Category: cipher – early

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.

Consider this… (cont) Moving about, bringing gifts.

a little over 2600 words.

Having now seen a few pages from the Liber abaci manuscript in Florence* which seems such an outlier within Hill’s Tables, it looks as if Hill was misled by a similar-looking form, and that there is not a plain, open-eyed ‘4’ shape in it, but one more like that seen in the Venetian zibaldone (Beinecke MS 327). This leaves us at present with the earliest usage noted within the Latin domains being Cresques’ ‘Atlas’, made for Charles V of France and completed in 1375.

It also leaves us with a clear context for emergence of this specific ‘4’ form in the south-western Mediterranean before 1400: maritime trade, related commerce, and cartes marine gridded ‘by the rose’.

*current description being Ms. Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Codice magliabechiano Conv. Soppr. C 1, 2616. One folio (Fol. 124r) is used as an illustration to  the wiki article ‘Fibonacci‘, and that alone shows two chief forms for the numeral: one in the page number as heading, another in a side-bar showing the Fibonacci numbers as summary for the text’s ‘rabbits’ problem. There are at least three varieties in the symbols used there for ‘four’  but none with the large eye and simple form seen in  Cresques’ work  – and in the Voynich glyph.

Cipher.

The earliest example of this ‘4’ form in any European cipher I’ve seen, so far, occurs in a cipher- key recorded by Simeone da Crema in Mantua, and dated variously between 1401-1438. The method used for the encipherment is described by Pelling as a form of ‘at bash‘.

Although da Crema’s cipher key was discussed by David Kahn (1967) and has often been reproduced (including in the context of ‘Bacon-was-Shakespeare’ theories), with a more recent technical paper published in draft by Pelling (2017) – little attention has been paid to the question of how a fifteenth-century Christian in Mantua could have come to learn of that element in Jewish, and chiefly Rabbinical, religious exegesis, or in Kabbalistic writings.

However, Mantua lies within Lombardy throughout which, as we’ve seen, Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti had granted privileges to the Jews in 1387 – coincidentally the year in which Abraham Cresques died. But events had meanwhile occurred in Spain, in France and in Mallorca which offer a possible explanation for this early use of the atbash technique by a Latin in Lombardy.

  • David Kahn, The Codebreakers: the Story of Secret Writing. (1967).

  • Pelling, N., ‘Fifteenth Century Cryptography Revisited’ – academia.edu.

  • On dating da Crema’s cipher-key see also comment by M.R. Knowles (March 19, 2021 at 12:49 am) below a post at ciphermysteries.com. 

1391-1401

An event or more exactly a wave of events had occurred during the decade 1391-1401, following loss (by sale) of the Majorcan possessions of Montpellier and Roussillon, and loss of immediate Papal oversight and protection for the Jews of France and Spain when the papal court returned to Rome in 1376.

Since Jews were treated as personal servants or chattels of a monarch or a pope, and were transferred along with title to a city or territory, so the Jewish community’s quality of life and level of protection depended on the personal disposition and effectiveness of a given pope or noble.

As expulsions began increasing in number through Europe, once the English king had demonstrated its usefulness as a way to avoid repaying debt, so the flood of refugees necessarily considered not only where they might go, but to whom.

For England and the first of the European expulsions see:

  • Robin R. Mundell, The King’s Jews (2010)

———-

image courtesy Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Montpellier was among the lands which had been sold by Majorca to France. Though permitted in 1387 to build a new synagogue, the Jews of Montpellier were faced immediately by a suit for its demolition, issued by the bishop of Maguelonne.

Increasingly violent and vile accusations followed, culminating in an order of expulsion issued in 1394, and which applied to all territories then held by the king of France.

Three years before, in Mallorca, and thus only four years after Abraham Cresques’ death, his own community and family suffered dislocation, forced conversion and/or obligatory re-location, Majorca now being part of Aragon.

Inevitably, under such conditions, as families and communities were broken apart and newly-converted Jews became officially ‘Latins’, earlier traditions and scholarship within a family, trade or community were lost, diluted or simply became more widely accessible.

An example from the commercial records of the Datini company offers a glimpse of the situation by 1399, perhaps no more than a couple of years before da Crema employs that ‘4’ in a cipher described as an ‘atbash’.

In the summer of 1399 Baldassare degli Ubriachi, an ivory- and jewel-merchant of Florence, set out on a journey to Aragon, Bordeaux, England and Ireland carrying pearls and jewels for sale. From the Kings of Aragon and Navarre he obtained, and from the King of England he hoped for, rights of free passage through their territories. On his outward journey he formed the intention of presenting maps as gifts to one or more of these monarchs, and while in Barcelona he commissioned four ‘world maps’ (which he described, generically, as ‘mappamondi’) from cartographers then resident in the city, Master Jacme Riba (or Ribes) of Mallorca and Master Francesco Becaria of Genoa. Contracts were agreed and payments made, on Ubriachi’s behalf, by Simone d’Andrea Bellandi, a partner in the Florentine merchant banking house of Francesco Datini of Prato and manager of its fondaco [combined office, residence and warehouse] in Barcelona. (p. 107)

  • from R. A. Skelton, ‘A Contract for World Maps at Barcelona, 1399-1400, Imago Mundi, Vol. 22 (1968), pp. 107-113.

The person named as ‘Maestro Giame (Jacme) Riba or Ribes’ was in fact the son of Jafuda Cresques and grandson of Abraham Cresques. The attacks of 1391 had seen Jafuda – who had earlier worked under his father in making the Atlas for Charles V – baptised, re-named and removed to Barcelona ‘temporarily’. As late as 1399, the Datini documents make a point of distinguishing his son Giame, as Jewish master of charts, from the other person commissioned – the Christian illuminator. To Giame’s name is added not only ‘maestro di charte da navichare‘, but also (and no doubt reassuring to some),’cristiano novello’, while the illuminator, Maestro Francesco Beccha, is just ‘di Genova, dipintore di charte da navichare‘. The Jewish master received far greater payment than the pictor, but (as we’ll see), Becca or Beccarius received other treasure.

  • Skelton, op.cit.

Degli Ubriachi was relatively free to cross from territories claimed for one king as against another, had enough knowledge and clearly enough means, to identify and then commission the sort of gift that a king coveted in those days – not the old half-fabulous sort of ‘mappamundi’ but the new, detailed ‘charte da navichare’ of which the Jews of Mallorca and Majorca were the recognised masters, and of which a magnificent example – still breathtaking today – then adorned the French court, doubtless displayed with the specific aim of creating envy in the heart of any visitor, but especially a foreign one.

Datini’s agent in Barcelona brokered the commission; Datini himself, born in Prato, had re-located to papal Avignon in 1358 at the age of about 24 or 25, remaining almost thirty years, before returning to the town of his birth in 1382.

His company records show that he had had regular and easy business dealings with Jews, often working together with one or another as his representatives or as free agents in Arabic-speaking regions – particularly on commissions involving North Africa.

Datini – and thus his agents – certainly knew the difference between a person making ‘mappamundi’ of the half-fabulous, half scriptural sort, and one with the knowledge of mathematics, geometry, astronomy and geography needed to produce cartes marine or (as the term appears in the Datini documents),’charte[s] da navichare‘.

The ‘master’ laid down the line work, including the place names and points for divisions ‘by the rose’; the painter worked on the ornament and perhaps (the issue is uncertain) the criss-crossing lines of the ‘rose’ divisions..

But with Gaime now a ‘new Christian’ and obliged to work with a painter from Genoa, he must have known that the work he produced would be not just illuminated, but copied.

A chart of relatively poor quality, dated to c.1401 appeared under Beccarius’ name. Today it is in Yale University’s Beinecke library.

It is inscribed with a long, boastful passage by Beccarius, in which all the numerals are still letters of the Latin alphabet. The only ‘Arab’ or ‘Spanish’ numerals are those drawn on a bar-scale, part of which is shown (right). They are surely the ‘right sort’ of numerals. The question is whether Beccarius simply tried to copy the Mallorcan style or whether in fact the line work is that from Gaime, or simply the depiction, in the map, of a sliding rule used by the masters of charts. In a different sense ‘denominators of the degrees’.*

Beccarius’ chart. Beinecke art storage 1980 158. Image ID: 1027149.

*the standard history of the modern slide rule, associated specifically with logarithmic calculations, is as follows: 

“The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, shortly after John Napier’s publication of the concept of the logarithm. Edmund Gunter of Oxford developed a calculating device with a single logarithmic scale, which, with additional measuring tools, could be used to multiply and divide. The first description of this scale was published in Paris in 1624 by Edmund Wingate (c.1593–1656), an English mathematician.”

I’d suggest that  it is precisely because Latins of Europe still had a lingering perception of the Arabic numerals as specialised calculation-symbols – much as we’d now regard the curly brackets and elongated ‘∫‘ of calculus –  that their use as symbols in cipher suggested itself to a few Italians, early in the fifteenth century and, further, that this is the reason da Crema’s cipher uses not only numerals in the style of the older Mallorcan Jews, but employs what was the specifically Jewish  custom  of  atbash – now adopted by da Crema not as a tool of exegesis but to encipher secular Christian text. Da Crema’s is the very simplest version of atbash. I suggest that its method is most likely to have come to his notice through Jewish refugees, and at first- or at second-hand from the conversos.

In the Datini records, quite apart from the ‘iv’, there are several variants for the form given the numeral ‘four’.

