precisely why you should never forward a received (and deciphered) message word-for-word using a different cipher, a lesson many WW2 code bureaux stubbornly failed to learn.

Similarly, the idea behind my “block paradigm” methodology is that if we can use secondary historical clues to determine the plaintext from which a given section of ciphertext was derived, we stand a reasonably good chance (I think) of reconstructing the cipher forwards from there. You can therefore think of it as a high-level “historical crib”, where the plaintext is reconstructed via in-depth research rather than by breaking a parallel cipher.

At the very least, this whole process could very possibly yield a completely different class of problem to solve, which in the case of the Voynich Manuscript shouldn’t be a bad thing, given that a century’s worth of backwards attacks has been largely unproductive. 🙁

But what might the plaintext for the Voynich zodiac look like? Would we even recognize it if we had it in front of us?

The Voynich zodiac section

In the same way that many people have long suspected that the Voynich Manuscript’s “Herbal” section(s) probably contains plant and/or remedy descriptions (albeit secret, valuable or unexpected ones), there has long been a strong – yet untested – historical hypothesis about what the Voynich zodiac section might well contain, which is simply this: per-degree astrology. This is because each sign seems to be divided into 30 elements (29 in the case of Pisces, though this may possibly have simply been a slip of the quill), and there are 30 degrees in each zodiac sign (i.e. 12 x 30 = 360).

The modern history of per-degree astrology is something I covered here before: it moved back from Marc Edmund Jones (1925) to the nineteenth century astrologers “Charubel” (who claimed he channelled his per-degree symbols) and “Sephariel” (who claimed that he copied his from “La Volasfera”, supposedly a Renaissance book by Antonio Borelli / Bonelli [did he mean Guido Bonatti?], but this has never turned up).

It’s often written that Western medieval per-degree astrology arrived from Arabic sources via Pietro d’Abano (while he was in Spain during the 13th century). Heidelberg has a 15th century German translation of his work in MS Cod. Pal. Germ. 832 (“Regensburg, nach 1491”), which Rene Zandbergen mentioned in a comment here back in 2009. (If you look at fol. 36r onwards, you can see a few lines of text for each of the thirty degrees in each of the signs in turn, along with some rather jaunty miniatures.)

Prior to the Arabs, you can doubtless trace all this back to the original Indian sources (Diane O’Donovan pointed to the encyclopaedia-sized “Brihat-Samhita” by Varahamihira), but taking things back that far falls way beyond my paygrade, so I’m not going to attempt it in this post. 🙂

However, if you take the time to read Chapter XII of volume III of Lynn Thorndike’s “History of Magic and Experimental Science”, you’ll see that another medieval writer famously wrote on per-degree judicial astrology: and this is where my search began.

Andalò di Negro

Andalò di Negro (fl. first half of the 14th century) was a noble from Genoa. Boccaccio, who he famously taught “in the movements of the stars”, noted that “since [Andalò] had traversed nearly the whole world, and had profited by experience under every clime and every horizon, he knew as an eye-witness what we learn from hearsay” (De genealogia deorum, XV, 6, quoted in Thorndike, p.195).

One of Andalò’s works (“introductorium ad iudicia astrologie”) that discussed per-degree judidicial astrology was of particular interest to me. So, back in 2009, I managed to get some working photocopies of it courtesy of the Warburg Institute’s Photographic Collection: these were of the two known documents listed further below.

Interestingly (and unlike the Pietro d’Abano-derived Heidelberg manuscript), the key feature that seems to oddly parallel what we see in the Voynich Manuscript’s zodiac section is that these two documents contain only a small amount of data per degree (though admittedly arranged in columns of a table rather than in the form of nymphs, stars and labels).

The first document is at the British Library: I managed to get a look at this in person, kindly thanks (if I recall correctly) to a letter of introduction from Dr David Juste, who was then a historian of astrology at the Warburg Institute. One unusual feature was that a few key parts of the tables were highlighted in different colours, something that wasn’t at all apparent from the black-and-white photographs taken for the Warburg in the (I guess) 1920s or 1930s. (Sadly, the colour notes I took at the time have long since disappeared).

* BL Add. MS 23770 (BL: “14th century”, Warburg: “circa 1350”)
http://searcharchives.bl.uk/IAMS_VU2:IAMS032-002097417 – “Letter of introduction required to view this manuscript”
1. “INTRODUCTORIUS ad iudicia astrologie co[m]positus ab A[n]dalo de Nigro de Janua;” with paintings of the signs of the Zodiac, the planetary Gods, etc., ff. 1-44.
Aries (8r), Taurus (9v), Gemini (11r), Cancer (12v)
Leo (13v), Virgo (15r), Libra (16v), Scorpio (17v)
Sagittarius (18v), Capricorn (19v), Aquarius (20v), Pisces (21v)
You can see monochrome thumbnails of these twelve images on the Warburg Institute’s Photographic Collection.

In the case of the second document, since 2009 Cod. Fonds 7272 has been placed online and made downloadable by BNF. As a result, I can include links directly into the Gallica pages for you (which is nice).

* BNF Cod. Fonds Latin 7272
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8452771j
Aries (112r), Taurus (114r), Gemini (115v), Cancer (116v)
Leo (118v), Virgo (119v), Libra (121r), Scorpio (122v)
Sagittarius (124v), Capricorn (126r), Aquarius (127v), Pisces (129r)

Here is the Aries table as it appears in BNF Cod. Fonds Latin 7272, courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France via Gallica:

By way of a guide, fol. 22v of BL Add. MS 23770 explains (says Thorndike, p.192 n.5) Andalò di Negro’s “fivefold distinction of degrees within the signs: 1, masculine or feminine; 2, lucidus, tenebrosus, fumosi, or vacui; 3. putei; 4. azamena (like the putei, to be avoided); 5, augmentates fortunam.”

However, I have to mention at this point that according to Boncompagni’s (1875) “Un Catalogo dei Lavori di Andalò di Negro” (an offprint taken from “Bullettino di Bibliographia e di Storia delle Scienze, Matematiche E Fisiche”, Tomo VII – Luglio 1874, and for an original of which I paid a load of money several years ago but which is now available print-on-demand from Kessinger *sigh*), there might possibly be a third copy still floating around.

Boncompagni (pp.54-55) mentions that an 1834 alphabetical index of the Biblioteca Altieri di Roma published by Federico Blume lists: “de Nigro, Andali de Ianua, Introductorium ad iudicia astrologiae, Fogl. membr. V.E.5”. Moreover, Emilio Altieri’s index to the Biblioteca Altieri (car. 11a, recto, lin.2) reads: “Andalus de Nigro de Janua, de Astrologia, Pil. 13, Lett. A. Numo. 5”. Yet according to a 1690 index, “Il detto Altieri non possiede ora alcun esemplare manoscritto d’alcun lavoro di Andalo di Negro“, so it seems that it had already disappeared by then.

That sums up the known versions of this work tolerably well: but what might these tell us about the Voynich zodiac? Obviously, that’s a good question something I’ll have to leave for a follow-on post…