Category: Historical context

O’Donovan notes #12.3 the merlon thing. The mapping exercise.

c.2700 words

The author’s rights are asserted.

Update, .

Koen has been in touch, and explained that the project was open collaboration, any forum-members who cared to do so contributing information and pictures they found and these, naturally enough, depended on each member’s decisions about where to look for examples. The map which results is thus a map of those contributions, and indirectly a reflection of members’ areas of interest. At the same time, my impression is that Koen would still welcome a broader data-base. If you care to contribute, but disinclined to have to join an online forum to do it, you might leave a comment under Koen’s blogpost of 2021. [here].

16th March 2023.

——-

Researchers whose attention is focused on the written text in Beinecke MS 408 are looking for single finite answer to what is commonly assumed a ciphertext. I hope I do them no injustice in saying that for most, scientific method is closely associated with statistical analysis, and in recent years we have seen images mapped as data points in an effort to apply forms of frequency analysis.

“Scientific” statistics.

Where in earlier years, the habit among those without specific training in reading pre-modern images was to claim it needed nothing but subjective interpretation and commonsense, or that historical arguments could be made by doing no more than presenting paired images as ‘matches’.

More recently, we have seen some effort made to reduce the treatment of drawings to a kind of statistical analysis which, though not particularly appropriate as methodology seems to be regarded as more efficient than studying the history of art and its methodologies, as if mapping ‘data points’ is by definition more scientific.

Few of us now leave school without learning that any science experiment begins by clearly stating the aim of that experiment. Then by itemising the specimens or samples to be tested. In labs one then describes the method, or at least details of the ISO and Standard Method(s) being applied.

Science students soon learn that if sample-collection is biased; if the methods employed are inappropriate; even if one or more samples are wrongly identified or if the technician is careless in applying standard methods, they still end up with a statistical result but the question posed will not have been answered nor any hypothesis rightly tested.

J.K. Petersen

So far as I’m aware, the first person to try creating distribution-maps for images from Beinecke MS 408 was the Voynichero known only as ‘JK Petersen’. His efforts were hampered by his having evidently little background in medieval history, codicology, or palaeography and none in the history of art or the analytical methods best suited to addressing problematic drawings. His dedication to the ‘all-western-Christian-Germanic-central European’ vision was undisguised and was reflected in his research parameters and thus in his range of processed data.

On the other hand, even within his narrow research-parameters, his work turned up images that certainly assisted others, simply because he introduced so many. I believe he was the first to refer to that French Franciscan manual’s ‘November crocodile’ which assisted our own investigation of the Voynich calendar. What they didn’t and couldn’t do was to prove the manuscript a German product.

Koen and the Lobsters.

Koen Gheuns applied a more nuanced version of that method to clarify one path of dissemination for the ‘lobsters’ in the Voynich calendar, although (perhaps depending on the Warburg database?), he believed the type originated with Michael Scot’s work in twelfth-century Italy and Sicily.

From that point Koen moved forward through northern France to Alsace and to examples seen in images produced from Diebold Lauber’s workshop.

Our subsequent study here complemented Koen’s work by enquiring what precedent works might have influenced Scot’s conception of the Cancer lobsters. We focused on England where Scot received his early education, and France where he received his higher education, as well as southern Spain where he worked for some time and Sicily-southern-Italy where Scot worked in the Sicilian court and where the core copies of his texts were made and first preserved.

Once again, the presence of an effort at data-mapping proved a useful resource, even if it did not prove what the makers believed their statistical-geographic maps proved.

Koen et al. and swallowtails.

Koen Gheuens next approached the topic of ‘swallowtail’ merlons but it is characteristic of Koen’s thoughtful approach that, unlike ‘JKP’ , he began by stating clearly the aim of his latest experiment. His question was “Where were images of swallowtail merlons produced before 1450?”. This was limited by his further aim to more clearly define what is implied when sources speak of ‘swallowtail’ merlons as characteristic of northern Italy. He wanted more clarity on ‘northern Italy’.

The end result was that his research-parameters reduced in practice to “Where, within western Europe, do we find drawings or paintings showing buildings with swallowtail battlements?”

His tacit argument seems to be that wherever we find the most extant instances of such drawings or paintings, that is the most likely place to have seen the origin of this detail in one roundel of the Voynich map (often described as the ‘rosettes page’).

Whether the experiment did – or even could – point to where the Voynich manuscript was made is the question we consider in this post.

As Koen said, in his post of 2021, he had intended to limit the experiment to images in manuscripts and other forms of art. It was a sensible and well-informed decision, but in the event because working with a group he agreed to add a layer marking extant buildings on which ‘swallowtails’ of any type can be seen today.

As a result, the number of data points was greatly increased; the architectural (red) dots largely obscured the iconographic results, and the overall weighting shifted. (see maps further below)

I have tried to contact Koen, first to ask his permission to reproduce his map, and then to ask if he could send a comparison from which the red dots were absent, but so far I’ve been unable to reach him.

Koen assumes that a representation of ‘swallowtail’ merlons will serve as a cultural marker and thus narrow the range in which we might suppose the Voynich manuscript was made. His post of 2021 does not appear to distinguish provenance for the manuscript’s manufacture from provenancing contents.

If it could be shown that, prior to 1440, none but northern Italian draughtsmen created drawings that included swallowtail merlons, or rendered them in wood-carving, relief carvings, mosaics and so on, the chances would be good that the draughtsman who put them on the structure drawn in the map’s north roundel had been a native of northern Italy, or had gained his training there.

But even then, it would be just a fair chance. At the very least one would have to show that all the stylistic details in the map – or in that one roundel – find counterparts in works first created in northern Italy.

And even if the draughtsman had been native to northern Italy, it would not alone tell us where he was when the drawing was first given its form, or when that happened.

Numerous non-Latins travelled in Europe and members of various Italian city-states travelled abroad. Before 1440, we know, some were to be found resident around the Black Sea, in Egypt, central Asia, southern Iraq, Iran and southern China.

I’ll say again – provenancing the manuscript-as-object is work proper to codicologists and palaeographers. Provenancing content is a separate matter – and more exactly, a range of separate matters.

Koen’s range of samples accords with his stated aim of clarifying ‘northern Italian’ in connection with drawings of swallowtail merlons, but the finished map could suggest a certain bias in the sampling. Could – not necessarily does. The reason is poor documentation.

The reader is left uncertain whether the absence of examples from England, France, most of Spain, and the Adriatic (apart from Venice) means that efforts to find examples in those regions returned a null result, or whether the research parameters were so narrowly defined from the outset that those regions were ignored? If the study intended to clarify ‘northern Italian’ it’s understandable, but in that case why include manuscripts from Barcelona and Naples? Was the research heavily dependent, perhaps, on libraries having a large number of their manuscripts digitised?

Koen explained clearly the difficulties involved in adding architectural structures to the data, and in my opinion his initial plan to omit structures was wise, but working as part of a team means compromise. The red dots now swamp the map, and in some cases (such as Genoa), the structures included do not have pre-1440 merlons no matter how energetically civic pride might insist the nineteenth-century reconstructions were historically accurate.

Further difficulties arise because the specimens/data are not labelled, or not labelled accurately in the legend, so that readers are left without any idea of whether the cluster over Milan is the result of a single atelier’s work over, say, 1440-1450, or whether they represent manuscripts made there between 1200-1450. Those placed on Venice may, for all we know, contain a text closely related to that of Naples or Barcelona. Specimen-labelling is basic to any scientific experiment.

Below is a close-up of northern Italy. The whole of Koen’s map can be seen through the link (HERE) which he, and later Peter M., provided.

While this post was in draft, Peter M. directed me to the latest version but it seems little has changed since 2021.

So what does the map tell us?

Not very much. For non-manuscript paintings (the blue dots) none but location details are provided and for the manuscripts (black dots) all the usual information is omitted.

It is impossible, therefore, to determine whether – for example – what we see as blue dots through central Italy is the result of a single painter’s wanderings, or whether due to dissemination of a particular text, or text-type, or the motif’s popularity and transmission within a certain sector of society, such as the intermarrying nobility or a particular religious order.

We cannot follow the chronology for dissemination in manuscripts, since none is identifiable: date, title, holding library and shelf-number are all omitted.

Red Dots.

Koen was perfectly right to urge caution about the overlay of those red dots. Even specialists in military architecture, and archaeologists working in the field are cautious when it comes to assertions about present-day examples of swallowtail merlons.

Even specialists in the history of these forms may have difficulty determining whether some are, or are not authentic reconstructions. I may be mistaken but to the best of my knowledge no original swallowtail merlons are extant in Genoa despite the protests of civic pride that the nineteenth-century rebuilds are authentic reconstructions.

It is true, as in the case of these Genoese merlons (above) that some closely reproduce an early form of such merlons. it is evident from the merlon’s height – able to cover a standing archer – and from the inclusion of slits through which the enemy might be observed and an arrow fired. Nonetheless, the merlons we see today date to the nineteenth-century.

Thanks to a Peter M., who quotes a source he describes as Castle Association and Architecture in the Middle Ages, I can say that before 1450 AD

*The swallowtail pinnacle (merlon) is unknown in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.

*North of the Alps, there are none [no structures with swallowtail merlons?] before 1500.

*From about 1540, castles [north of the Alps??] began to use the dovetailed battlements as a fashionable design. In most cases, even the architect is known.

Context and Significance.

It is understandable that for Voynicheros whose background is in the pragmatic sciences mapping ‘data-points’ might seem a logical way to produce or support any statistical argument, but that expectation is misapplied when it comes to reading and understanding the intention behind a pre-modern picture.

In the same way, people more accustomed to subjects using binary logic have a habit of assuming a division of all images into the literal versus the ‘decorative’, or the meaningful versus the non-meaningful and the same ideas are seen in descriptions of where and why swallowtails were used.