Considering the number of clerks, agents, accountants and notaries whose writings are part of that archive, and compiled over so many years, it is not surprising to find such variety. Indeed, in a ‘summary of summaries’ that was drawn up in Barcelona and dated July 14th., 1395 there is even a very modern-looking, open-topped ‘4’ – but I’ve seen no usage so consistent, nor just the same form for the numeral as we see in the fourteenth-century Mallorcan work, and the early fifteenth-century manuscript by Michael of Rhodes. And of course in the Voynich glyph.

To date, studies of the Datini archive have been focused on the history of accounting or on social-domestic history with much of the latter less interested in Datini’s networks and activities than on his personal life, and specifically Datini’s wife. If any palaeographic studies of the documents have been published, I’d welcome directions to them.

*Mikhail Kuter, Marina Gurskaya, Angelina Andreenkova and RipsimeBagdasaryan, ‘The Early Practices of Financial Statements Formation in Medieval Italy’, The Accounting Historians Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2 (December 2017), pp. 17-25. [JSTOR] Includes some rather poor reproductions of the original documents for that ‘summary of summaries’.

At this point I must turn again to the links with north Africa and Gerona, in connection with Kabbalist writings and contemporary Jewish communities’ responses to the emergence of Kabbalah in mainland Europe. It is matter required here because of Panofsky’s allusion to Kabbalah, in 1932, and da Crema’s use of atbash method so close to when the Voynich manuscript was being put together. However, rather than make this post impossibly long, I’ll break here.

References:

For readers’ convenience, once again:

  • Solomon Gandz, ‘The Origin of the Ghubār Numerals, or the Arabian Abacus and the Articuli’, Isis. 16, No. 2 (Nov., 1931), pp. 393-424

  • Yakir Paz and Tzahi Weiss, ‘From Encoding to Decoding: The AṬBḤ of R. Hiyya in Light of a Syriac, Greek and Coptic Cipher’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies , Vol. 74, No. 1 (April 2015), pp. 45-65. A recent study of medieval Jewish atbash [JSTOR]

  • Tony Lévy and Charles Burnett, ‘”Sefer ha-Middot”: A Mid-Twelfth-Century Text on Arithmetic and Geometry Attributed to Abraham Ibn Ezra’, Aleph, 2006, No. 6 (2006), pp. 57-238. with regard to the practical mathematics involved in cartography. [JSTOR]

_______

Postscript (editorial) – I notice in an otherwise interesting amateur site about the history of western cartography, that its author holds a peculiar idea that some unnamed Latin Christian from mainland Europe (and yes, imagined male) must surely have ‘kickstarted’ the Mallorcan cartographic tradition.

It is a peculiar idea of a kind found very often employed, and in all sorts of contexts, in European works of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, its basis (often unconscious) being a presumption that others perceived as inferior are inherently passive, incapable of discovery, of invention or of scientific observation and so must have been ‘kickstarted’ by some whiteman.

One sees this tacit ‘feminisation’ imposed on peoples of India, of Asia, of Africa, on Jews and on any non Anglo-Germans even within Europe, as on one sect of Christianity but not another, and indeed generally on notions about women everywhere in various works of the nineteenth-century Anglo-German school. One does wish such notions were less persistent and less prevalent today in western popular culture.

Speaking of which phenomenon..

I’m sure that many of those Voynicheros presently enthused by a theory that the Voynich drawings were done by women imagine themselves forward-thinking and generous, but from a longer perspective it’s just another depressing example of presuming, first, that the customs of the Latin west, or the Mediterranean cultures, constitute ‘the normal’ and inability to read the drawings by those conventions must imply the drawings ‘inferior’ in some way, and their maker/s equally so. Over time, this unfounded presumption has seen an ‘author’ imagined for the whole, and that ‘author’ then declared infantile, mentally deficient, deranged, physically impaired, sexually obsessed and so on. Anything except that the first enunciators of the images were simply not habituated to, nor interested in, medieval Latin Europe and its conventions – social, religious or graphic.

One wonders just what matter will be produced and asserted support for the notion that Christian, Jewish, or Arab women invented images of naked females by the hundreds and still drew them “badly”.

Women in Armenia, Persia and in Jewish communities of Europe certainly did copy manuscripts, as I pointed out with examples and references years ago, but they did it neither better nor worse than men of similar condition.

Perhaps the people enthused by the ‘women did it’ idea will try citing manuscripts produced by nuns, or the tired old ‘Trotula’ theory, or the still older and more tired ‘Hildegarde’ theory, and will again speak of the law passed in Norman Sicily in 1244 obliging medical students to take an oath “never to consult with a Jew or with illiterate women.” The argument, one supposes, will be that the reason the great majority of the Voynich images don’t reflect western Christian attitudes, priorities, social hierarchies or graphic conventions is because (mere) women would be ignorant of them.

Oh joy.

(I know… lowest form of wit … wait to see the evidence offered. But really – must they? ).

Elevated souls Pt 2a. ‘Astro —-‘

  • Header image: (left) stars of northern latitudes; (right) declination and right ascension  -image courtesy ‘Sky and Telescope’.

Previous two:

 

David Pingree

In 1982, the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (Vol. 45) published the paper:

David Pingree,  ‘An Illustrated Greek Astronomical Manuscript. Commentary of Theon of Alexandria on the Handy Tables and Scholia and Other Writings of Ptolemy Concerning Them’.  ( pp. 185-192).

I begin by mentioning it for several reasons.

The late Prof. Pingree is one of the “two Davids” whose works are among those indispensable for study of what some pre-modern peoples knew about stars and – most pertinent to our chief study – how they thought about and imagined the heavens.

The ‘other David’ of the two is David A. King, whose works include the Ciphers of the Monks, in which King drew attention to the same Picard instrument whose orthography for month-names is – as I think Pelling first observed – closely similar to that of the Voynich month-names’.

Since the matter of  ‘Occitan month-names’ is among those affected by metaphorical ‘palimpsest-ing’,  I add more detail.

Writing in 2004, Shaun Palmer credits Stolfi with the proposal and (quite properly) notes that Pelling had come earlier than himself and independently to hold a similar view.  Pelling’s book (2006) then treated and illustrated the issue in  detail (pp. 21-23).  Those three  references should give you a clear idea of the evidence and substance behind this now-widely-accepted view.Searching for ‘Occitan’ today at voynich.nu I found the references given on this point to be an anonymous blogpost of 2012  and a note of thanks to Don Hoffman for providing Zandbergen with bibliographic details of King’s book. Following the principle that  “no acknowledgement asserts no debt”, readers might assume all  unprovenanced matter on that page (which is copyrighted  to  the owner as is every blogpost)  must be a result of the owner’s own research, crediting Zandbergen accordingly.

That paper by Pingree is chiefly concerned with the manuscript Ambrosianus H. 57. sup. (= 437). The ‘tables’ in question are known as  ‘Ptolemy’s Handy Tables’ but were compiled from Ptolemy’s data a century later, by Theon of Alexandria.  Researchers working on the Voynich manuscript might like to consider, in addition, matters associated with Ptolemy’s Geography, as balance for a tendency to associate Ptolemy solely with astrology, or even solely with astronomy. See e.g.

  • Dmitry Shcheglov, ‘Hipparchus’ Table of Climata and Ptolemy’s Geography’, (available through academia.edu)

 

Question 1: Is there Astrological matter in the month folios?

Caution Newcomers should be aware  that nothing in the manuscript has yet been proven related to any branch of occult or pseudo-scientific practice including that of astrology, though  speculation has been so common –  thanks initially to Wilfrid Voynich and his inflation of the ‘Rudolf rumour’ – that many imagine it has been proven beyond doubt.  Yet the stars are part of the natural world and natural, too, may be their observation and depiction.  To represent the theological position of the earlier medieval west, we may refer again to  Augustine:

Amiens Cathedral exterior: Virgo = Threshing               see   labours of the months.

Who can fail to perceive how great is the difference between useful observations of the heavenly bodies in connection with the weather, such as farmers or sailors make … and the vain hallucinations of men who observe the heavens not to know the weather. or their course … but merely to pry into the future ….

from Augustine’s Letters  55 15

  • Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac (2019)
why is the astrological  idea a problem?

Objection 1.  The idea’s introduction depended entirely on ideas about John Dee’s connection to the manuscript, in combination with consideration (only) of the month-names and central emblems from the month-folios.  The latter were taken to depict the ‘signs’ forming a tropical zodiac, rather than taken literally as a depiction of the physically-visible constellations which appear in sequence through the seasons of the year.  The conflation of constellation with astrological ‘sign’ is endemic in Voynich discussions, even today.  

Even if the emblems did constitute a representation of the zodiac ’12’ there is no necessary connection between their depiction and that aspect of mathematics which defined astrology in the medieval world.  In other words, there is no necessary connection between a depiction of the ecliptic constellations and tropical- or sidereal astrology.  

That the opposite idea should be so prevalent in Voynich writings today is due to the fact that most modern readers, living in an industrialised society and urban environment, don’t need to know the stars as people did in earlier times.   Today, we use clocks, watches and phones to know the time; we learn from the weather man what sort of weather we’ll have today; we rely on automatic or printed calendars to tell us where we are in the cycle of months and seasons.   Reflection from city lights, and nights spent indoors (or outdoors) under artificial lights means  many see none but a few of the brightest stars in the night sky.   And all this, together, means that the word ‘zodiac’ instantly evokes the motifs of ‘birth-signs’ and daily horoscopes for us today, and thus seems the ‘most obvious’ interpretation for any comparable series, especially if stars are depicted. 

 Thus, the constant error has been an imposition on a manuscript  six hundred years old, the hierarchy of ideas proper to twentieth- century urbanites.

