Addendum to ‘Notice to Katie Tucker’

Part of a comment which Wayne Tucker recently posted at the Voynich.ninja forum reads as follows:

,,,Much of my work since 1983, has been published through the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon, my geodesy field work, and associated cartographic maps, can be found in numerous occasional papers published by the Natural History Museum of the U of O.

I began studying the VM in 1987 and was, at this time, employed as the Assistant Director of the U of O Map Library.

As the AD it was my job to know all of these early works.

By 1985 I was already familiar with the Catalan Map.

That “mapa munde” was the first to employ the rose compass image.

As the AD it also fell on my shoulders to peer review the work of other professional cartographers.

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What Wayne Tucker has failed to say – and those who should say have also failed to say – is that the first detailed analytical study of the Voynich map (often termed the ‘rosettes’ page) was provided by the present author following publication of a post by Nick Pelling entitled ‘A Hurricane of Oddness’ .

The present author’s research was undertaken with the aim of clarifying a drawing which had previously received nothing but occasional bits of cloud-gazing and one of two brief comments that proved to be well-founded: one noting the two suns and another the inclusion of what the writer thought might be a path or road.

The present author undertook that research between 2011-2013, with summaries published as blogposts first in a blogger blog ‘Findings’ and then, switching to wordpress, at Voynichimagery. Occasional additional notes were posted as addenda to that research until at least 2015 and all that material remained freely accessible to the public until the level of plagiarism became impossible and the material was closed to the public in 2017.

It was in those research-summaries mention was first made, in Voynich studies, of various cartes marine, including but not limited to the world-map of Abraham Cresques (part of what is sometimes termed the Atlas Catala or Catalan Atlas).

In those posts, too, the present author explained in detail the phases of evolution evident in the Voynich map and why the detail now in the map’s north-west roundel is to be equated with Cresques’ “Angel of the Rose” as I chose to call it.

For people well acquainted with the medieval cartographic traditions, it will be evident that maps gridded by the Rose are not so easily classified as is generally supposed – they do not fit well with the old and persistent argument about development from portolans and are not ‘mappa mundi’.

Some others may understand better than I do what Wayne Tucker might mean, therefore, when he writes:

“The Atlas Catalan is not the Mapa Munde. That map was found in the Hereford Cathedral school.”

I do not consider Cresques’ worldmap a ‘Mappa mundi’ (note correct spelling) but related rather rose-gridded (some say rhumb-gridded or loxodromic) charts whose first examples occur in north Africa and among the Basque but whose flowering occurs in fourteenth-century Genoa and Majorca.

Regardless of how long Wayne Tucker has been interested in maps, and in the Voynich manuscript, it seems he is now attempting an argument that he is entitled to claim precedence, or originality within the field of Voynich studies, for such things as allusion to Cresques’ worldmap and its ‘rose’.

It is not merely a quarrel about precedence, but of Wayne Tucker’s implying or asserting a precedence to which he is not entitled, and thereby implying that any other reference to such matter either imitates or plagiarises some previously unknown insight about the manuscript’s content.

He attempts to assert, in effect, that there had never before been any reference made to points in common between the Voynich drawing and certain medieval charts (including Cresques’), nor any parallel argued or noted before between Cresques’ Rose and the figure I termed the Voynich map’s ‘Angel of the Rose’.

The fact is that all those matters were contributed to the study over a period of years, in the form of research-summaries published by the present writer from 2011 onwards and freely available online to students of the manuscript… until 2017. Every post received readers, and from 2011-2017, Voynichimagery received so many readers, some few of whom continue to offer as ‘inspirational ideas’ snippets lifted from one or another of those (or others’) contributions – and without the scholar’s routine acknowledgement of their sources.

This is why it becomes necessary – simply to maintain one’s own rights over one’s own original work – to make the facts clear whenever persons such as Katie Tucker, or Wayne Tucker or others attempt to claim to be the first to have mentioned (in the present case) the Catalan Atlas or its worldmap in Voynich studies.

The present author could claim to have been interested in maps and cartography for half a century; to have been studying indigenous and non-mathematical astronomies since the 1970s, and to have applied that knowledge to the exposition of medieval pictures since the 1980s.

But the fact is that within the field of Voynich studies, the present author applied that interest and knowledge in written contributions to the study of Beinecke MS 408 only from 2008 onwards, and in the same way Wayne Tucker’s first reference to the Atlas Catala, the ‘Rose’ and so forth comes only very recently.

I have never suggested there is any link between the Voynich manuscript and an ‘ancient machine’ so unless some earlier Voynichero cares to dispute Wayne and Katie’s claim on that score, it’s all his.

I will continue to use, or re-publish my own original research and contributions to Voynich studies as I please, and if readers are misled into thinking the original imitates an imitator, they must blame for their confusion that first Voynichero who insisted that “in Voynich studies it is unnecessary to cite precedents”. The ignorance which informed that idea has created error and confusion exponentially since the slogan was first promoted by one or two prominent voices from about 2010.

Perhaps some old-boy Voynichero might decide do the decent thing and help Wayne and Katie with their footnotes and bibliography.