In the critical sciences, data mapping has to involve informed qualitative judgements and more than superficial knowledge of historical periods, documents and cultural attitudes.

Just as counting the number of jars in a medical store-cupboard, and mapping where each stands will not make a doctor of you, so simple data-point maps cannot alone explain he origin, date or intention of any among the Voynich manuscript’s drawings.

The factor most often overlooked is that of perceived significance: in this case what significance the various types of swallowtail merlons had for persons who commissioned, made, copied or regarded a given image in a given social environment and historical moment.

We know that, for a time, one or more types of swallowtail signified ‘the imperial party’. Were the mapped examples found chiefly in cities granted independent status by, say Frederick II, or are they perhaps more often seen in lands that were under the direct control of a western emperor when an image was made? Is the usage dependent a given city’s current political alignment or, perhaps, the leanings of a specific patron? Was a given instance intended to elicit negative or positive response?

Koen’s enthusiasm in 2021 led him to overstatement in his summary, for he wrote:

“The neat thing about this map is that we know for sure that the VM belongs on it as a data point among the blue markers”.

Why should we suppose that for the original maker, those merlons were any more definitive than the square-topped merlons, or more important than the starry spiral, or the various topographic elements? And those are all just in the map’s north roundel. Are any attested in the mapped manuscripts or paintings and if so which?

What lends Koen’s results more weight is that a number of quite independent researchers came to similar conclusions about a focus on the region around, or otherwise connected to Milan, where Koen’s map records the greatest number of manuscripts containing images with swallowtail merlons.

Milan is where Pelling’s historical research, combined with his studies of ciphers, codicology and palaeography, finally led him by 2005-6.

I’ve also concluded, in regard to the Voynich map, that we are most likely to owe its present form to a collaboration of Jews and Genoese, attested not only in Genoa but in Constantinople, Caffa and the Balearics.

Where to from here?

That work done by Koen Gheuens and his friends is not wasted. It should prove very helpful to anyone investigating questions of textual and iconographic transmission in those parts of medieval Latin Europe.

What the map cannot do is tell us where and when Beinecke MS 408 was produced. Establishing a manuscript’s date and place of manufacture is the work of palaeographers and codicologists.

Provenancing content is something else again.

Other questions: Merli, Rook, Rukh.

Etymologies should be taken with a little salt on the side of your plate, to be taken as needed.

For the term ‘merlon’ an etymological dictionary has:

The term merlon comes from the French language, adapted from the Italian merlone, possibly a shortened form of mergola, connected to Latin mergae (pitchfork), or from a diminutive moerulus, from murus or moerus (a wall). An alternative etymology suggests that the medieval Latin merulus (mentioned from the end of the 10th century) functioned as a diminutive of Latin merle, “blackbird”, expressing an image of this bird sitting on a wall.

Let’s start with that tenth century usage, which saw the walls ‘merli’ as blackbirds. Later, in English, the tower-birds, and the chesspiece both became ‘rooks’.

The nineteenth-century etymologists’ well-known disdain for languages other than Latin, Greek and the Germanic group often leaves them blank- when faced with terms gained from Celtic, Hebrew, Egyptian or Berber. In this case the word they cannot see is well known in Hebrew as in Persian – as ruach in Hebrew (esp. Genesis 1:2) and as rukh in Persian.

When working through the Voynich map, section by section and detail by detail, hunting out examples in art and architecture and commentaries in older sources, one chicken-and-egg problem nagged at me.

‘Did the chess-piece inspire the merlons, or did such merlons inspire the form given that chesspiece?’

I scarcely mentioned that part of the research in the summaries published through Voynichimagery, but I’ve decided to write up a little more now for any readers who feel impelled to follow a thread to the heart of an historical maze. That will be in the next post in a couple of weeks’ time.

Until then, here is one detail from a mid-fourteenth manuscript to think about.

The manuscript was made in Persia very shortly before the Plague arose and thus only a very few years before, in France, the ‘November crocodile’ was drawn in grisaille in that Franciscan missal.

As you see, here the rook (Persian rukh) maintains the same form it had in the eleventh century when the chess-players mosaic was made in Piacenza.

Notice in this illustration the hats with stiff, back-turned brims, too, and the garment fastened under the right arm.

Also, from a drawing placed on the back of the Voynich map

a high-collared version..

O’Donovan notes 12.1: The Merlons thing.

c.2500 words

The author’s rights are asserted.

First, let’s put that detail into physical perspective.

From the Yale facsimile edition, we find that the entire Voynich map measures, overall near enough to 420 mm square. That’s 16.5 inches each side.

Within that map, the roundel containing the detail of interest measures close to 100mm (3.9 inches)

Within that, the structure given crenellations measures just 30mm by 45mm (1.2 x 1.8 inches).

.. for reasons I’ve never seen explained, it’s a habit among Voynich writers to omit or truncate the flanking arcs, thus reducing the detail to the size of an ordinary postage-stamp – about 25mm (1 inch) square.

That’s about the length of your thumb’s top joint. Try taking your finest pen and reproducing it there some day when you’re bored at work. 🙂

What does this tell us about this detail-in-a-detail-in-a drawing?

First, that given the physical constraints on the draughtsman, this detail isn’t likely to be a detailed and literal portrait of any single structure or location, simply because the scale precludes inclusion of enough details to clearly distinguish one structure from all others of similar form within a purely literal genre.

The same constraints tell us that for a given place or location to be clearly identifiable, some of what is included should be there for its resonance in terms of medieval iconographic forms: that is for its existing symbolic or metaphorical hooks.

To put this another way, the constraints imposed by the available space mean that the structure must serve as token for that place and while some elements may indeed be literal, others will not or may not be so.

Consider the difference between what you would produce if asked to present a literal portrait of your local place of worship, as distinct from marking it on a map. In the first place you would need to add far more detail to show the ways in which it differs from all other churches built in the same architectural style, but in the second case, you might just draw one of these:

or you might use a more literal-looking token, detailed only enough that a visitor will connect your drawing to a local building when she or she comes across it – even though the drawing is in no sense a literal ‘portrait’. Like this:

The idea of a ‘token’ image embraces the purely symbolic and the merely generic.

A token can include some literal details (such as the rose window, if your local building has one), but omits all non-essentials and can even include non-literal details – your local building may not have a cross on its door, for example. As you see, this drawing doesn’t show whether the building is made of stone, of brick, of stucco or of wood, which a literal portrait would have to do.

Given the very limited space assigned this detail in the Voynich map, our default assumption (pending other evidence) must be that for the first maker of this detail, each item he did include here had no less weight and importance than any other, regardless of whether one item is drawn in a way generic, symbolic or literal.

It is irrelevant that one or another of the inclusions springs more readily to a modern eye; it is quite as much a mistake to ignore the form of the central tower or the subsidiary towers or the square merlons as the fishtails.

So then, to the degree that the drawing must necessarily be reduced to whatever the maker considered essential elements, what we have is a token, but one hopes a significant token, for the intended place.

For the moment we set aside the various theories which have the Voynich map a description of some poetic, theological or other set of ways. We’ll start from an initial position that the map is not of some otherworld and see how we go.

Given a combination of an intention to communicate information of some kind, and the constrained space available, we now consider each of those features the first maker considered distinctive – even definitive – and suppose further (for the time being) that the place indicated did exist to so late as c.1440.

The structure is placed between two great curving ‘walls’ though it isn’t immediately clear whether those are meant for topographic or for man-made forms. Certainly no defensive walls would be found extending across the lowest point of a very narrow and very steep river valley – a moment’s thought will show you why.

At the front we see a great entry-way opening directly onto what is shown (by a fairly-well known convention in late medieval cartography) as a waterway, shallow and having only one opening. Today we don’t conceive of the Mediterranean as a large shallow ‘bay’, but evidently that’s how the maker viewed it and in fact that’s exactly what the Mediterranean is. By comparison with the open ocean, the Mediterranean is shallow and it does have only one natural opening to the deep sea, through the straits of Gibraltar.

So, without presuming which elements in the Voynich detail convey information by literal depiction and which by symbolic value, consider the remaining items included.

The enclosed area is drawn about twice as wide as it is deep. It is enclosed on three sides by walls.

Inside those walls is drawn nothing but one great tower, apparently round since two others which are square are found outside the back wall and are clearly shown so.

That central tower is evidently distinctive in having three storeys (assuming one window-token equals one storey). The roof is tall and conical, but seems to sit within the tower’s upper edge, which suggests that between the tower proper and the roof is an upper parapet or walkway.

Behind the rear wall, there is placed to our left one of those square towers and this has its top coloured blue, the same pigment used to colour an adjacent area. Where that ends, to the right, is a second square extramural tower, this having its top coloured yellow.

We may suggest, then, that perhaps here the blue is used to denote water, so the front entryway is a water-gate and the tower to the left, outside the walls is a water-tower. If that is what the maker intended, then perhaps the lines of blue which we see following along the top of those curving flanks could indicate aqueducts of the sort so often seen in Roman-era settlements, especially in the near east. But, on the other hand, those lines may only indicate some natural descent of fresh water down steep hillsides. No need to decide yet which the maker intended. The analysis is still in its early stages.

As we look for sites fulfilling our criteria so far, the nature of the less easily discerned will serve as a test for each possible identification.

And now at last we come to the merlons.

There are at least two, and possibly three forms of merlon shown on these walls – the ordinary square merlons and what might be described as two forms of fishtail merlons or, perhaps, an attempt to draw twice the same form of fishtail merlons, but whatever the case, the form given those across the front appear different from those seen on the right side of the rear wall.

As you’ll see (further below) there wasn’t just one form of fishtail merlon, but of course the difference may again be due to the scale at which the draughtsman was obliged to work.