Things were different six centuries ago.

Objection 2.  No  zodiac sequence contains (as the month-emblems do) two goats, or two sheep,  or a sheep and goat adjacent to one another.

This issue and others raised by the month-emblems are rarely even noticed today by Voynich writers. and of the few who do notice, fewer speak, and of the very few who do mention a problem, the majority do not address that problem so much as seek a way to turn back into the fold any who show signs of doubting that “its-a-zodiac-and-zodiac-means-astrology” proposition chain.    In private conversation a Voynichero once said that he didn’t include both pros and cons in his own writings  because “if your mind is too open, your brains fall out” – which sounds to me like some conservative slogan gone wrong. 🙂

Objection 3. Even if we grant that,  in adding the month-names later, the person who did that truly  believed  the emblems represented constellations from the zodiac, more cannot be deduced from it than  he had  regarded the series as a series of months and their stars.  It is no support for an idea that  “months+stars means astrology”.  

Objection 4. is that the the Voynich series names only  ten months, and the months omitted (January and February) are – perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not –  the months when the fields were dormant, and when  ships of the Mediterranean stayed in harbour. The ‘sailing year’ ran from March until (nominally) November but the historical records show that in fact ships of the harbours where the most competent seamen were based might continue  sailing coast wise even as late as December.

Other points:

  • An argument that the remnants of two cut pages following  the month-diagrams  had once contained two more diagrams of that sort is – like theorised astrological purpose – only speculation at present. 
  • As I’ve explained elsewhere, correlations of month-name, month-marking constellation, and associated ‘labour’ were not uniform  even within Latin Europe., and the correlations made in the month-diagrams between emblem and month-name are not those of the northern latitudes (England, Germany and northern France).
  •   When responding to a Voyichero’s query,  Prof. Ewa Sniezynska-Stolot of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow – whose area is given as the history of European art, especially its traditions of astrological imagery-  also mentioned calendars in connection with the month-diagrams’ central emblems.  Here the difficulty is that her opinion was a short note written in response to a Voynichero’s query and it appears she was given no indication there was any reason to doubt that the content in this manuscript might have any but a medieval Latin European origin.  The answer of an expert is typically provided within the framework of the question posed.  Not knowing that explains why William Friedman got so little from Panofsky, where Anne Nill had received so much more  – and we’re not talking word-count here.
  • Nor do we know what Sniezynska-Stolot was shown of the manuscript at the time (2000), or whether in colour or copy-flo.   As translated by  Rafel Prinke and  reported in Reeds’ mailing list, her note has a distinctly off-hand tone.

By  13 Jan 2001 her note’s content was already reported to Reeds’ mailing list and members were discussing it in  connection with specific problems of the kind no longer acknowledged as existing by the most conservative faction and whose discussion is thereby discouraged, with ‘blanking’ from the record of any non-conservative who might do so. 

Still – let’s move on to one possible hint of the astrological… and trust our brains won’t fall out. 🙂

Astrological versus (purely) Astronomical

Exaltation and Depression?

Consider the following pair  from the first of the ‘April’ diagrams (folio 70v-ii), keeping in mind that the fifteenth-century draughtsman could draw ‘nicely’  but for reasons as yet unclear, didn’t wish to.  What message are we to take from their presentation? What aspects are we supposed to  read as meaningful? What about their postures, for example?

 

Did the original maker  intend the male  figure is to be read as ‘elevated’/’exalted’ and the female as ‘dejected’ or dismayed?   Or are our  subjective reactions focusing on details he would have dismissed as irrelevant?

If he meant attention paid to their posture, we must realise that such terms as ‘elevation’, ‘exaltation {Gk. ὕψωμα]  and ‘dejection/depression’ [Gk. ταπείνωμα] were used technically of the planets in Byzantine astrology, while  “seldom, if ever, found in the West” -as Pingree observes, though he finds that their illustration  in  Ambrosianus H. 57. sup is drawn ‘in western style’.

Indeed, the draughtsman’s style may be western, but it has  little in common with that of the person who drew the unclothed figures in the Voynich month-folios, except perhaps a common implication (also found in certain Islamic texts) that when figures from polytheistic religions are presented, the images should express moral censure. (see further, below) I say ‘perhaps’ because we have no proof thus far that the Voynich figures were intended as deities or anything of the sort. Neither have I seen any argument which proves that  the Voynich manuscript depicts any of the five planets, let alone all of them.

*The planets proper, the ‘wandering stars’, included only Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in medieval times.

re planets…2001

In 2001, a member of the first (Reeds’) mailing list responded to Robert Firth’s comment on the fact that the ‘celestial’ folios hadn’t served as key to the written text as many hoped they might,  by saying  that “we” ‘ ..have quite a number of good (even if not dead certain) [identifications]:- the Pleiades and Aldebaran; – the seven planets; – two sets of twelve labels in 12-segmented circles; – one (or two?) set of 28 segments, “obviously” indicating the mansions of the moon. (12 Jan 2001).  All members of that list, at the time, would have known which of them had contributed each item, with what evidence and what argument (if any) but as yet I don’t know. If you can enlighten me on the point, please do. I’ve seen nothing one could call a cogent argument for it between 2008 and today.

detail) Milan, Ambrosianus H.57.sup. f.112v. Venus – on which see Pingree (1982) p.32

The unclothed pagan deities for each planet are depicted with a certain censure in the Ambrosianus manuscript  –  e.g. Venus (right) is depicted as as a debauchee – given the face of a young and pretty woman but a body heavy, old and exhausted from bearing children by various fathers. I see little obvious similarity between the draughtman’s style and that in the Voynich month-folios.  Expressions of moral censure in depiction of figures from polytheistic religions are  also seen in some Islamic works, notably in the  ‘Book of Marvels’ ‘Kitab al Bulhan’ (MS. Bodl. Or. 133) a seventeenth-century work (or copy) where Voynich-like “glyphs” were also inscribed.

That-last point was initially brought to notice by – I believe  – by Nick Pelling in his review (2008) of Okasha El Daly’s book. A detail (‘Crab’) from the same Bodley ms was later considered by one Voynich blogger whose blog I cannot find online today. In two posts of 2013 the present writer commented on several of  images from that manuscript, together with  other examples of ‘Voynich-like’ glyphs.

An image posted to pininterest by Marco Ponzi associates a detail from the Bodleian ms with one on folio 67v 2. His commentary may appear elsewhere but I’m not willing to join that site to find out.  (Again, if anyone already has more detail, I’d be happy to include it in the comments section below this post.)

On the Greek astrological terms and their significance see e.g.

  • Roger Beck, (2008) A Brief History of Ancient Astrology, pp. 57-8
  • Roger Beck, (2017) A Brief History of Ancient Astrology  pp. 242ff.
  • Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune.
  • James Evans. Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity (p.135). Evans’ equating ‘Chaldean’ with ‘Babylonian’ is over-confident.
  • Tamysn Barton,  Ancient Astrology (2002).

Neither  Aratus/Cicero’s Aratea, nor Manilius’ Astronomica  (written  c.30–40 AD) makes use of the planets, a point to be kept in mind given the date for Vat.gr. 1291 and possible  pre-Christian (but anti-Greek? anti-polytheist?) origin for its ‘women of an hour’ (see previous post).

Manilius in the west

Goold believed that before his election to Pope, Gerbert d’Aurillac had found in Bobbio a copy of Manilius’ Astronomica bound (as Gerbert said) with a copy of Boethius’ text on mathematics. Other scholars have doubted this, attributing the west’s knowledge of that text (as we have it) to Poggio Bracciolini’s practice of  commandeer manuscripts from monastic libraries by his position as papal secretary.  The ‘discoveries’ were then copied (at a price) for members of the Italian literati, who appreciated Poggio’s ‘little arm’. His own view is recorded in one colophon, which translated reads “This oration, formerly lost owing to the fault of the times, Poggio restored to the Latin-speaking world and brought it back to Italy, having found it hidden [sic] in Gaul, in the woods of Langres.” If he had acquired it from Bèze abbey, that copy is unlikely to have been older than the 11th-12thC.

Again with the older period in mind, and possible bridges between  pre-Christian astronomical works and the early fifteenth century when the Voynich manuscript was made, I’ll add here part of the description of Niceforous’ visit to Cyprus in the fourteenth century.  There was still a Lusignan ruler in the island, one who with his chief scholar George Lapithes asked the noble visitor from Constantinople to summarise for them as many astronomical texts as they could gather. They brought him copies of Ptolemy’s works, including the  Tetrabiblos, called Ἀποτελεσματικά ετράβιβλος in the Greek – but also,  according to  Niceforous (I quote from another paper by Pingree):

“all the books that still existed composed about such matters, by Ptolemy’s predecessors and by more recent authors as well as those that had been written in antiquity and by the  Chaldaeans and the Persians”. 

  • George Lapithes and David Pingree, The Byzantine Version of the “Toledan Tables”: The Work of George Lapithes?’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 30 (1976), pp. 85+87-132.

Pingree offers evidence and argument for a/the Greek translation of the Toledan Tables’  in Cyprus during the first half of the fourteenth century, to which same period, as it happens, I assign their ‘return to the Mediterranean’ phase for  the majority of parts in the Voynich manuscript.

Ambrosiana H.57. sup. – evolution 2ndC AD – c.1458..

