c.1200 words
The author’s rights are asserted.
So far, in considering these two diagrams (on folio 85r and folio 67v-1), what we’ve been doing is like picking out two small pieces from a pile of jig-saw puzzle pieces for which there is no convenient picture printed on the box.
What we must now do is to pause to think about what these two pieces tell us and because the manuscript is evidently no uniform composition but a compilation, what they tell us may not only differ between one and the other of these pieces, but may agree or disagree with the traditional expectation that all the matter in Beinecke MS 408 would be of western Christian (i.e. ‘Latin’ European) origin and an expression of no other cultural traditions.
.First piece – diagram on folio 85r (part).
Analysis (see posts in Series #6) showed some elements do use conventions closely consistent with those of medieval Latin art, particularly the fact that in it four winds are given characters closely reflecting the content in a widely-used western text – Isidore’s Etymologiae.
Yet elements in the same diagram expresses ideas and habits alien to the Latins’ visual vocabulary, most importantly use of an asymmetrical four-fold division for the circuit.
Other characteristics presenting opposition to the traditionalists’ assumption that the whole manuscript is an expression of Latin culture, is the accurate depiction of Mongol dress and a ‘lily’ which is no fleur-de-lys.
But the single most telling detail is the asymmetrical divisions’ being marked by a form that ‘L.L.’ suggested might be the fly-whisk (as symbol of religious or of civil authority, known from western North Africa, through Ethiopia into India and south-east Asia) but which I think closer in its sense here to that ‘whisk-like’ form as banner – a motif employed not only in Asia by the Mongols, but also in art produced in a Persian environment during the period of Mongol rule (13th-14th C). An example is shown at right.
In those cases the ‘whisk’ takes on the character of a banner, and the sense it bears is most like the flag as emblem in Europe; that is, it signifies not only religious or secular authority, but planting the flag constitutes a claim to rule over a that territory.
Between the second half of the thirteenth century and much of the fourteenth century, Mongols ruled the largest empire the world has ever seen. They were the great power throughout the Mediterranean world during that era, with only Mamluk Egypt as significant second. The Seljuk Turks waited in the wings.
As the Yuan dynasty, Mongol rule within China would survive until 1368 AD.
During that time, foreign traders were welcomed in China’s foreigners’ ports, protected across the overland ‘silk roads’ and foreign ambassadors and their religions invited. Among those who accepted invitations to come to China itself there were a few western Christians and of those (very few) of which records remain, none but persons from Italian city-states remained long. For example, we hear of one doctor from Bologna, a Franciscan friar from Sicily, another Sicilian resident as trader, and of Katerina Villioni who died there in 1342.
While, therefore, it is statistically most likely that matter now in Beinecke MS 408 came into European horizons with someone who was not a Latin (i.e. western European Christian), and otherwise most likely that it was brought by an Italian or a Jew whose home was in the south-western region of the Mediterranean, it is not beyond all possibility that a Latin from some other part of Europe might have fetched much of the material from ‘oriental parts’ in that brief period called the ‘Pax Mongolica’.
Example 2 (folio 67v-1 – starting with post #8.3)
In this case, the diagram’s main, central, part displays habits that can fairly be described as ancient, and Egyptian, but continuity within the art of Egypt and regions it influenced during Egypt’s four-thousand years as an independent kingdom means these same motifs and ideas continued to be seen even when Egypt lay under foreign rule, as it did for almost all of the six centuries which preceded the Christian era. In the sixth century, Egypt had been taken first by Persia, then in the fourth century it was taken from Persia by the Macedonian Greeks, who were in their turn supplanted by Rome.
On the other hand, this diagram’s peripheral emblems, whose subject is entirely astronomical, suggest by their forms and selected subjects, no ancient origin. One emblem’s being overlaid with heavy pigment implies a late effort to ‘Latinise’ that detail, while retaining in it the image of an unmistakeably Asiatic face – again suggesting the Mongol century and a discrepancy between the customs informing the original drawing and what are evidently later additions, the latest of which is a less-than-congenial influence from one or more ‘heavy painters’ or the work’s overseer.
Reflecting more than one cultural tradition and historical era is no reason to suppose the drawings faked. Quite the opposite; they speak to issues of origin and subsequent transmission which – so long as we do not create pre-emptive narratives (‘theories’) – are more helpful than troubling.
Matter deemed ‘ancient’ was typically revered and carefully transmitted everywhere, though in Latin Europe that reverence was usually accorded only the information in written text and it is unusual to see images not immediately ‘translated’ to suit the customs of Latins’ visual language.
The diagram on folio 85r provides a nice example of how certain elements might be left untranslated – either because they had no Latin equivalent, or were considered insignificant or as I think is found again in other sections of the manuscript, because the fifteenth-century copyists had been ordered to alter nothing.
We are only concerned with the manuscript’s drawings. When and where the written part of the text gained its present form is for others to determine.
For these two diagrams, then, it appears that the most likely period for their first arrival in Europe is during the ‘Mongol century’ – late thirteenth to late fourteenth centuries.
Once more, for any newcomers, I repeat that this ‘Notes’ series is not here to ‘showcase’ my own research, but to demonstrate the value of adopting an analytical rather than a theory-driven approach.
Partly for that reason and partly there is a persistent problem of plagiarism among a few Voynicheros (all linked at first- or second remove to the same university), I won’t be including in these notes the complete analysis of any one drawing or series, though in the usual way it is an absolute requirement of formal analyses that an account must be given of the entire drawing, or the entire series of drawings being discussed. A theorist may cherry-pick, and most do. Iconological analyses may not.
I’ve said that the fourth of the peripheral emblems in folio 67v-1 represents certain stars in Orion, but being reminded of that problem with persistent plagiarism I’ve decided to omit further details here.
In treating its ‘North’ emblem, however, it became apparent that a person who exercised a form of overseeing- or censoring role is linked with the addition of heavy pigments, and the nature of that ‘censorship’ suggests a Latin scholar and/or -cleric responsible.
The next series will investigate whether the same is true for images in a different section where astronomical emblems are found.
Within what we’ve called the ‘Voynich calendar’, some sections show the ‘heavy’ painter’s influence especially pronounced, though for the exercise just two central emblems will be considered, both of which have been regarded by even the staunchest of Voynich traditionalists as ‘unusual’ and unhelpful to a theory of the manuscript as entirely an expression of western Christian culture.
These are the emblems which now fill the centre of the diagrams for July, and for November.
The series is described as a calendar because its diagrams’ central emblems are over-written with month-names in a dialect or language variously identified, but always as a language or dialect used in the south-western Mediterranean or in regions linked to them by the sea-lanes: Occitan, Judeo-Catalan, and Norman French most often suggested.
Voynich Revisionist 