Since we don’t yet know when the drawing was first enunciated, so even if we date our present copy 1405-1438, some effort will be needed to determine by research which elements are employed for their symbolic information and which are more nearly literal within this token. Nor can be even guess, as yet, whether the intended place and structures remained standing beyond 1440 AD, even if they existed to that time.

A common and very typical error in Voynich studies is to begin by assuming that one can identify the place by adopting Mary d’Imperio’s suggestion that its resembled a castle, and then start collecting photographs of such examples of castles having fishtail merlons as exist today, without doing any deeper investigation of the date to which such merlons are dated – in fact many examples seen in Europe today are the result of romantic nineteenth-century ‘renovations’.

Merlons – geographic range.

Merlons of various kinds, including the fishtail type are attested during the medieval centuries from as far north as the Black Sea to as far south as Egypt, and from Asia Minor to western Europe. Some are attested by contemporary writings, some by relics in near-ruins, others by what little still remains in structures often destroyed and re-built since those times.

These facts are well-known to historians and to students of military architecture, and have been reprised and documented often enough in contributions to Voynich studies, that there is really very little excuse one can offer, in 2023, for such misleading assertions as – and I quote:

The swallowtail merlons on the Rosettes** castle and city walls tie the manuscript to southern-German or northern-Italian contexts.

The term ‘context’ avoids saying ‘locations’ while implying it; the substitution provides a loophole, so that in future the theorist can claim the assertion applies to any time when any southern German or northern Italian may have been in any place – including the Black Sea, or Egypt, or somewhere in between such as Constantinople.

But asserting that the type is tied to southern Germany and northern Italy is easily disproven and here again, the work has already been done and more than once since 2010. If readers find no reference to the earlier contributions or to these Sicilian precedents shown below (again) it may be because those researchers have relied too heavily on specifically Voynich-related sites rather than turning to external and more impartial [non-wiki] sources.

The following three images all show buildings in Sicily, and all having their merlons in original style(s), according to our best current information. The first example dates to the tenth century and it is said the merlons which had crumbled over time were accurately repaired; the second example is dated to the twelfth century; the third to the thirteenth century, from which time we see such forms first used by the Franco-Savoyard Challant family* in the Valle d’Aosta, west of Milan.

*They built the famous Fénis castle, among others, and it remained in the possession of the Fénis branch of the lords of Challant until 1716.

Notice the varied forms given these older fishtail merlons in Sicily.

TENTH CENTURY: This part of the tower dates to the period of Arab rule in Sicily (i.e. from 902AD). Before that time, the island had been part of the Byzantine empire. It was gradually re-taken by Christian forces and freebooters in numerous battles between 999 and 1139AD. The Latins who finally took it decided to keep it rather than returning it to the Byzantine emperor, although Byzantine and Arab influence remained strong in the island to the end of the 13thC.
c. TWELFTH Century.
THIRTEENTH CENTURY – Palazzo Corvaja, Taormina.

Nick Pelling’s historical research led him to made a fair case for the present manuscript’s having been made in, or near Milan.

He did begin by expecting all the content would be the original composition of single Latin Christian author who had lived contemporary with the present manuscript’s manufacture. This was in keeping with most theoretical Voynich narratives to that time (2006)

Unlike the creators of many other Voynich narratives, Pelling adopted standard scholarly ethics and used accepted methods, while taking pains to consider the codicological evidence and, as best he could, to date and describe the manuscript’s palaeography. All this in addition to attempting to explain the whole work in the light of his studies of late medieval cryptology.

Pelling was (so far as I know) the first among the Reeds’ list generation of Voynich writers to pay attention to the implications of the script’s “4o” form, while being chiefly interested in its presence in some early fifteenth-century Milanese ciphers.

Pelling read the Voynich map as a city-plan or city-scape rather than a map in any narrower sense.

Unlike many other creators of variants on the traditionalist narrative, Pelling laid out for his readers the course of his own research. He gathered and then presented and cited honestly the full range of precedents and sources he found; he explained his reasoning and the data used to inform that reasoning. He was prepared – within limits – to debate his own findings as few later traditionalists would do, and as some have never done. Even more in keeping with the better type of scholarship, Pelling himself published comments and responses made to his work – the positive and the negative, both. This sort of open-intelligence attitude attracted so many researchers that to just one of the posts listed below he received more than 600 comments.

Pelling represents the last flicker of that energetic, co-operative and actively debating atmosphere which initially gave the first mailing list under Reeds such energy and which led rapidly to numerous new insights still being re-discovered by those living in the present ‘groundhog day’ fog. Thereafter the rise of a ‘believe my theory or else’ and degradation of ethics and standards in the online arenas saw debate and any honest engagement with informed dissent constantly discouraged or disdained by the more ambitious theorists until today one finds little activity of that kind in any Voynich arena.

Whether any of the Voynich research published since 2006 has moved Pelling’s own opinions on any point, I cannot say. It is something which readers must discover for themselves.

Below are linked two of Pelling’s earlier posts. one about the larger drawing and the other about the detail presently of interest, I add a link to a post made by Koen Gheuens in 2017 and, because it tracks the history of this particular ‘groundhog day’, a post made for this blog about 18 months ago. Perhaps after that discussion of Pelling’s contributions to the study I should add that he and I differ on a great many points, especially those invoking one or other of the manuscript’s drawings. 🙂

more on the backstory in an earlier post at this blog:

  • D.N.O’Donovan, ‘Swallowtails‘ voynichrevisionist (October 8th., 2021)

In the next post, we’ll move from surviving examples in Sicily to those which begin to appear from about the 13thC in the Franco-Savoyard Valle d’Aosta.

The Valle d’Aosta is not on the Venetian side of Italy, but in an area which will have become familiar to any readers who laboured through our analyses of the calendar’s ‘July’ and ‘November’ emblems. That is, a region between Milan-Genoa and adjacent to regions in which forms of Occitan were spoken during the middle ages – including Genoa. In the map detail shown below, the marker for Valle d’Aosta is seen slightly left of centre at the top of the image.

Valle d’Aosta in the mountains west of Milan, above the Lombardy plain.

O’Donovan notes #9.2: Plague,Medicine, Money and Secrecy (concluded).

c. 3250 words

The authors rights are asserted.

Before we begin.

If you have encountered social media stuff about the Black Death and cats, witches &ct.. then before going further, please take the full remedial dose: Tim O’Neill’s podcast ‘Cats and the Black Death‘ .

Really.

Seriously.

OK – that done, let’s hope Voynich studies will never see any ‘Voynich-magical-women-plague-medicine’ theories.

“false and advertising leches.”

We are all familiar with the stories about how spouses deserted their spouses and parents their children, priests their parishioners and physicians their patients during the Plague years, and especially during its first onslaught in 1348-1442.

But as usual things weren’t really so simple, and Amundsen describes well the dilemma faced by contemporary physicians, whose ethics were opposed to seeking money for money’s sake:

The conscientious physician was in a delicate position in relation to public opinion that impugned his actions with charges of avarice if he seemed too eager to take on cases (especially if they terminated with death) and with charges of cowardice or irresponsibility if he were not willing to undertake the care of those ill with contagious disease. .. There was in medieval medical ethics a strong tradition of refusing to treat those whom the art of medicine could not help.

  • Darrel W. Amundsen, ‘Medical Deontology and Pestilential Disease in the Late Middle Ages’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct. 1977), pp. 403-421.

This attitude might be compared with the rule among English lawyers that, if you know the accused is guilty of the crime, you do not pretend otherwise in court. Here if you were convinced the patient’s disease could not be cured by medicine, to pretend otherwise was unethical because the physician’s aim in attending would be – or would appear to others to be – merely mercenary.

He notes that the anonymous author of a plague tract composed c. 1411 – that is, within the period to which the Voynich quires’ vellum is dated – said this quite plainly: “if the patient is curable, the physician will undertake treatment in God’s name. If he is incurable, the physician should leave him to die.”

However, the medieval physician wasn’t just there to act as pill-dispenser or blood-letter. Caroline Proctor emphasises, when describing the career of Maino de Maineri, who died in about 1368, how that fourteenth-century, Paris-trained, court physician and his patrons “viewed the role of physician as much more than doctoring to the sick …. The good physician sought to preserve and conserve the health of his household, acting as dietician, moralist and guardian to his clients.” and she is correct in saying that view of the physicians’ role is “echoed throughout other contemporary sources” of the fourteenth and earlier fifteenth century.

  • Caroline Proctor, ‘Perfecting prevention : the medical writings of Maino de Maineri (d.c. 1368)’, Doctoral thesis, University of St.Andrews (2006).

So ethical considerations alone meant that the physician would not hide information which he believed was for the public good.

At the same time, we hear from Boccaccio that even in those early plague years, when people already knew that the Plague had arrived from regions to the east of Europe, there began to emerge persons who claimed to be able to address it. Writing of that time, and in this connection, he recalls how

“.. over and above the men of art, the number became exceedingly great of both men and women who had never had any teaching of medicine…“

Boccaccio, Decameron. the Introduction ‘to the Ladies’.

Three hundred years afterwards, in the mid-seventeenth century, and as Plague continued to flare up, subside, and return in one part of Europe and another, we find that ‘plague remedies’ are now being touted by charlatans, but most educated people believe that one either recovered, or one died, and that while various precautions might be taken there was no ‘plague cure’ in medicine. To them, if not to the masses in Europe, anyone claiming to know a ‘cure’ was supposed, by default, an avaricious quack.

Whether Boccaccio might have classed Theobaldus Loneti as physician or as charlatan I do not know but writing after 1450, and with apparent honesty, Loneti had claimed for himself an unusually positive attitude.

‘When … there was a debate among physicians over incurable diseases such as leprosy, paralysis, pestilence, and the like, they finally came to the conclusion that no remedy for the pestilence could be found, especially since Galen and Hippocrates and other ancient physicians made no mention of one. But after much discussion, it was I alone who maintained that many remedies against this plague could easily be employed.’