Claudius Ptolemy lived in the 2ndC AD.  Theon of Alexandria in the 3rdC AD.   So then, discussing the content in the Amrbosiana manuscript, Pingree tells us:

We may conclude, then, that the original [i.e. the Ambrosiana] manuscript was copied in 1358, and that a series of owners for the next century added to it, rearranged it, and annotated it. It is likely that the manuscript was copied in Byzantium, and remained there while these changes and additions were being made to it. There is no absolute proof for this supposition in the manuscript itself, but it is known that the texts in Ambrosianus H. 57. sup. were copied in part from Laurentianus 28, 7;3 and that manuscript can be shown to be Constantinopolitan. (Pingree, op.cit. p.186)

and

There is no doubt, on the evidence of the script, that the codex could have been written in Constantinople in 1357-58. It is in the style associated with the Hodegoi scriptorium over a period of about half a century.  Western connexions of this scriptorium are not apparent. If they existed they would be more likely at this time to have been with Venice than with Southern Italy.   (ibid. p.192)

.. yet when it comes to those miniatures …(emphasis is mine)

The consensus of opinion is that the style of the miniatures is basically Western, though with an admixture of Byzantine elements. Islamic tradition lies behind the curious iconography, in which the planets are shown with their day- and night-houses, exaltations and dejections: this is seldom, if ever, found in the West. No immediate model has been located in an admittedly cursory search. An artist active in Southern Italy or Sicily may be indicated by the mixture of Italian and French styles. It is not impossible that an artist of, say, the Neapolitan school was working in Constantinople in the mid-fourteenth century – a time when others (Barlaam of Seminara, for example) travelled freely between that city and Italy. No artist answering to this description can, however, be securely documented in Constantinople at this time. Nor can it be assumed that the manuscript was decorated in the same place as it was written: the illustrations may be later additions. Indeed, they look very much as if they are.    (ibid. p.192)

 

For those who managed to come so far   –  here’s the sweet….

B. Astronomical?

Returning to the pair on folio 70v-ii, a closer look at the female figure…Short-ish hair, large head, figure’s right side drawn with a swelling line, indicating a breast. But where the figure’s left breast would be, there’s only what appears to be a piece of skin, marked with lines evoking sutures or something of that kind. Obviously not a skin-graft  (skin-grafting, history of)

We have a word for females who display just one breast. It’s from the Greek: a- (ἀ-) which means lacking and mazos (μαζός), which means breast   ..so, …”without breast”= Amazon.

Classical Greek and Roman imagery doesn’t depict Amazons  lacking a breast. They show a figure who is usually short-haired,  sometimes in armour which can include a breast-cover, or with only one breast covered by clothing and/or armour.

Interestingly, on fol. 70v-ii, the breastplate has been understood by the draughtsman to be of the high-collared type. The two images (at right) are shown simply to demonstrate that high-collared breastplates,  for females, are not entirely unattested.  An amazonian caryatid in Dresden wears armour very similar in deign to the Keralan type. That caryatid is described (by a seller of prints) as  ‘an ancient wall sculpture’. I can only say that their definition of ‘ancient’ is unusual.

The Keralan tradition marks by such means one of the eight chief patron- ‘mother’ goddesses, known to be warrior-women when necessary.

To this day women archers may don a breast cover in addition to the cover always provided for the forearm by the long, skin-tight sleeve and/or by a wrist-guard which might be better called a forearm-guard (but isn’t).  These were traditionally made of thick leather; The present day Olympian (below) wears ones of modern materials.

When you consider that women in pre-Renaissance Europe didn’t normally ever handle a bow, and that  the two drawings in the lower register were made  two thousand years apart from each other, the conceptual image informing the physical image per se has evidently survived remarkably well. The fifteenth-century draughtsman understood his exemplar.

 

So now – which star(s) if any might have been identified as  ‘Amazon’ by any tradition of star-lore, at any time between the 5thC BC and 15thC AD? Here are two possibilities from the Greco-Latin-Arab traditions with which I think readers will be most familiar.

 

  1. alpha [α] Virginis (Lat.Spica) ?

According to the 15thC Yemeni, Ibn Majid, the star α Virginis serves as the manzil (lunar station/mansion) and in that context is known as Simak al A’zal, ‘warrior without a spear’ (Tibbett’s translation p.100). And the figure from the first April diagram certainly has none.  However, women of the Arab tribes in Arabia, and more particularly of the Yemen, appear from the early accounts to have been treated more on par with men and in the pre-Islamic period to have been decidedly martial. By comparing with both older and early medieval works, it appears that until the seventh century AD, α Virginis may  have been often envisaged as a female warrior, one who roared or howled in the attack.   As Virgo, she is still armed in an image within the 9thC Byzantine manuscript Vat.gr.1291.

9thC Greek  (prob. from a late classical source)

A star-ceiling made in Egypt under the patronage of the Roman emperor Tiberius in 50BC, shows Virgo holding a ‘spike’ staff of some kind. The image shown here (below, right) is  as illustrated by Wallace Budge.

1stC BC. image in late-Hellenistic Dendera. If the spike is papyrus, the use of palm and scroll as alternative is understandable.

While Virgo’s spike-star  was generally envisaged as a stalk or sheaf of wheat for most of the Latin period, the alternative tradition was not forgotten, and the late image seen below shows how it was preserved – as a martyr-like palm branch held delicately by a more passive and ladylike virgin angel.

So if this is the intention behind the ‘Amazon’ on folio 70v-ii, her being without a weapon may be due to the same cultural attitudes (not necessarily Arab) which sees  the ‘ladies of an hour’ drawn with arms deprived of strength in Vat.gr.1291 folio 9r- as we also see   in the month-folios of the Vms.

Libra

In both instances, the informing ideas appear to me  indicative of deep-seated belief that the stars had effective power to harm and I doubt such fear derives from the classical Greeks or from the Orthodox Christians of ninth-century Constantinople. That Vat.gr.1291  has drawn on ideologically opposed traditions is evident if one compares the charming figure for Virgo in the ‘helios’ diagram (folio 9r) with the frankly unnerving and skeltal ‘ghost’ which is one of the few figures un-erased from the same manuscript’s planispheric ‘night sky’. (right)

So let’s return to the charming Virgo.  Unlike her counterpart on folio 23r of that manuscript, hers is not  the stocky body we associate with Europe’s late Roman art. She is envisaged as a slender and elegant messenger, whose ‘spike’  now appears more like rolled scroll. (angelos means ‘messenger’.)

This may be a good moment to remind readers that Alain Touwaide said the Voynich manuscript’s appearance suggested to him the sort of Byzantine hospital workers’ notebooks called iatrosophia, though it wasn’t one.

Touwaide has studied such manuals within his wider area of specialisation, and among his publications  is

  • Alain Touwaide, ‘Byzantine Hospital Manuals (Iatrosophia) as a Source for the Study of Therapeutics’, in Barbara S. Bowers (ed.), The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice  pp.147-173 of Vol. 3 of AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, (2007).

I agree that in the  Vms, we have a compilation of matter brought together for an entirely practical purpose, and find it possible the ‘bringing together’ may have occurred in comparable circumstances, and even within the Byzantine sphere, but having already treated in detail a large proportion of the Vms’ imagery,  I am glad that I am not in the unenviable position of having to differ from Professor Touwaide on the ‘practical handbook’ issue, or the ‘compilation’ issue, though I should have been obliged, unhappily, to do so had he said the whole was a work of medicine, or even of astrological medicine.

  • at the moment I can’t refer you to the printed version of Touwaide’s Voynich talk (or, rather first Voynich talk) at Mondragone.  The book is unobtainable, and Stephen Bax’ site where it had been shortly reviewed is presently infected by some virus.  Maybe later.

2. gamma [γ] Orionis.

Hinkley Allen informs us that in  “the Alfonsine tables” (no version or copy is specified) the star γ Orionis has a previously-unattested name, as  Bellatrix – a term from Latin and which means again, a female warrior.

Note – Ptolemy’s Tables, Alfonsine or Toledan Tables in Voynich studies

I was surprised to find no mention of any of these tables in Voynich writings or chats until speculations about occult topics had taken been current for about ninety years.

One would have thought an examination of standard sources for astronomical knowledge would be tested first before resort was had to speculation, but things went the other way.  Perhaps, yet again, we must attribute this oddness in the study first to Wilfrid Voynich’s tale, and a feeling among some that support for the ‘Rudolf’ idea had to marshalled.   However that may be, even today (Nov.2019), I find no mention of the Toledan tables at Nick Pelling’s site, or at voynich.nu.  I believe there was some talk of them in comments to Stephen Bax’ site, but at present it is under ‘virus interdiction’. I hope to check it and properly credit anyone who posted there if/when the site and its comments return.

Otherwise, I have found nothing about the Alfonsine or Tioledan tables (do let me know if you know better) until 2002 (ninety years after Voynich acquired the manuscript), when Luis Vélez’ says in  Reeds’ mailing list (Tue, 16 Jul 2002):

Thus, students of medicine at Bologna… learnt astrology [sic.] for four years, including grounding in Euclid’s geometry and Ptolemy’s Almagest. In addition, they learnt how to use instruments such as the astrolabe and the quadrant, and were taught how to use the Alfonsine Tables along with their canons. ..

 

Hinkley-Allen suggests ‘Bellatix’  was gained by mis-translation of an Arabic term, ‘roaring lion’.  I should have been inclined to dismiss this altogether, as mere transposition of some term for a star in Virgo – except that it survives experiment extremely well.  Experiment involves cultural and specific context, in addition to the image’s individual characteristics and drawing-style.

As you see, where the chap looks quite upbeat, the female looks decidedly “down”, doesn’t she?

Those interested in the written part of the Voynich manuscript might care to research uses for the opposition between elevation/exultation and subjection/ being downcast as applied by older works to matters other than planetary dispositions.

And with these two feasible identifications, mentioned  I’ll leave the astronomical and astrological possibilities for you to think about, except a last note that in another place, according to Tibbett’s note, al ibn Majid identifies Bellatrix with Orion’s hand [lit. Yad al Jauza’, usually Betelgeuse],  and it is in connection with this passage that Majid relates a condensed ‘cipher’ mnemonic for some fairly technical and mathematical matter.

Should it be of interest to any reader, description of that ‘cipher-mnemonic’ runs from the last paragraph on p.87 to the end of the first paragraph on f.88 in Tibbett’s English translation..

Postscript: From the research into historical and cultural context – I think one topic should have been mentioned, viz. the Indian tradition.  Thus, our Bellatrix (γ Orionis) is still recorded as ‘Yad al Jawzã’ al-Yusrã’ on astrolabes made in Lahore by a ‘dynasty’ of astrolabe makers in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries.

  • see e.g. Mubashir ul-Haq Abbasi and Sreeramula Raeswars Sarma, ‘An Astrolabe by Muḥammad Muqīm of Lahore Dated 1047 AH (1637-38 CE)’, Islamic Studies, Vol. 53, No. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 2014), pp. 37-65

In the same context, the ‘serpentine’ extension behind Betelgeuse may allude to the ‘Ketu’ (headless body) of Rahu Ketu in Tamil and Hindu astronomy.  The sources differ considerably and I don’t want to give an impression that I place much importance on it.)

Also, we know that the Indian and Muslim traditions were both still present in Iberia during the fourteenth century, as Chabas and Goldstein (among others) have said:

quote stars Jews Spain astronomical tables 14thC Indian trad

Chorography..

I had meant to now talk about chorography, and identifications of stars with places – not by astrology but by an older system of observation and  a mythos of locality.. as well as by nominal superimposition of  celestial and terrestrial co-ordinates (made easier in medieval times if one had an astrolabe).

I would have begun from the classical sources’ identification of Amazon lands, by Herodotus and later authors, illustrated by a couple of maps, and then moved on to the technical correlations for star-and-place as well as the various astrological equations of peoples and regions …. coins, legends, Manilius, Dorothea of Sidon etc., remarks on Genoa’s colonies in the Black Sea (from c.1290s to the time the Plague came..) and so, eventually,  to Ptolemy’s co-ordinates.

But this post is already a trying length, almost 4,700 words, so I’ll leave all that material from my logs aside, except to say the Voynich ‘strings’ may bind place and star.

The star-place correspondence system has to be conceptual or temporary because the vernal equinox moves, as the first minute of right ascension doesn’t.  Then there are also the eastern navigator’s “fetterings” but …alas.. who’d ever read so much?

At least you have some sources for this last and  far from unimportant section.

edit (6th December 2019).

Can’t get the ‘comments’ to include this image, so here it is. Proof of relevance to c.1420.  See second of the comments following this post.

 

Notes on Panofsky’s comments 4. Kabbalah

Header Illustration: detail from a Kabbalist scroll.  Brit.Lib.  Or 6465 (1556)
Two previous:     Notes on Panofsky’s comments 3 – hesitations (February 13, 2019)
Notes on Panofsky’s comments 2 – (February 7, 2019)

See also Postscript – added at end of post, 28th. Jan. 2022.

Note 8: … ‘Kabbala’

When Anne Nill wrote to her friend Herbert Garland in 1932 about Panofsky’s viewing the manuscript, she said, “He thinks there is some influence of the Kabbala in it.!!!!!8

The question has been hanging ever since. I know of no further comment by Panofsky, though something may be buried in the archive of his correspondence.

Elegant Enigma includes a  few paragraphs under ‘Cabala’ in the section titled ‘Collateral Research’, where it is placed between Angelic magic and Alchemy.

Notice d’Imperio’s use of the past tense:

” [Cabala] depended heavily on manipulation of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and lists of sacred words and was in general highly ‘verbal’ and abstract in character in contrast to the iconic and ‘visual’ character of other magical [sic!] systems,… the manipulations of Cabala may have inspired at least some cryptographic devices’     (d’Imperio, Elegant Enigma. p.60).

Both her spelling for the word as ‘Cabala’ and her few comments suggest that d’Imperio relied on an article in the  1901-6 edition of   Encyclopaedia Judaica.  If so, she didn’t take to heart its authors’  admonition:

most modern scholars … have treated the Cabala with a certain bias and from a rationalistic rather than from a psychologico-historical point of view; applying the name of “Cabala” only to the speculative systems which appeared since the thirteenth century, under pretentious titles and with fictitious claims, but not to the mystic lore of the geonic and Talmudic times. Such distinction and partiality, however, prevent a deeper understanding of the nature and progress of the Cabala, which, on closer observation, shows a continuous line of development from the same [religious] roots and elements.

What d’Imperio calls  ‘word-manipulation’ and thinks the mark of a magical system owed most to Abraham Abulafia, a conscious rationalist and follower of Moses Maimonides (who is sometimes called the ‘arch-rationalist’). Maimonides’ thought was – and still is –  respected across the religious and sectarian divides.  Of him, the  Catholic Encyclopaedia writes:

“through his “Guide of the Perplexed” and the philosophical introductions to sections of his commentaries on the Mishna … [Maimonides] exerted a very important influence on the Scholastic philosophers, especially on Albert the Great, St. Thomas [Aquinas], and Duns Scotus.”

speaking of perplexity, and though off topic, I’d like to mention a paper I’ve just seen online:

  • [pdf] Jim Reeds, ‘Solved: The Ciphers in Book iii of Trithemius’s Steganographia’, (DRAFT: 26 March 1998).

‘Voynich’ thoughts and Kabbalah

detail of miniature in a Greek Kabbalist manuscript.       Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Ottieni. courtesy Lehigh University.

An online search for ‘Voynich’ plus ‘Kabbalah’ turns up nothing to help us understand Panofsky’s remark.  It may seem harsh to say that nothing said so far about the Voynich manuscript and Kabbalah has been other than trivial – but see for yourself:

  • In 2009, Pelling mentioned (here) that Pater Castell saw the  sephiroth in  one of the botanical drawings (Pelling’s illustration).
  • In 2013 Donald Goodell began a thread on the arch.net mailing list managed by Rich Santacoloma.  See that thread here.
  • A conversation was begun some years ago in the online ‘Journal of Voynich Studies‘  but – as so often – the talk soon veered  back to its contributors’ chief interest: the nobility and seventeenth-century Prague.
  • On July 5th., 2015,  Marco Ponzi left a comment on Stephen Bax’s site, citing an image from a sixteenth-century Kabbalistic Greek text. (It was Ponzi’s find, but a detail from the same diagram can be seen above).   Darren Worley soon provided the picture’s caption, “Influence of the moon on reading the signs of the cabala (kabbalah), miniature from the Cabalistic treatise, Greek manuscript, 16th century…etc.  Ponzi doubted the caption’s accuracy, but  I’m assured it’s correct.
  • Jan.26th., 2016, a thread opened on the forum ‘voynich.ninja’.  The subject was actually Jules Janick’s published theory (with or without his name mentioned). The exchange followed the usual course.

Otherwise, Arthur O. Tucker‘s co-author, Jules Janick has made most of the general idea, pulling into Tucker’s ‘New World Voynich’ narrative the late and Christianised style of Kabbalah, knowledge of which he attributes to the missionaries.  However, in overlaying  the tree of Sephiroth on the Voynich map, Janick failed to notice that the quarter he designates ‘North’ is marked clearly with the rising sun which signifies East.

Texts and resources

(detail)  Brit.Lib. MS Or 11791 f.8v ‘Perush Sefer Yetzirah’ cf.  Brit.Lib. Add MS 26929.

As readers will realise, we are still entirely at a loss to know what about the manuscript or in it, could have led Panofsky to say he thought there was some influence from Kabbalah.  Of course, he might not have expressed himself as definitely as Nill reports, but hers is the only account we have.  He might simply have been musing…’Spain or somewhere southern’… Jewish… thirteenth to fifteenth century… could well be some influence from Kabbalah..’  We don’t know. The whole question is still, effectively, unexplored.

Any reader inspired with determination to solve the problem, one way or another, might like to begin with  Sefer Yetzirah, (‘The Book of Formation’ (or: ‘- Creation’) which is the earliest and perhaps best known of works described as Kabbalistic, though in this case the description is debated.

“Composed in (c.200 BCE – c.200 CE). Sefer Yezirah (Book of Formation) is the title of the earliest extant book on Jewish esotericism, although some early commentators treated it as a treatise on mathematical and linguistic theory as opposed to Kabbalah.”

– from the Sefaria site‘s introduction to the parallel Hebrew/English text.

  • British Library MS Or.11791 Parchment codex.  Commentaries on the Sefer Yetzirah (14th-15thC).
    The Library recommends the following article – and so do I.

The catalogue entry for another volume highlights the need to forget parochial thinking. The various hands are described:

Script (summary): Spanish and Italian semi-cursive script;  Italian semi-cursive script of the 15th century;  Italian/Byzantine semi-cursive of approximately 15th century; Spanish semi-cursive of approximately 15th century; Italian/Byzantine semi-cursive of approximately 15th century. 