Of course, that’s another instance of self-advertisement but once again his treatments were set forth in plain text, without any effort to make them secrets in our modern sense of the word.

These diverse attitudes, over time, toward physic and the plague help explain, I think, both Kircher’s persistent rudeness towards Baresch, and why Baresch’s own letter to Kircher and those of mutual friends lay such emphasis on the fact that Baresch’s interest was “in medicine, and not money.” It makes sense if one posits that Baresch believed the Voynich text included some ancient, eastern, plague remedy. Baresch himself speaks of medicine as the most worthy occupation of men, after religious service and in this expresses the same ideals as we see in John of Burgundy’s plague tract, three centuries before when he wrote:

Moved by piety and anguished by and feeling sorrow because of this calamity … I have composed and compiled this work not for a price but for your prayers, so that when anyone recovers from the diseases discussed above, he will effectively pray for me to our Lord God. . .

One has to be a little cautious, too, because in medieval texts the term ‘remedy’ often means something closer to ‘relief’ or ‘alleviation’ or ‘avoidance’ in order to allow preservation and recovery of health rather than being a cure.

Unlike secrets of the diplomatic sort, which certainly were being rendered unreadable by use of encryption, rare scripts or obscure languages in some western courts by the mid-fifteenth century, we find that medical ‘secrets’ were still secrets only in the medieval sense – that is, specialised techniques and knowledge gained by masters of an art, craft or profession as a result of their formal training and long experience. More like tricks of the trade than commercial secrets.

About this time, i.e. about the mid-fifteenth century, we do begin to see recipes for some medicines and ointments – often including roses and violets, but those recipes – once more – are written in plaintext.

Regarding theories of a ‘medical Voynich’, therefore, the points to be taken are that if, as may be reasonably supposed, the Voynich text was inscribed before 1440, and its text is rendered obscure by use of cipher or encryption as so many believe, then it is unlikely to be product of Latin Europe’s medical or pharmaceutical tradition; the historical record shows that even that disease, for which any claimed cure might be expected to gain great profit, did not yet see physician-authors attempting to keep their knowledge hidden. On this, we may again quote Amundsen:

Although to the modern reader the plague tractates may seem at worst fraudulent and at best esoteric, they were in reality exoteric in the best sense of the word. While they provide sidelights on the ethics of medieval medical practice, they also illustrate a high degree of ethical motivation on the part of their authors, because almost all were written for the use of the public and represent a massive effort, in the aggregate, at popular health education.

Amundsen, op.cit. p. 421

Note: For readers’ convenience, I limit the number of sources quoted directly; I try to choose only those whose work is well-researched and in keeping with the most reliable scholarship, but I would like to think that any Voynich researcher worth his/her salt will check back to the original medieval sources before accepting anything repeated at second- or third- remove.

Things begin to change somewhat later, around the late sixteenth century and by the mid-seventeenth century, even as printed ‘remedies’ begin to be sold to the ordinary public we also see some chroniclers and other observers almost on the verge of understanding the chain of Plague’s transmission.

In one case, in Florence, we hear of how a weaver opened some bales of wool – then he and his weavers all died of plague; then that a chicken-farmer dies of it; and then across the courtyard from the weaver, a woman and her children receive a bag of flour – and they die.

  • Giulia Calvi, ‘A Metaphor for Social Exchange: The Florentine Plague of 1630’, Representation, Winter, 1986, No. 13 (Winter, 1986), pp. 139-163.

Just so, it is common enough to hear that to open a bale of cloth, wool or of furs first brings plague into a community and some link was understood to exist between plague and domestic (if not always domesticated) animals.

When Plague struck a certain village in England in 1665 it was understood that plague began in that village* after a tailor opened a bale of cloth from which fleas escaped and bit him.

*Eyam, Darbyshire. Noted for the number of inhabitants who survived. Recent scholarship revealed that those who survived did so because they had inherited a certain gene (delta 32). On this, a documentary made by Timeline has the usual high-pitched introduction but improves from about 8:22.

Seventeenth-century: cheap print culture.

By the seventeenth century, we now find that in the family setting (not identical to a household setting) the kind of ‘secrets’ books whose Victorian equivalent would be Mrs. Beeton’s often now include a family’s secret recipes against plague and these are the family’s secrets in a more modern sense.

Further, that such recipes, as claimed plague remedies, had become by this time “important and established features of early modern medical cultures, both domestic and commercial and were sold widely in marketplaces, streets and through cheap print cultures” – so that the ‘money’ part of plague and money was now well to the fore – but even so I’ve encountered none that were actually encrypted, either before or in publication.

Crawshaw also notes (with references given*) that in Venice “The submission of secrets to the Health Office requests for privileges, reminiscent of the patents studied by Luca Mola’s work on the Venetian silk industry, became more common towards the end of the sixteenth century and continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”(p.615)

*in particular the Introduction in Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (eds.), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500-1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2011)

  • Jane Stevens Crawshaw, ‘Families, medical secrets and public health in early modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, Vol. 28, No. 4 (September 2014) issue: Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe, pp. 597-618. Linked to the quotation as note 15 is a short bibliography of plague recipes and charlatan-literature.

The case of one Marieta Colochi shows how a seventeenth century Venetian family regarded their plague ‘secrets’ in just the way an eminent chef might treat a superior culinary recipe – that is, as potential key to a family’s present and future financial and social position.

The same attitude is attested there some decades earlier when in 1576, an important medical officer in Venice decided in the public interest to give up his own ‘secrets’ for treating victims of plague – by selling those secrets to the state. The price Ascanio Olivetti sought, during the lifetime of the future Rudolf II, was an initial payment of 5,000 ducats and thirty ducats’ salary per month for the rest of his life, with the same salary to be given for life to his children, male or female, on the understanding that they would serve the Health Office as needed. Clearly, Olivetti believed that in selling his medical ‘secrets’ he was selling what had been the key to his own and his family’s financial security.

So by the third quarter of the sixteenth century, at least in commercially-minded Venice with its passion for commercial secrecy and commercial exclusivity, the medical secret might be a commercial secret.

Reporting this, Crawshaw notes that 5,000 ducats was the equivalent of almost thirty-five years’ Ascanio’s official salary. In the event, Venice agreed to a one-off payment of just 800 ducats (five times his annual salary) but did agree to increase his monthly salary to thirty ducats, provide for his children, and exempt him from all taxes including the Venetian decima.

From this example we learn that in late sixteenth-century Venice, at least, the medical secret – or one aimed against plague – really could have immediate commercial pecuniary value.

Ascanio’s salary having been until then about 160 ducats a year, and he one of the highest ranked physicians of the Venetian state, the amount puts into perspective Mnishovsky’s story about the Voynich manuscript’s having been bought from an anonymous carrier* for 600 ducats.

* Marci’s convoluted sentence (which Philip Neal parses in meticulous detail in his Notes) is translated by Neal as: “Doctor Raphael, the Czech language tutor of King Ferdinand III as they both then were, once told me that the said book belonged to Emperor Rudolph and that he [Mnishovsky or Rudolf is left ambiguous in the original too] presented 600 ducats to the messenger who brought him the book”. For a safe link to Neal’s site, see ‘Constant References’ section in the Bibliography in this blog’s top bar.

A notorious example of profit-seeking from plague during the sixteenth-century is that of Caspar Kegler‘s publishing his own snake-oil ‘plague medicine’ recipes. I have written of him before – HERE – and referred readers to Heinrichs’ study, whose details I give again.

  • Erik Anton Heinrichs, ‘The Plague Cures of Caspar Kegler: Print, Alchemy, and Medical Marketing in Sixteenth-Century Germany’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 417-440.
  • A more upbeat and laudatory perception of Kegler appears more recently on the Danish ‘Hypotheses‘ website, from which I have the illustration shown at the end of this post. By the mid-to-late sixteenth century, too, German hands are now often using the ‘4’ shape for the numeral four – not as a result of education in the mercantile-commercial calculation schools (‘abbaco’ or ‘abaco’ schools) as occurs so much earlier in the south, but in imitation of printers’ having adopted that form in the meantime.

Conclusion:

What we learn from all we’ve seen is that within the Voynich vellum’s radiocarbon-14 dates of 1405-1438, medicine within Latin Europe was perceived as public service and while individual physicians and others might attempt to raise their professional profile to boost their income, we’ve found nothing of ‘secretly written plague remedies’.

Writings touting ‘secret plague medicines’ appear in western Europe in the sixteenth century, proliferating from that time into the seventeenth- and not least because access to print had become very easy and relatively inexpensive.

But even then, one does not find such texts encrypted.

One is free to imagine that some medical ‘secret’ might be encrypted or enciphered in western Europe by the early modern period, if not in the early fifteenth century, and it is conceivable – just – that it might have been encrypted using a system that defies even modern tools for cryptanalysis. But to imagine such a desire among qualified European physicians, and/or that they would use a cipher of such sophistication before 1440 demands a suspension of disbelief greater than the present author can manage.

This may, of course, be due to my own insufficient understanding of cipher techniques and their imponderables before 1440, or to the fact that some regions of Europe have manuscripts less easily accessible than others’ and are being omitted from the surveys and data-collection.

Solely from what has been considered, though, one must conclude that if the whole Voynich text is enciphered and was composed before 1438 in Latin Europe, then it is highly unlikely to be a text first composed there by a physician trained in the Latin medical tradition.

With regard to which – Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh reported at a recent Voynich zoom-conference that they had found only six encrypted books dating to the fifteenth century. Despite their paper’s displaying insufficient background in medieval history, -iconology and manuscript studies, it is of value in that each of two authors has a high and well-earned reputation in their own field of cryptology and their survey found not a single instance of a fifteenth-century encrypted herbal or an encrypted medical treatise.