For the  total novice (as I am), a couple of easy first meetings with Kabbalist thought:

  • George Robinson, ‘Kabbalah in Spain‘, (undated online article). Sub-title reads, “From the 13th through the 15th century, the Iberian Peninsula was the home of most major kabbalists.”
  • A modern orthodox rabbi,  Rabbi Yom Tov Glaser, explains Kabbalah for modern believers –  youtube video.
  • An article by Ephraim Rubin which looks like a very solid introduction to the Zohar.  published as a blogpost at Kinkatso & Co.

See also:

edited from the original.

  •  Joseph Dan, ‘Gershom Scholem’s Reconstruction of Early Kabbalah’, Modern Judaism, Vol. 5, No. 1, Gershom Scholem Memorial Issue (Feb., 1985), pp.39-66.
  • Hartley Lachter, ‘Spreading Secrets: Kabbalah and Esotericism in Isaac ibn Sahula’s Meshal ha-kadmoni’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Winter 2010), pp. 111-138.
  • Moshe Idel, ‘Ramon Lull and Ecstatic Kabbalah: Preliminary Observation’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 51 (1988), pp. 170-174.
  • Moshe Idel, ‘Maimonides’ “Guide of the Perplexed” and the Kabbalah’,  Jewish History, Vol. 18, No. 2/3, Commemorating the Eight Hundredth Anniversary of Maimonides’ Death (2004), pp. 197-226
  • Shaul Magid, ‘From Theosophy to Midrash: Lurianic Exegesis and the Garden of Eden’, AJS Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1997), pp. 37-75.
  •  Daniel Jütte, ‘Trading in Secrets: Jews and the Early Modern Quest for Clandestine Knowledge’,  Isis , Vol. 103, No. 4 (December 2012), pp. 668-686. (This paper includes the discursus on Abramo Colorni – regarding whom see N.Pelling, ‘Abraham Colorni’s Cryptography…’ ciphermysteries, (Feb.9th., 2019).
  • The Zohar – first edition published in Mantua 1558-60 is in the Library of Congress, Hebraic Section.  (Sefer ha-Zohar, 3 volumes, Mantua, 1558-60 )

_______________________

Postscript – 28th. January 2022.

I should like to acknowledge the courtesy of Koen Gheuens who wrote to let me know that about six months ago, a Voynichero called ‘Carey’ approached him, citing the same manuscript which I used here for my header and invited him to join her in creating a theory about the Voynich map.  Koen only much later thought to check – as a scholar does – to see what precedents there might be for associating that same source (Brit.Lib.  Or 6465 (1556) to images in the Vms and on noticing this post, maintained the same scholarly approach by writing to ask my thoughts.   One appreciates such courtesies all the more for their rarity in the online ‘Voynich’ world.

For readers who might care to know the same, I’ll share two thoughts:

first.  Yes, I did see points of comparison between Brit.Lib. Or 6465 and details in the Voynich map – which is why I included a couple of details from it in the post.  BUT that scroll was made at least eight generations after the last recension of the Voynich manuscript, and about a century and a half after our present copy was made.

Brit.Lib. Or 6465  is dated to1556.

Secondly, to suppose that any viable ‘Voynich-Kabbalah’ storyline could be developed by any persons without the essential preliminaries – that is, the necessary languages and study under a scholar specialising in medieval Jewish religious thought and writings – is an idea more informed by self-confidence than by reason.  Kabbalist studies were not casual reading; it was recommended only for mature adults (over 25) who would by then have had not less than thirteen years’ prior study in religious texts and commentaries- in Hebrew, in Aramaic and related dialects, and in such Jewish dialects as Judeo-Occitan or Judeo-Catalan etc.

That said, if Koen Gheuens and ‘Carey’ (f.) are keen enough to take the topic seriously – and far more seriously than d’Imperio did – I hope they’ll find a suitably qualified Jewish scholar to provide a detailed and well-informed opinion before publication.

Next post:  Salomon and Liebeschutz

Wheat from Chaff – Hime’s ‘gunpowder cipher’

Header picture: Mongols using grenades/bombs in 13thC Japan.

preceding posts:

Wheat from the Chaff – ‘Bacon ciphertext’
Wheat from Chaff – Books of Secrets and the ‘Secretum secretorum’

The “gunpowder recipe”  in Bacon’s  De secretis ..

The essential reference is:

  • H. W. L. Hime (Col.), “Roger Bacon and Gunpowder,” in Roger Bacon: Commemoration Essays, ed. by A. G. Little (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1914) pp.321-335.

In 2002, while discussing the range of early cipher methods, Pelling transcribed the passage and explained Hime’s rendering of it:

an anagrammatic cipher [which] supposedly transforms… ” luru vopo vir can utriet” into R. VII PART. V NOV. CORUL. V ET … which is allegedly short for…“recipe VII partes, V novellae coruli, V et..”   …the central part of his [i.e. Bacon’s] recipe for gunpowder.

To include mention of that passage from De Secretis in a more specifically ‘Voynich-‘ context would be to accept that some connection exists between Roger Bacon and the Voynich manuscript, and while some form of connection might exist, none has yet been argued from the primary evidence so the ‘gunpowder’ passage from De secretis should be irrelevant, shouldn’t it?

Reeds realised this,  and apparently  so too  did Robert Steele. Reeds’  Voynich Bibliography  includes none of  Hime’s essays and to the listing for Steele’s article (below), it adds a note:  “..about Bacon ‘gunpowder cipher’,  not VMS“.

  • Robert Steele, “Luru Vopo Vir Can Utriet.” Nature 121 (11 Feb. 1928), pp.208-9. The article’s abstract (which is all I’ve seen) mentions another item (NATURE, Sept. 4, 1926, p. 352).

Unfortunately, these are among the few since 1914 to recognise that distinction, the majority distracted first by Hime’s supposing  the passage in De secretis.. proved Bacon invented gunpowder.

A false connection

Combined with Wilfrid’s (also unproven) assertions that the Voynich text was written by Bacon and is in cipher, the topic of de Secretis’   ‘gunpowder cipher’ is included again and again in Voynich-related articles, books and theories to as late the present (2018), when mention is made of it in Dooley’s book:

  • John F. Dooley, History of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis: Codes, Ciphers, and Their Algorithms. (2018).

Dooley’s chosen sources are curious, but the second plainly implies supposing some link to Beinecke MS 408.

     #Brian Clegg, The First Scientist: A Life of Roger Bacon (2003).

     #Lawrence Goldstone & Nancy Goldstone, The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World (2005).

Essentially a biography which turned into a Voynich-themed historical novel, the Goldstones’ book offers no new insight into the imagery, text or manufacture of Beinecke MS  408. see Review by Kirkus, the final line of which is “Many scrambled historical eggs conceal the Bacon.” and The New York Times comment begins:

“When two Westport authors, Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, decided to write a history of the 13th-century scientist Roger Bacon, they had no idea the trail would lead them to one of the world’s great mysteries. But when they discovered that the brilliant but reviled man of science might have hidden information in a strangely coded manuscript now at Yale University, that became the theme of their new book … ” NYT (Feb 20, 2005).

Seeing how this particular irrelevancy  survived will shed light on the way that other ideas long doubted, or modified, or weeded out entirely from reputable scholarship are still part of the ‘Voynichworld’ landscape.

It was a hundred and three years ago – and before Wilfrid’s talk to the Physicians of Philadelphia –  that Lynn Thorndike explained why the ‘gunpowder cipher’ is likely to be a late addition to Bacon’s original text.  Writing in 1915,  just a year after Hime’s essay appeared in print, Thorndike wrote:

Lynn Thorndike

“In the first place, the cipher [as asserted by Hime] is based upon chapters of the “Epistola de secretis operibus naturae et de nullitate magie” not found in the early manuscript of that work and considered doubtful by Charles* in his work on Roger Bacon. Indeed, the opening phrases of two chapters, ” Transactis annis Arabum sexcentis et duobus,” and ” Annis Arabum 630 transactis” suggest their source. Secondly. Roger Bacon openly alludes to gunpowder in 1267 in his ” Opus Tertium ” as already in common use in children’s toy explosives. Therefore Colonel Hime has to date the “De secretis” at 1248, and to hold that Bacon was at that time “driven to employ cryptic methods by fear of the Inquisition” (p. 334), but that by 1267

“circumstances had totally changed in the lapse of years; the composition of gunpowder . . . had been divulged, and the first use made of the deadly mixture was for the amusement of children” (p. 321).

But is there any good reason for dating the “De secretis” in 1248? Much of it sounds like a brief popular compilation from Bacon’s three works of 1267-8 concocted by some one else later; compare, for instance, the first paragraph of the sixth chapter of the “De secretis” with Duhem, “Un fragment inedit de l’Opus Tertium,” pp. 153-4 and Little, “Part of the Opus Tertium,” 50-51. The dedication of the “De secretis” to William, Bishop of Paris, who died in 1249, occurs first in the late edition of 1618 and has not been found by Little in any manuscript. Then the inquisition bug-a-boo is negligible. Has any one ever shown that the inquisition punished a practical invention? … it can not be shown that in the thirteenth century the church persecuted men of science. Rather, popes and prelates were their patrons.”

quoted passage above from:

  • Lynn Thorndike, ‘Bacon and Gunpowder‘, Science, New Series, Vol. 42, No. 1092 (Dec. 3, 1915), pp. 799-800. (p.799).

* ‘Charles…’ is presumably E. Charles, author of Roger Bacon: sa Vie, ses Ouvrages, ses Doctrines (Bordeaux, 1861) to whom Thorndike refers several times, not always approvingly.