After explaining carefully their criteria for defining a text as “an encrypted book” – though not the geographic parameters for their survey – the authors list the following:

(i-iii) three texts by Giovanni Fontana (1395–1455), a man of Padua whose family had come from Venice, and who was trained in engineering and medicine*;

*for reasons we cannot spare time to go into here, Fontana’s probably having served (as Long** says) most of his working life as a military physician and also serving for a time as municipal physician to the city of Udine in Friuli – which is adjacent to the Veneto – are factors relevant to Voynich studies, though neither point is mentioned by the Dunin-Schmeh paper. **Pamela Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge …(2001). For Fontana’s enciphered works, Long refers to the studies by Eugenio Battisti and Giuseppa Saccaro Battisti.

(iiii) a late work called Steganographia, attributed to a German Benedictine monk named Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516). The paper’s authors see Trithmenius’ work as a satire (they use the word ‘hoax’) rather than regarding it, as do e.g. Pelling and Reeds, as simply a model- or text-book for steganography. I’m given to understand that Reeds deciphered the content of Steganographia‘s third volume.

Dunin and Schmeh also refer to (v) a manuscript they call “Codex Palatinus Germanicus”, but the description leaves the text unidentifiable since there are 848 codices bearing that description, all having been formerly in the Palatine library in Heidelberg.

Fontana’s medical degree notwithstanding, none of his encrypted books is about medicine.

Additional note (10th Feb 2023). The assertion seen under Fig.3 in the Dunin-Schmeh paper, “… two more Giovanni Fontana books (not depicted) have the closest visual similarity with the Voynich Manuscript” is unexplained and unattributed, but appears to be derive from an observation made by Philip Neal [HERE], who wrote “some – not all – of the diagrams illustrating [mnemonic machines described in Fontana’s Secretum de Thesauro] slightly resemble Voynich illustrations”. The wiki article, last updated in Dec. 2022, says that “it has been suggested…” and references Neal. The Dunin-Schmeh paper omits mention of Neal and asserts the item as fact. Thus are tentative comments by single individuals elevated into anonymous ‘dicta’ in Voynich studies.

Balance of Probability

If one presumes – as most Voynicheros do presume – that the Voynich text was first composed in Latin Europe and that it was inscribed before 1440, and further assume that it is encrypted, then it becomes highly unlikely that the content is medical. Pace Brewer, the evidence is that Latins just weren’t into encrypting medical texts and recipes, let alone whole books of them.

*Kegan Brewer’s paper entitled, ‘ “I beg your grace to suppress this chapter or else to have it written in secret letters”: The Emotions of Encipherment in Late-Medieval Gynaecology’ has an ambitious title but in the event describes no more than occasional instances of words or phrases being omitted, erased or otherwise censored in much they way that medical works did if the material could be misused or misconstrued. As late as the early twentieth century it was still the norm that “certain things are best left in the Latin” – and for much the same reason. Brewer’s paper was delivered at the zoom conference held courtesy of the University of Malta, as were those of Schmeh and Dunin; of Fagin Davis, of Painter and Bowern and others. All can be read online through CEUR, an online journal dedicated to publishing workshops in computer science.

Postscript – thanks to Monica Green and Rae Ellen Bichell’s blogpost [HERE] I owe readers an apology: the header picture for the previous blogpost does not show victims of the Plague, but of leprosy, and comes from James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum, a 14th-century encyclopedia. But as Bichell points out, Getty images, which distributes that picture and the British Library itself in a 2012 exhibition mis-labelled the detail as an image of the Plague. I should have checked the original, nonetheless.

O’Donovan Notes – #8.3 Angles of approach – Medicine, Newbold and ‘astral spirits’ in the VMS (Pt 1)

Ways of belief, of expectation, of judgment … are not easily modified after they have once taken shape. – John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct.

c.1280 words. The author’s rights are asserted.

Preface

The previous post was little more than a bridge which would allow us to connect the same themes across the period from the early centuries AD, to the fifteenth. That is, from the period to which the same assignments of month-to-sign is attested as in the Voynich calendar, to dates appropriate for the Voynich manuscript’s vellum. While doing so, we may introduce a hint of that theme we’ll consider later – an idea of secret medicine.

Let me say again here that I have seen nothing to justify the now deeply-entrenched idea that the Voynich manuscript is focused on medicine, nor that the calendar was intended to serve astrology, nor that the ‘leaf-and-root’ section is about medicinal pharmacy.

Many newer-come Voynicheros will not realise that was passes for “what everyone knows” are very largely products of Wilfrid Voynich’s imagination or that of William Romaine Newbold. It is unfortunate that so many of their unfounded notions came to be embedded in the traditionalist narrative and even – during the late 1960s and 70s – incorporated into what was written up as the Beinecke library’s catalogue entry.

That is why, for example, you’ll see a pre-set slate of options for understanding the work – those being ‘science, medicine or magic’.

We owe to Newbold not only his subjective description of the manuscript in terms of thematic sections, but also the first effort to understand the manuscript’s anthropoform figures and an intimation that they are not necessarily meant literally.

Unlike Wilfrid, who may have had some Latin but seems ignorant of Greek, of ancient and of medieval history, Newbold certainly studied both those languages and related literature, both secular and religious. (The Upenn site’s biography is excellent; that in the wiki article worse than merely bad).

Newbold’s great mistake had been to accept on faith various assertions made with enormous self-confidence by Wilfrid Voynich.

If – as I think – Wilfrid himself was early convinced by his own imaginative tale, until he could not distinguish between the offerings of his imagination and those of evidence and reason, so we may regard him as the first modern Voynich theorist, and Newbold the first of those whose aim was nothing more than to hunt for items that might support to another’s theory after the fact.

Even so, it wasn’t Wilfrid, but Newbold who first offered a classification of the manuscript’s sections, and described the anthropoform figures as meant for disembodied souls or spirits – daimones.

Given what we’ve seen in Hague, MMW 10 A 11 and what is to be seen in another, slightly earlier French manuscript, (Oxford, Bodleian, St. John’s College MS 18) we should not dismiss Newbold’s views without some consideration, at least.

(detail) Oxford, Bodleian, St.John’s College MS 18 f. 1r. Roland of Lisbon’s Reductorium physiognomie.. Second quarter of the fifteenth century. Image copyright, Bodleian Library. Reproduced here by express permission of the President and Fellows of St John’s College Oxford..

Newbold’s opinions about the Voynich figures were already set by 1921, being included in his lecture given in April of that year, and as part of his description of the manuscript’s sections:

I’ve underlined one sentence in red because it shows that by 1921 Newbold had already placed greater faith in Wilfrid’s theoretical narrative than in the historical evidence.

Newbold knows there is no evidence in any of Bacon’s extant writings suggestive of any particular interest in the idea of transmigration of souls – which idea is contrary to Bacon’s religious allegiance – but Newbold is already so dedicated to Wilfrid’s theory of Baconian authorship (for which there was no evidence, either, save a scrap of unsupported rumour) that Newbold now imagines that proof must exist somewhere; that the theory cannot be wrong.

The underlined sentence implies, I think, that he imagined the missing ‘somewhere’ to be in Wilfrid Voynich’s ugly ducking manuscript.

Three months after he had delivered that lecture, Newbold wrote to ask assistance in hunting the imagined evidence that might support his own theory.

Dated July 21st., that letter was published in the Catholic Review in October of that year, and separated by several pages from its illustration.

NOTE: Looking again at this folio (75r) I realise that it contains what is near-enough to single hatching ‘in the strict sense’ – in which it is exceptional but because of which I owe my regular readers an apology.
The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Oct., 1921), p.407.

Whether Newbold received any response to that letter I do not know, but once again and as with his choice of topic for the lecture he had delivered in April to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia*, Newbold seems to have been oblivious to the expectations, interests or sensibilities of his audience.

*Mary Scott Newbold lectures were intended to present to the College recent technical advances in the practice of scientific medicine. See Lectures 4 and 6 published in the same volume of the Transactions.

.

What led Newbold to think the figures were souls or ‘astral spirits’?

As so often, one must ask about a Voynich theory what evidence could have led the creator to suggest it. Few deign to reply to such a question, but in Newbold’s case it might just possibly be answered, even now, ninety years and more after his death.

We know that he had studied both Latin and Greek. The authors who are named in his April lecture provide some idea of his range of reading. And I daresay we may take it that his use of such terms as ‘souls’ and ‘astral souls’ approximate to the Greek daimones or daemones.

Trepanier’s recent paper, in which he attempts to reconstruct Empedocles’ views, has a comment on this point:

“Part one [of Trepanier’s paper] reviews Empedocles on soul and argues that the identification of the transmigrating daimon of [fragment] B115 with the soul found in our Platonist sources is correct enough, pending some important qualifications” (p.131).

Further, and still in regard to Fragment B115, he says, “This insistence on longevity but not everlastingness for both daimones and gods [in B115] is notable precisely because it goes against, respectively, for souls, the Platonic doctrine of the immortal soul, and, for gods, the traditional Homeric notion of “gods who are forever,” θεοὶ αἰὲν ἐόντες” –

which last comment accords well with Augustine’s position, as we saw it expressed in Civitate dei.

As I’ve said, I cannot agree that anything in the manuscript’s drawings justifies assuming medical purpose, but I may be mistaken. Newbold’s undoubted erudition means that we should not dismiss his comments on the older and neoplatonic works without the courtesy of consideration.

We also note that despite the uncharacteristically satirical, impatient and even contemptuous tone and “code-purple-prose” of Panofsky’s responses to Friedman’s list of simple-minded questions, Panofsky does seem to reference in his answer to Q.5 the earlier views expressed by Newbold’s views, as when Panofsky writes of “a general cosmological philosophy … celestial influences transmitted by astral radiation and those “spirits”…. (For the full text, see HERE).

If we place side by side, in chronological order, images dating from the days of Ausonius through those of Augustine, to the two fifteenth-century manuscripts cited above (Hague 10 11 and St.John’s 18), then I rather think we may be able to suggest some specific texts – even a specific manuscript – of which Newbold might, possibly, have been thinking.

to be continued..

Postscript:

  1. Professor Romaine Newbold, ‘The Roger Bacon Manuscript’, Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Series 3: Vol.43, (1921)  pp. 431- 474. Section occurs pp.456ff.
  2. Oxford, Bodleian St.John’s College 18 was made by the Portuguese, Paris-trained physician Roland of Lisbon for John of Lancaster, while John was Prince Regent of France and England’s Duke of Bedford and shortly before or just after John purchased the entire French royal library at Louvre, as he did in 1424 following the death of Charles V.

O’Donovan notes – Calendar 7: the diagrams are not for amateurs, sorry.

c2000 words

The author’s rights are asserted.

It is now more than a decade since I pointed out, for persons then involved in Voynich studies, that while the calendar diagrams’ central emblems use a visual language near-enough to Latin conventions, the diagrams themselves do not.

Given the enormous optimism, self-confidence and positivism one finds in Voynich writers working outside their areas of special competence – and which is surely needed to address so problematic a manuscript in the absence of prior studies – I expect my opinion will be unwelcome that any correct reading of these diagrams (if not of their written labels) will need specialist knowledge at a level we associate with such names as David A. King, Elly Dekker, and the late David Pingree and Paul Kunitzsch – Kunitzsch’s death in 2020 ending one of my own long-held hopes for this study.

The diagrams raise a number of highly technical issues which only a deep grounding in the history of medieval astronomical texts, tables and charts can clarify. Many of those issues will be invisible to a general reader and amateur theorist, especially any misled into thinking that all one needs are “two eyes and commonsense” and some computing skills.

I had hoped to avoid pouring such cold water on enthusiasts who enjoy guessing or who have confused traditionalists’ repetition of old theories with statements of fact.

I include this post so that my silence may not mislead readers of this blog into thinking that I believe the Calendar section expresses nothing but the habits of western Christian (‘Latin’) Europe.

Whether we consider the ninth century, the twelfth century, the mid-fourteenth century, or the early fifteenth century, astronomical knowledge involved wider and more complex interactions than the usual historical summaries suggest.

It is more than a decade since I realised that there is an inherent conflict between the iconographic information provided by the Calendar’s central emblems as against the diagrams as such.

Take, for example, the long-enduring assumption that each of the calendar’s anthropoform figures represents a day (or night), or that each star in each diagram does so. The stars, and the nymphs have been counted by various writers over the years – in publications, as in conversations to mailing lists and forums. Most recently, I understand from one amiable forum member, Anton Alipov has counted them again and shared his results at voynich.ninja.

The rhyme everyone knows today was known in medieval Europe by the ninth century. In modern English it runs,

Thirty days hath September, April, June and November.

All the rest have thirty-one, excepting Februrary alone

which has 28 days clear, and twenty nine in each leap year

Even if we were to treat the doubled months as split months and count their stars together, still the tally must read (according to the copy I’ve been sent)

  • March: 29 or 31(?)
  • April: 30 [As 15+15]
  • May: 30 [as 15+15]
  • June: 30
  • July: 30
  • August: 30
  • September: 30 [and one extraneous star]
  • October: 30
  • November: 30 [and one extraneous star]
  • December: 30

The logical question to ask (one would think) is where and when we find calendars of comparable design, ones lacking any evidence of intercalation?

That has never been the response made in the past.

Those unable to contemplate the possibility of non-Latin character for the manuscript’s contents (or who can imagine it, but find the idea preposterous) have veered off and created alternatives – often by inventing imaginative-hypothetical theory-patches mis-represented as the fruit of historical logic. The basic traditionalist position is that if the manuscript’s content doesn’t look Latin, or act Latin, then it jolly well ought to, and really does “underneath it all” and/or that the author/draughtsman got it wrong, poor thing. 🙂

It must be understood that the “all-Latin-Christian-European” theory-narrative IS the traditionalist theory because the study’s founding fathers – Wilfrid Voynich, William Newbold and William Friedman – began by assuming it an autograph composed all at once by a thirteenth century Englishman, or by some other European male important enough to figure in Europe’s story of its own intellectual advance to the mid-twentieth century.

Especially for the Friedmans (and thus for Mary d’Imperio) even to suggest the content included “foreign” matter was offensive, because to them the foreign implied the inferior and unimportant.

Added to this was the theory that the written text should prove to be a consistently-spelled and neatly grammatical plain-text because without such standardisation (as they thought) encryption and decryption became impossible. That it was an encrypted text of ordinary prose or poetry was the cornerstone – the non-negotiable element – in the theories they created.

For the time of Roger Bacon, Scot et.al., that meant in practice assuming the text written in one of the liturgical languages and given their bias – it meant Latin, English or German, none of which is indicated by the usual statistical analyses. The same assumptions and prejudices so common in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries are why Panofsky’s recognising non-Latin elements – presumably in the manuscript’s layout and drawings – was not taken seriously by the Friedmans and by Mary d’Imperio was imagined mediated by some Latin figure. Hence the references to Ramon Llull and anachronistic allusions to a consciously Christianised Cabala.

As so often, Voynich theorists have attempted to assert a section’s meaning, or a drawing’s meaning, though paying scant attention to the form given an image or section – as we’ve noted recently in discussing the series of emblems used as centres for the Calendar diagrams.

Inherited bias, within the traditionalist theories, seem to me to explain why a hundred years and more have passed without any Voynich writer asking, and seeking to understand even the simplest of questions about this section: such as “Why do the central emblems not form a zodiac sequence, even of just these 10 months?” Or “What kind of calendar might have 30-day months for every month from April to December, inclusive?”

The larger questions about calendars and the history of astronomical works are not within the brief of an iconographic analyst; what we can address is the curious choice of emblems to fill these diagrams and why they present such an odd mixture of zodiac-like and non-zodiac like forms.

I would add another question – why do they include forms which appear in some cases compatible with images found in England and in France over the period from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, but with other emblems unattested in Latin works until the mid-fourteenth century?

I’d point here not only to November’s crocodile but to the history of the Arcitenens type. The Parthian type with its goat-legs appears early, in the work of one Anglo-Saxon monk who also worked in France, and as a fully human figure in the 9thC, but it was not the form preferred thereafter in Latin manuscripts’ representation of the 12 zodiac figures and seems to disappear soon after from the Latin sources.

Nonetheless in its old Pan-like form it reappears in one Jewish manuscript* that the holding library dates to the 15th-16thC, and whose chief text is the Six Wings of Immanuel Bonfils of Tarascon (1300 – 1377). And the same manuscript has a prawn-nosed lobster for Cancer. I cite the example only to show that history – including the history of images and forms – is no simple “forward-march”.

*On this see first: Gerrit Bos, Charles Burnett and Tzvi Langermann, ‘Hebrew Medical Astrology: David Ben Yom Tov, Kelal Qaṭan: Original Hebrew Text, Medieval Latin Translation, Modern English Translation’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society , New Series, Vol. 95, No. 5 (2005), pp. i, iii, v-vii, ix, 1-61, 63-121.

image is not to be copied or re-used.

Alfonsine Tables.

The part played by Jews, including Jews from French-speaking regions, in the translations made for Alfonso X of Castile is another subject unsuited to amateurs and speculators, for it is still debated by scholars who may fairly be described as eminent specialists in that field. When such scholars as Pingree and Mercier are unable to agree about transmission of the Persian Syntaxis or Byzantine reception of the updated version of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables, the issues can hardly be resolved by less well-informed writers – yet such matters must impact on how one explains the extraordinary number of stars which seem to be referenced by the Voynich calendar.

Alipov’s recent count gave a total of 299 figures of the star-holding type (he calls them ‘nymphs’) and a total of 297 stars – presumably including some he describes as extraneous (ornamental?).

I call the number extraordinary because any survey of astrolabes and other flat representations of the heavens, produced before 1440 (and more realistically to 1350 AD), generally include between 17 and 30 stars, with 50 being an unusually large number. Similarly, one does not find in the Latins’ calendars, breviaries or books of hours from which so many Voynich writers have taken their zodiac images such things as star-tables or lists, nor do their months consist of mostly of 30-days.

From time to time, since Jim Reeds’ mailing list was opened, individual researchers have tried to raise the matter of the lunar calendar and the lunar asterisms known as lunar mansions or as towers – only to have the topic submerged, ignored or bulldozed under some determinedly Eurocentric theorising – typically focussing on the Picatrix in pretty much the same way that “southern and Jewish” has been transmogrified by theoretical narratives about Ramon Llull and Christianised Cabala.

Illustrations in copies of the Aratea may add red dots to mark stars, and Elly Dekker, in 2010, published a paper on the Leiden Aratea* which shows it referencing more than 600 stars by the red dots with which its pictures of the constellations are adorned. How much work was required to identify those stars, her paper shows plainly enough an although I include here one table [Table 3] from that paper, I cannot emphasise strongly enough that no use should be made of it to invent or patch a theory – at the very least the trouble should be taken to read the paper in full and realise just how much expertise is required even to identify stars embedded in an illustration of a constellation.

Leiden Aratea (Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek MS Voss. lat. 4° 79) – produced in the first half of the ninth century for the court of Louis the Pious (814-40). It is not a typical work of that time, but an exceptional one – in its size, artistic quality and content. It contains images of forty-two constellations as we count them now, and the Pleiades.

*Elly Dekker, ‘The Provenance of the Stars in the Leiden “Aratea” Picture Book’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , Vol. 73 (2010), pp. 1-37. Accessible through JSTOR.

While respecting the level of scholarship needed to attempt an accurate reading of the Calendar diagrams, we may continue to investigate the central emblems which – I’ll say again – do not appear to me to agree well with the character and content of the diagrams proper .