For current opinion on authorship and dating for De secretis see:

  • Jeremiah Hackett, (ed.)  Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays 1996 (Brill)

Thorndike’s protest had little effect and for the next half-century, the idea continued to circulate in European popular histories that the invention of gunpowder should be credited to a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman friar.  What is notable about these writings is an apparent inability to contemplate Europe’s being in debt to Asian, or even Arabic-speaking peoples. Sarton would be among the few exceptions and yet, despite Sarton’s discussion (in 1931),  Lutz  asserts (in 1936) any Oriental or Arabian origin ‘disproved'(!!). (Cf. header picture and illustration below, right).

Meanwhile, Six years after Thorndike’s first protest,  he had again (1921) objected to the constant repetition of the idea that Bacon invented gunpowder, in a letter to  Scientific American which I’ve already reproduced in part.

No noticeable diminution in the idea’s popularity followed, and then

20 years later (1936) , a paper by Edward Lutz again repeats as if they were facts established that  Roger Bacon wrote the Voynich manuscript, and invented the telescope,  the microscope… and gunpowder.

Friar Bacon and hypothetical telescope. From Lutz (1936)

Of gunpowder, Lutz wrote:

“Invention of Gunpowder: In this connection a few words about the invention of gunpowder seem to be in place. If nothing else, Friar Roger was the first European to make mention of gunpowder.[a]  Since its Chinese and Arabian origin has been disproved, we may add that good arguments exist for its actual invention or chance discovery by Bacon during his long life of research. He wrote about gunpowder’s main characteristics before anyone else [sic!] had even mentioned the substance. He possessed its exact chemical formula and hid it within a subtle cipher.[b]

[a] citing, (as n.244)  – W. W. R. Ball, History of Mathematics (1919), p. 174.  [b] citing  (as n.225)  W. R. Newbold,  Cipher of Roger Bacon, pp. 141-143; and Hime’s article  “Gunpowder” published in the Encyclopaedia Britannia (1929). Vol. 2  p. 890.

  • Edward Lutz, ‘Roger Bacon’s Contribution to Knowledge’, Franciscan Studies, No. 17, June, 1936), pp. ii-v, vii-xi, 1-82.

And , dear reader, if you’re thinking  Lutz  was an outlier  –   think again.

Thirty-five years after Thorndike’s critique, now (in 1950) a young Hochberg attempts to judge the matter without doing more than exercising logic on a prohibitively narrow range of data, and all at the level of secondary opinion. The result is erroneous conclusion.

detail from the ‘Mara Buddha’ –  foreign ‘demons’ attack Dunhuang’s Buddhist enclaves. (10thC AD). One fire-propelling item is understood to be a grenade and the other a fire-lance.

A further controversial question concerning [Roger] Bacon’s achievements is whether or not he discovered gunpowder. … Colonel Hime, in perhaps the most authoritative work on the question of Bacon and his relation to the discovery of gunpowder, concludes that Bacon, in the face of the evidence, must be considered to be the discoverer of gunpowder … While it is true that Hime’s conclusion depends upon a certain amount of hypothesizing and conjecture … the conclusion is far from being unreasonable. Nevertheless, both Thorndike and Sarton have challenged the theory that Bacon discovered gunpowder. Their attack centers on Hime’s proposed decipherment of the De Secretis (15, pp. 688- 691; 12, pp. 957-958, 1037-1038). Sarton, however, seems to admit that the issue is not decisive…

  • from Herbert Hochberg, ‘The Empirical Philosophy of Roger and Francis Bacon’. Philosophy of Science, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Oct., 1953), pp. 313-326.

The aim in referring to Hochberg’s essay from so long ago is not to criticise Professor Hochberg for youthful errors;  but to make clear that an exercise of logic cannot make up for a failure to determine the facts by research –  and further that to rely on no more than a limited sample-range – especially of secondary opinion – is to beg the questions they left unasked.  In this instance, the critical question was  not, as Hochberg supposed (more than half a century ago), “which of these secondary authors’ ideas do I think most plausible?” but ‘Where and when do we find our earliest testimony to the existence of gunpowder?”

Sixty-three years later, (in 1978) d’Imperio’s Elegant Enigma – whose subject is the Voynich manuscript – includes three of Hime’s essays in its bibliography,  though d’Imperio herself adopts a non-committal tone in the main text:

A considerable literature exists, dealing with ciphers attributed to Bacon in alchemical works.  An anagram in which Bacon is said to have hidden a formula for gunpowder [in de secretis] is explicated variously by some but debunked by others. [the sources are cited – Elegant Enigma, pp.66-67).

Note that d’Imperio does not ignore, but fails to credit to its source, Thorndike’s opinion that the cipher-passage is a later interpolation to De secretis, and also fails to see that the entire question is irrelevant to study of Beinecke MS 408, given lack of any positive evidence for correspondence between Bacon’s extant works and the Voynich manuscript.

Who did invent gunpowder? 

The question was settled beyond all reasonable doubt by Joseph Needham, whose 700-page study was published fully thirty years ago.

Yet …

One hundred and two years after Thorndike’s protest, and thirty-one years after Needham’s exhaustive study,  when Craig Bauer (rightly) asserts (2017) that Hime’s decipherment of the passage in De secretis remains in dispute – his footnote includes not only Hime’s publications about the passage from De secretis but also that Voynich-themed biography of Roger Bacon later referenced by Dooley!  What uncertainty exists is not, today, where gunpowder was first invented but only about which European friar ( Friar Roger or Friar Berthold) first knew its method for manufacture.   And that dispute has no demonstrable link to the Voynich manuscript, at all.

  • Craig P. Bauer, Unsolved!: The History and Mystery of the World’s Greatest Ciphers from Ancient Egypt to Online Secret Societies (2017), p.23 (and notes p.532).

re: Friar Berthold – the legend persisted to 1911.  See the linked entry which cites

  • Hansjacob, Der Schwarze Berthold, Der Erfinder des Schiespulvers u. der Feuerwaffen (Freiburg, 1891).

from Needham, op.cit., (p.51).

[following paragraph added Jan 4th., 2019] Manly had provided a lucid dismissal of the ‘gunpowder cipher’ in 1931, writing:

a) The Gunpowder Formula. The briefest and simplest case of a decipherment obtained from a text not written by Roger Bacon is furnished by the famous ‘Gunpowder Formula’.. Here, in a letter attributed to Bacon, occurs, according to Brewer’s reprint from the printed text of 1542, the famous: ‘Sed tamen sal petrae LURU VOPO VIR CAN UTRIET sulphuris; et sic facies tonitruum et coruscationem, si scias artificium.’ I shall not now insist upon the probability that the last three chapters of this epistle are not the work of Bacon, or upon the fact that without any warrant Professor Newbold took a well-known symbol for Sed as Sume. The important fact is that the letters LURU VOPO VIR CAN UTRIET are not found in any extant MS., but are apparently due to a misreading of the distorted Greek letters occurring at this point in the MS. from which the 1542 edition was printed. Yet applying his system to this misreading, which originated more than three centuries after the death of Bacon, Professor Newbold got a thoroughly satisfactory decipherment.

  • John Matthews Manly, ‘Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS’, Speculum, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Jul., 1931), pp. 345-391.
  • an anonymous but informative website on the history of gunpowder is here.

How did Bacon come to know something.. anything… of gunpowder,?

In terms of European knowledge, the usual opinion is that he learned it from Friar Berthold, or vice versa.  Not that the question has any demonstrable relevance to study of Beinecke MS 408,  but Needham’s view was that:

… Perhaps the most extraordinary fact is that all the stages, from the incendiary uses of the mixture right through to the metal-barrel hand-gun or bombard, with the projectile fully occluding the bore, were passed  through in China, before Europeans knew of the mixture itself. Probably there  were three comings. Roger Bacon by c.1260 or so was able to study fire-crackers, doubtless [sic] brought west by some of his brother friars; and the Arabian military engineers in the Chinese service must have let Hasan al-Rammah know about bombs and rockets by  c.1280. Then, within the following twenty years, came the cannon, quite possibly directly overland through Russia.

  •      Needham, op.cit., p. xxxi.

See also:

  • Lynn Thorndike, ‘The True Roger Bacon’ published in two parts in  The American Historical Review. Part 1 in Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jan., 1916), pp. 237-257; Part 2 in Vol. 21, No. 3 (Apr., 1916), pp. 468-480.
  • the current version of the wiki biography for Roger Bacon is good.(Dec. 2018)

Next post: The Military Cryptanalysts (Prelude).

Wheat from the Chaff – ‘Bacon ciphertext’

Header picture: detail from Brit.Lib. Add MS 21917 f.71v

The two posts previous to this are:-

The radiocarbon dating which, in 2011, finally ended efforts to describe the Voynich manuscript as an autograph by Roger Bacon, also saw the perhaps arbitrary abandoning of his view that the appearance of the manuscript, and the content, suggested origin in works from the thirteenth century.  No-one has taken on the task of testing whether the content mightn’t be a fifteenth-century copy of a thirteenth-century text (by Bacon or anyone else) but another problem with Wilfrid’s narrative is the limited range and type of techniques for enciphering that were known in Europe before 1400. Not that we necessarily accept that the written part of the text is in cipher.

I add the above paragraph as clarification today (29th Dec. 2018) because I hear on the grapevine that this blog, whose aim is to demonstrate the need for a re-visiting and revising of ideas long-held or tenaciously maintained about the manuscript,  is  being rumoured an effort to  re-instate  Wilfrid’s ‘Bacon ciphertext ‘ idea. ….  **sigh**

Bacon’s cipher methods

Note (updated 18th. Jan. 2019).  Whether it still applies, or was just a touch of influenza, just before this post originally went up, Nick Pelling  had said that he felt discussion of  methodologies inappropriate for his site.  Time mellows many opinions, of course.