Two more passages worth thinking over before we turn to those manuscripts I’ve been promising (one very early semi-Christian calendar, and Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 313).

Both these passages (below) come from papers by Raymond Mercier, a former editor of the Journal for the History of Astronomy.

The first relates to the ninth-twelfth centuries; the second to the early fifteenth century.

In the first Mercier notes a curious instance of alteration/adjustment in a twelfth-century Latin text, apparently attempting to harmonise the Christian with the Jewish calendrical system, while at the same time back-dating it to the ninth century. The author of the tables he mentions – Luhot ha-Nasi – was Abraham ben Hiyya, known as Sarasvorda , who was born in Barcelona c.1070, and who died in Narbonne or in Provence in 1136 or 1145AD.

In this second passage from one of Mercier’s papers, he is speaking of events which occurred close to when the Voynich quires were made (1405-1438).

I would add, as a simple matter of fact, that the Persian New Year began in March, and we learn from Ibn Majid, a fifteenth century navigator who knew his stars, that the eastern mariners counted their sailing year from the date of the Persian New Year. It was important to count one’s days on those eastern maritime routes, because if wrongly calculated, the monsoon winds on which their navigation relied might be misjudged with disastrous consequences, physical and economic.

additional note (13th October 2022) on the moveable date of that Persian New Year relative to the Julian calendar, and the Arab navigators’ practice of counting their days pp. 361-2 in G.R. Tibbett’s English translation of the ‘Kitāb al-fawāʼid fī uṣūl ʻilm al-baḥr wa-al-qawāʻid’ of Ahmad b. Majid al-Najdi, the translation published as Arab Navigation Before the Coming of the Portuguese…etc. Any reader who is particularly keen to have the information but not quite so keen on the book’s price is welcome to email me and I’ll type those two pages.

O’Donovan notes: the calendar’s emblems – November and July. Pt.1

c.3500 words

edited to correct mis-spelling – 25th Sept – somewhere along the line ‘Lippencott’ made its way into the spell-check’s ‘don’t check’ list. My apologies to the scholar.

The author’s rights are asserted.

Introduction.

It should not come as much of a surprise that the series of diagrams we call the ‘Voynich calendar’ has not found any counterpart in the art of western Christian (‘Latin’) Europe. Nor, if also considered as a series, has the sequence of its diagrams’ central emblems.

It remains possible that some day there may found a work of Latin (i.e. western European Christian) origin in which there is comparable series of month- diagrams, presented on such a fold-in, beginning with March, following March with two segments each showing a goat, and then two segments showing bull-like forms, and which also includes a Scales of the same unusual construction, two lobsters for ‘July’ and a quadruped with a whip-like tail for ‘November’ – but none has been found yet during the century and more since 1912.

An analytical approach meets divergence from any theoretical norm not as if it were a social gaffe, politely to be ignored, but as a sign of potentially valuable information. In this case, we hope the information gained might ultimately assist those still wondering where and when they should look for whatever language or dialect (if any) informs the written text.

The major flaw in a widely promoted ‘central European-Ruolfine-German’ theory is that it takes as axiomatic too many of the old guesses, including the guess that although the series of central emblems in the Voynich calendar does not form a zodiac, or any coherent segment of one, it may be treated as if it did.

The analyst’s approach says rather, ‘Well, since it isn’t a zodiac, why isn’t it, and to what purpose was it made which has it differ so obviously from that theoretical model?”

If that were our present question, it would require considering the entire series – the central emblems included with their diagrams – but at present we are investigating the degree to which astronomical, historical and cultural information we’ve gained from diagrams in other sections of the manuscript does or doesn’t chime with information offered by the calendar. For the sake of the exercise, therefore, we will concentrate on just two of the central emblems, those overwritten with the month-names for November and for July.

From the earlier two analyses* it was concluded that those are most likely to have been brought into a Latin environment between the mid-thirteenth to later fourteenth centuries AD with one showing a greater proportion of its drawing compatible with the visual language of medieval Latin (western Christian) Europe than the other. Asian influence was recognised in both.

*of the diagrams on fol. 85r and fol. 67v-1.

Our now considering a couple of emblems from the Voynich calendar is done to test whether those astronomical emblems do, or don’t, say the same.

For newcomers, let me emphasise that any formal analytical study must treat the whole of any drawing or series: in the calendar that means both diagram and central emblem – no conclusions being valid which cherry-pick. However, this being an exercise and demonstration of research-method, we may use these two as example of how to progress through a work, piece after piece, testing and reconciling opinions gained from one item against those which follow, to build a cumulative study.

—

November.

Our attention having already been drawn, and repeatedly, to the south-western Mediterranean, the fact that the Voynich ‘calendar’-emblems were over-written with month-names in a dialect or language from that region, or linked directly to it by contemporary networks, makes it reasonable to begin there.

Below is a map showing entanglements between the relevant linguistic regions – those most densely coloured red – during the thirty years between 1358 AD to 1372 AD. It is not a maritime chart, nor a political map, nor does it map textual stemma. It illustrates the commercial network of trade and correspondence for one trading house while the Italian founder was resident in papal Avignon. I apologise for the map’s poor quality; it is as it appears in the source..

Francesco di Marco Datini was born in Prato, near Florence. His knowledge of commercial maths’ method and practice being most likely gained in Paolo Dagomari’s ‘abaco’ school* in Florence. Between regions speaking Catalan, Judeo-Catalan, Occitan (most often posited as providing the calendar’s month-names), goods and people travelled chiefly in the ships of Genoa, of Venice and of Catalonia.

*For more, and references, see earlier post, ‘Consider… Maths & memory Pt 1‘, voynichrevisionist, (January 13, 2022),

Edit: August 9th. The paragraph’s last sentence was poorly expressed. Please read: ‘Between regions… the ships in which goods and people travelled were predominantly those of Genoa, of Venice and of Catalonia’.

Routes – controlled by Venice – blue; by Genoa – red.

It was also in the context of the new abaco schools – dedicated to commercial maths, geometry, practical astronomy and navigation – that use of Arabic numerals was fostered in Latin Europe, and that simpler ‘4’ shape for the numeral – a form similar to one of the Voynich glyphs – was disseminated. Its earliest known instance occurs in 1375, in the great rose-gridded worldmap commissioned for the court of France from a Jewish master named Abraham Cresques’, a resident of Majorca.

As I first pointed out a decade ago, there are discernable points of connection between Cresques’ Atlas, early Genoese cartes marine in that new, rose-gridded style, and the Voynich map, but the last (as I concluded) comes of older and different origins, its final recension when Latin-compatible details were added, dating to about 1350 AD.

In Cresques’ work, the zodiac constellations are represented as a fairly standard series, but they do reflect a habit which we’ll see again, by which crab and scorpion are suggested related, or akin to one another. The same attitude is reflected by the zodiac in the Occitan manuscript, made about fifty years before (see header), – but that characteristic is not found in the Voynich calendar.

Caution: on the web there are many altered and edited images purporting to be from Cresques’ Atlas (also described as the Catalan Atlas). Some are over-written with large, white geomantic figures. Another that I’ve seen paints over, with gold, all the inscriptions that in the original are written in Hebrew letters.

By the early fifteenth century, when the Voynich quires are thought to have been inscribed, the finest ateliers and illuminators in this part of Europe were producing images of Crab and Scorpion in forms we might call ‘classic’ and which will be immediately familiar to a modern reader. Paris was still the intellectual capital of Europe, and Italy increasingly the artistic and literary capital of Europe, while other regions were still to come into full flower.

The new commercial ‘4’ for the numeral would not appear in Germany until after 1440 and in works produced from Germany and central Europe, forms were still employed – for Scorpius especially – which had been used in the south-western Mediterranean as much as four hundred years earlier, and which there had been largely superseded by the early fifteenth century.

Below is the ‘November’ page from a manuscript created in Burgundy within the same date-range as the Voynich quires’ vellum (1405-1438 AD). Its Crab was painted at some time between 1412 and 1416, though parts of its ‘November’ page were completed only between 1435-1489. The ‘November’ page looks like this.

Limbourg Bros. Très Riche Heures du Duc de Berry 1416 AD.

Its Scorpion is recognisable as you see; and so is its Crab.

Unlike the Voynich calendar, these monthly diagrams show constellations extending across adjacent months, as astrological signs do, but which the Voynich month-diagrams do not.

Another difference, if a predictable one, is that this high-status and high-end work, despite its being made a quarter-century after Cresques’ Atlas, retains the older and by then conservative form for the numeral ‘four’.

What this indicates is that if – and we emphasise that if – the hands which wrote the Voynich ‘4o’ were accustomed to writing the numeral as ‘4’, it is unlikely that the manuscript was composed first in central Europe or by members of Latin Europe’s social or scholarly elites.

Further evidence of the work’s being used by and for persons of lesser standing is the fact that the month-names are inscribed in a southern vernacular dialect or language rather than in Latin.

On the other hand, it was during the period presently of most interest to us (1350-1430 AD) that use of a regional vernacular for literary compositions of all kinds was becoming not merely more popular among a few educated people but was becoming a hot political issue.

Initially fostered by the popularity of Occitan-speaking troubadores, as their popularity waned, a political movement arose which would ultimately develop into modern nationalism, with its less pleasant twin, active xenophobia.

The Italian Brunetto Latini had written his most famous work in the French vernacular, but Dante’s Cantos had the greater and more lasting impact over the period between their completion in 1320 and the end-date for the Voynich manuscript’s vellum (1438 AD).

Varieties of Occitan were spoken not only within the borders of what is now modern France; it was also spoken in parts of Italy and according to a wiki author (who provides no reference)

The first part of the name, Occ-, comes from Occitan òc and the expression ‘langue d’oc’.. is an appellation promoted by Dante Alighieri of Occitan by the way of saying “oui” in Old Occitan–Catalan; as opposed to the “langue de si” (Italian) and the “langue d’oïl” (“yes” in Old French).