 

Bacon  described seven methods by which a text might be rendered obscure in his  De Epistola de Secretis …  (“Letter concerning the marvellous power of art and of nature and concerning the nullity of magic“).

I’ve transcribed the  section in a separate Page (‘see right: Addendum…’). adding some explanatory notes from  John Dooley’s book[J.D.]  and a couple of my own. [D]

The same Page illustrates and links to Aethicus/Ethicus’ alphabet.

Newbold said in 1921, and Power remarks more recently, that Bacon felt great admiration for Aethicus.

( Wilfrid addressed the Philadelphia College of Physicians on the same occasion that  Prof. Newbold delivered the  Fifth ‘Mary Scott Newbold’ lecture.  Newbold held the chair of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and speaking dates are planned well in advance, so it seems a reasonable assumption that Wilfrid’s invitation was due to Newbold’s good graces.)

  •  Roger Bacon and ciphers. Addendum to…’
  • John Dooley, History of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis: Codes, Ciphers, and Their Algorithms. (2018)
  • Amanda Power,  Roger Bacon and the Defence of Christendom, ( 2013) pp.221-2.
  • 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.

Illustration: (detail)  Roger Bacon, Wellcome Image V0000284

Some early ciphers

Scholars are yet to pay much attention to European ciphers pre-1400, and the seminal paper is still regularly cited:

  • Bernhard Bischoff, « Ûbersicht ûber die nichtdiplomatischen Geheimschriften des Mittelalters», Mitteilungen des instituts fur Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 62 (1954) 1-27.

but see also:

  • Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim, ‘Introduction: Ciphers and the Material History of Literacy’, in Ellison and Kim (eds.), A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers: Cryptography and the History of Literacy.  (New York: Routledge, 2018).

The best known study of early cipher available in English is surely

  • David A.King, The Cipher of the Monks. (2001) The table of contents is (here). King’s work was introduced to public Voynich discussions online by Nick Pelling in 2010, while discussing a 14thC astrolabe from Picardy. (here).

An English cipher, in de Foxton’s Liber Cosmographiae (composed in Oxford in 1408):

  • John Block Friedman, “The Cipher Alphabet of John de Foxton’s Liber Cosmographiae,” Scriptorium 36 (1982), 219-35. accessible as a pdf through Persee.   I have now also found a note by (the honorable) Marco Ponzi who says (here) that de Foxton’s cipher was introduced to  Voynich studies by  Nick Pelling, in a comment to the first mailing list (in 2002).

 

The history of ciphers is older than Bacon, of course.

The cipher, part of which is shown in the header dates to the late tenth century, from the Abbey of Luxeuil and according to the catalogue entry at the British Library reads:

Hbfc Stfphbnxs scrkpskt p[er] prfcfptb brchkinb[er]tk mbgkctrk’ – solved by Sir Frederic Madden to read:  ‘Haec Stephanus scripsit per precepta Archimberti magistri’ (‘This was written by Stephanus at the command of Master Archimbertus’).

The first reference below describes an ostracon (MMA 14.1.219)  said to date from before the eighth century AD.  I have chosen this example partly for its age,  and partly because the editors describe the cipher as one formed by ‘the mixture of several types of letters’ – which is the fourth method described by Bacon in thirteenth-century England.  That ostracon also lets me send a nod to  Georg Baresch,  who believed the Voynich manuscript contained  ‘ancient’ and ‘Egyptian’ matter  as he made clear when asking Athanasius Kircher’s help to identify  the Voynich script.

  • Paulinus Bellet, ‘Anthologia Palatina 9.538, ‘The Alphabet and the Calligraphic Examination in the Coptic Scriptorium’,  The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (1982), pp.1-7.
  • cf. Liv Ingeborg Lied, Hugo Lundhaug, Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology (2017) p.157 & note.
  • Letter of Georgius Barschius to Athanasius Kircher (1639). Transcription, translation and notes by Philip Neal.

Apropos of Baresch’s ‘guess’ that the manuscript’s content relates to medicine:

  • George W. Corner, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Medical Cryptogram’, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 4 (1936) 745-750.

Several researchers have commented on similarities between the Voynich script and other scripts, including Coptic. One sometimes sees observations of this sort collected – sometimes with attributions included – at agglomerative sites such as  voynich.nu.

 

Why would Bacon want to write in cipher?

“the Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, an infinitely greater scholar, who had been persecuted on account of his writings and whose scientific discoveries had been misrepresented as black magic. Moreover, for many years he had been forbidden by his Order to write, and he himself referred in his works to the necessity of hiding his great secrets in cipher.”

As far as I know we have not a  scrap of evidence to show that Roger Bacon ever wrote at length in cipher, and Wilfrid appears not to have known that his conception of Bacon as ‘persecuted scientist’ derived ultimately from the Draper-White thesis, which had been refuted in print four years before Wilfrid laid eyes on his ‘Bacon ciphertext’.

James Walsh had written in 1908,

That Dr. White’s book, contradicted as it is so directly by all serious histories of medicine and of science, should have been read by so many thousands in this country, and should have been taken seriously by educated men, physicians, teachers, and even professors of science … only shows how easily even supposedly educated men may be led to follow their prejudices rather than their mental faculties …

And in 1921, Lynn Thorndike  again objected to that ‘persecuted scientist’ notion when writing to Scientific American (see end of post).

Despite objections from persons both intelligent and well-informed, the myth/’theory’ of Bacon’s persecution ‘for science’ continued to be promoted and thus to infect writings for the rest of the twentieth century.  As example of their tone I list the publications from 1922 ( from Reeds’ Bibliography).

  • Feb 4th., Cons, Louis, ‘Un manuscrit mystérieux: Un traité scientifique du treizième siècle, attribué a Roger Bacon’, L’Illustration 159 (Number 4118, 4 Feb 1922) p. 112. [Copy in BL Facs 439. J.R.]
  • May 20th., Garland, Herbert. ‘A Literary Puzzle Solved?’ Illustrated London News 160, (20 May1922), pp.740-742.
  •  Dr. R. Loeser. “Roger Bacons Chiffremanuskript.” Die Umschau. 26 (1922), pp.115-117.

When Bacon was censured, it was in England, and as a result of his serving as ‘whistleblower’ when requested by the Pope to write about poor management and practice in the church in England. Others claim Bacon incurred displeasure by taking it on himself to criticise the system of education decided by ‘elders and betters’ in the church hierarchy.

Natural History?

Bacon’s contemporary, Thomas of Cantimpré (1201 –1272), wrote at great length about natural history, in his ‘De naturis rerum‘, a text that was (so to speak) ‘an instant run-away best seller’, being soon  translated into French, Belgian and German vernaculars.  Clearly, ‘natural history’ didn’t have to be hidden in cipher during Bacon’s lifetime.

The following illustration, comparing script in a fifteenth-century copy of  Cantimpré’s thirteenth-century text with script taken from one folio of Beinecke MS 408, was first published by the present author in May 2016.   That post was one item in a  more detailed exposition of  the internal evidence which indicates the content’s evolution over time. The last substantial stratum, prior to the present volume’s manufacture,  I have dated to the period between 1250 and 1330 AD, that conclusion confirming an earlier opinion (by the present author) which had been reached and shared in posts online by 2011.  Certain minor alterations, additions and marginal inscriptions were treated separately.

illustration from D.N. O’Donovan, ”An early 15th C copy of a 13th C text: Thomas of Cantimpré’, voynichimagery (blog), May 9th., 2016. I regret that in 2017, after almost a decade of being obliged to protest plagiarism and  other abuses, I withdrew from  public access the research I’d shared online.

Postscript:  I am indebted to correspondent for reference to a comment made by Derek J. de Solla Price in 1975, indicating that some had earlier wondered if this might be the case:

Scholars … have surmised that it may well be a copy of a lost original— a fifteenth-century copy of a thirteenth-century text.

  •  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Secular Spirit: Life and Art at the End of the Middle Ages (1975) p.203
  • The interesting work recently done by Koen Gheuens, tracing examples of an anomalous form of  ‘lobster-style’ Cancer, refers to Cantimpré’s work. It is worth readers’ attention, though here will be left for a later series.

Aristotle prohibited?

In theory –  only in theory –  it could be argued that there is a period of about ten years when Bacon might (just ‘might’) have needed to encipher some text attributed to  Aristotle.

As mentioned in the previous post, the Arts Faculty of the University of Paris were told in 1210 that:

 “Neither the books of Aristotle on natural philosophy or their commentaries are to be read at Paris in public or secret, and this we forbid under penalty of excommunication.”

On the other hand, members of the Faculty of Theology could read what they liked, and no prohibition existed at all in England.

Bacon came to Paris while the ban was in place (at least nominally), arriving in 1233/4 and remaining until 1250, according to some accounts.  But the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy says Bacon was already “teaching Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy and metaphysics by the 1240s”, and a ‘British Heritage’ article says Bacon was invited to Paris in 1241 “to present a lecture series on the Aristotelian corpus.”

Which would leave only the period between 1233-c.1243(?) when it might have been necessary to obscure the content of a notebook or some Aristotelian text.

In Paris again by 1257, Bacon would have now found Aristotle’s works freely available:

By 1255,  all of Aristotle’s works were available plus a range of commentaries and expansions of his ideas. [These] were not only widely read in Paris but were prescribed texts in the Arts Faculty.

 

Next post:   medieval ‘Books of Secrets‘; Aristotle’s Secreta Secretorum; and Roger Bacon’s ‘De Secretis‘