*Dante’s son was another student of Paolo Dagomari’s ‘abaco’ school.

So, the frame within which the evidence offered by the Voynich calendar may now be explored means that wherever it was copied in the early fifteenth century, the probability is it was a region where Occitan, Judeo-Catalan etc. were understood. For the form(s) given its emblems for November and July – supposing they are intended as astronomical emblems – we cannot look to works first composed in fifteenth-century France and Italy unless the copyist’s intention was to reproduce faithfully forms found in some much older work. The Voynich ‘November’ beast is no expression of fifteenth-century fashion.

It is easy enough to resort to imagination (aka theory) to explain why, if it is an astronomical emblem, the November figure does not present the form of a scorpion. We might imagine :

  • that the copyist had no idea what a scorpion looked like.
  • that the copyist had no means to discover how one should represent the constellation Scorpius,
  • that he had been struggling to understand Aratus in the original Greek and mis-interpreted αὐτὰρ ὑπ᾽ αἰθομένῳ κέντρῳ τέραος μεγάλοιο σκορπίου to mean not, “the great beast, [the] Scorpion” but “the great beast [whose name is] Skorpios” – and so drew his idea of ‘a great beast’.

And given the history of astronomical learning in medieval Latin Europe and the long, confused history for transmission of Aratus’ Phaenomena, the last might easily be accepted as plausible.

But imagination-as-theory is embedded in traditional Voynich method, so let’s leave it aside and begin working from physical evidence and the historical and cultural context.

What sort of works might have caused images of this kind to be included in the fifteenth century manuscript by persons who, it would seem, understood the dialect or language in which these month-names are written? What did they know about stars?

Astronomical or Astrological?

It has become a widely prevalent habit, if an unfortunate one, to describe any knowledge of the stars as either astronomy or astrology, but the distinction is inappropriate for our purposes and for the period of interest to us now.

To observe that different constellations along the ecliptic occupy the mid-heavens in turn through the year is not astrology, It is simple observation of fact.

To mark the months by twelve of those constellations and call the twelve the zodiac is not astrology either. It requires no more than observation, without need for any knowledge of mathematics or of astrological methods. The labels themselves are not ‘Scorpio’ and ‘Cancer’ but ‘November’ and ‘July’.

In the same way, navigation by the stars is arguably the oldest human science, older than the first cities, and older than mathematics as a formal discipline. So too, it is not astrology to say that in November, when a certain constellation rises to eventually occupy the mid-heavens at night, ships should not venture far from shore. That’s the fruit of common heritage and observation.

When you invent a character for that constellation, one which has it looking at the ships with a hostile expression, that’s still not astrology; its popular lore. Associating a star or constellation with a place on earth can be, but is not necessarily, astrology either. As our default term, then, we use ‘astronomical’ keeping ‘astrological’ for cases where that purpose is clearly expressed by the internal evidence.

So – even granting, as a first possibility, that all the central emblems in the Voynich ‘calendar’ depict constellations which lie along the ecliptic – zodiac constellations – it cannot be presumed from that alone that the series of diagrams, or the series of its central emblems, had astrological purpose – unlike those split-month images we see in the  Très Riche Heures du Duc de Berry, illustrated above.

Indeed, we have had the opinion of two scholars, independent of each other and of Voynicheros’ influence – at least then – who have stated plainly that the diagrams in the Voynich ‘calendar’ are not astrological charts*.

*for details see earlier post D.N.O’Donovan, ‘Skies above – not astrological’, voynichrevisionist, (February 9, 2020)

In this same connection we remind readers, that shortly after publication of his great study’s* second volume, Fritz Saxl was asked by John Matthews Manly, who sent him copies of pages from the Voynich manuscript, to comment on them. Saxl replied, as so many eminent specialists have done when asked to apply their knowledge of medieval Europe’s history and art to this manuscript, that nothing struck a familiar chord.

  • Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters. Vol. 1, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1915, Vol. 2, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1927, [Vols. 3 & 4, Meier, Hans, and Bober, Harry, and McGurk, Patrick.]

Lippincott’s ‘Saxl’ Project: hunting the November beast.

Led by Kristin Lippincott, the ‘Saxl Project’ is again concerned with collecting and grouping zodiac images, making pdfs of the material available through Lippincott’s website.

The Saxl project – Led by Kristen Lippincott and run jointly with The Warburg Institute, University of London. It has also benefitted greatly from previous collaborative research, which was carried out with Dr Elly Dekker of Utrecht University, between 1997 and 2007.

Among images collected to illustrate Scorpius are a few which show it drawn more like a lizard or a warm-blooded beast than a true scorpion. For us, at present, it matters less where these manuscripts are now or even when they were made, than the textual sources which were being copied in them, and Lippincott’s taking note of those sources (as most Voynicheros’ efforts have not) shows the source-texts are just three, all of which were known to some, at least, in Latin Europe before c.1350 AD.

One is a work written by a Roman of the pre-Christian era. The other two are medieval works written by Englishmen – one of whom never left England and rarely travelled beyond his monastery, and the other of whom studied in Paris, in Toledo, in Italy and at the Norman-Sicilian court.

.

The Roman-era work is a primary-school level ‘crib’ called the Astronomicon Poeticon. It is popularly, if doubtfully, attributed to Gaius Julius Hyginus (c. 64 BC – AD 17). The first of the Englishman is Bede, whose authorship of De signis caeli is also widely doubted today, but the work itself is reasonably ascribed to the period in which he lived (673- 735 AD).

Only the third source is securely attributed and dated. That is Michael Scot’s Liber Introductorius, completed in 1228.

Scot is best known today for the time he spent in the Sicilian-Norman court, but Scot brought to that court what he had learned earlier, including proficiency in Arabic and in Hebrew, both of which were commonly spoken in the Sicily of his time. Scot’s studies included mathematics, astronomy and natural history. Together with Andrew the Levite, he had already translated in Toledo the text of al-Bitrūjī’s de motibus celorum.

  • ‘Critical Edition of the Latin Translation of Michael Scot by Francis J. Carmody’, review by Marshall Clagett, Isis, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Sep., 1953), pp. 280-281.

There has been little scholarly attention devoted to the iconography of Scot’s Liber Introductorius, and influences from older North Africa have been largely overlooked, as has his list of ‘Berber’ star-names and the full range of sources from which Scot worked. Apart from those still well-known, Scot refers to – but here let me quote Edwards:

Scot … mentions other authors [in addition to the most widely known] … such as the Tacuinum of Cleopatra, Isidore, Bede, Ambrose, “Alexander the Great,” Empedocles, Euclid, Hermes, Haly, loanton and Nemroth, Rasis, and Macrobius. He mentions the Tables of Toledo as being especially useful. He cites Pythagoras, Socrates, Cicero, Plato, Pliny, Cato, Galen, Jerome, the Sybil, and John of Spain.

Glenn Michael Edwards, ‘The Liber Introductorius of Michael Scot’, thesis (PhD), University of Southern California, 1978.

What this tells us is that, whatever the source of the astronomical information embodied by the Voynich calendar’s diagrams, the emblems used to fill the centres – and particularly November’s ‘beast’ – come from a source already known to Latin Europe before 1350 AD but which may not be a classic text or even one extant today.

We also have the example provided by diagrams in the astrological Libros del Saber to show that astronomical-astrological diagrams might later have central emblems added or created for them by later copyists. To paraphrase an earlier comment*: Diagrams in copies of the ‘Libros..’ differ from copy to copy, as one might expect, but the difference is so strongly pronounced in their central emblems that one has the clear impression each copyist was obliged to find exemplars for these details himself.

*made in connection with Panofsky’s assessment of the Voynich manuscript, as reported by Anne Nill, that “except for one page partly taken from Alfonso’s manuscript, [our manuscript] was entirely unlike any manuscript known to him.”

So at last the parameters for researching these two emblems are defined. Our initial focus will be on a period between 1350-1438 AD. We begin from the regions in which Occitan was written and understood. We do not presume astrological purpose. We allow for the possibility that the central emblems were added to, not obtained together with, their diagrams. We know there is a high probability that the central emblems, at least, were gained from some older source already known in the Latin sphere by no later than 1228 and possibly much earlier… and so now, to work.

Scorpius – ‘Labours of the Months’ series, Basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine,  Vézelay (constructed 1120- 1150 AD). From its foundation until 1280 AD, the Abbey of Vézelay was affiliated with Cluny, of Burgundy. Founded in 910 AD, Cluny became the centre of an order of monks extending from England to Spain.

Postscript – Michael Scot and the Munich [M] source:

Speaking of an important Italian ms now Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Ms CLM 10268, Edwards remarks that in the margin of folio 125C is a horoscope by Bartholomew of Parma, dated 1287, and that this “presents a terminus ante quem for the exemplar, since the paleographic evidence does not support so early a date for this manuscript”. He goes on to say of this source, described as M without quotation marks:

The script is a compact Italian book Gothic, the letters being quite square. The “M” is made of three very sharp minims, and the “A” tends to form two loops, with the top of the letter almost touching the bottom loop. M in addition uses both the upright and the uncial “D”. These are characteristics of the last quarter of the thirteenth century, but the use of the looped rather than the upright final “g” is indicative of the early fourteenth century.

In view of the fact that Italian hands changed so slowly, it is difficult to place them with accuracy. Yet the style of script will justify an ascription of the date to circa 1300 more readily than to any other. I have attempted to push back the date of the manuscript to 1287, and discussed the matter with Virginia de la Mare, Assistant Keeper of Western Manuscripts for the Bodleian.
In her view, the decorations and colors used in the illuminations are characteristic of those executed at Bologna from 1300 to 1310 and cannot justifiably be ascribed to an earlier time.

Glenn Michael Edwards op.cit. pp. x-xi.