Having said that, a key part of any historical research plan is working out an active bibliography (i.e. I’m also expecting to have my search biased towards Northern Italian balneo sources ( much as in 2006, I still suspect the Voynichese “4o” ligature was a Northern Italian palaeographic ‘tell’, one that was appropriated by numerous Northern Italian cipher keys 1440-1460), though I’ll initially cast my research net wider. I predict that this will be unillustrated, will not have been widely copied, and will typically be found bound alongside medical manuscripts. It should therefore be no surprise that my new plan is to search for a pre-1460 balneological source document where the central section matches the general structure of Q13B.
So we now have a lot more (and better) information about what we should be looking for in a balneological match (which we would hope to use as part of a known-plaintext attack on Q13B). However – and I think this is important – because we have an illustration that seems to run across a gathering’s centrefold, we can be reasonably sure that if so, we’re looking at the eight contiguous middle pages of a twelve-page document. “was typically copied alongside”) medical documents, and (c) it’s probably a ‘pure’ balneo text that we’re looking for.Īlso: because we’re apparently missing a (folio-numbered) bifolio from Q13, it could well be that what we’re looking at with Q13B is only two thirds of a balneological ‘book’. Q13), (b) the source document for Q13B probably ‘travels’ with (i.e. Ultimately, the huge takeaways from this for anyone searching for a balneological match are (a) the balneological section (in Q13B) is only half as big as you might otherwise think (i.e. reversed relative to its position in Q13’s final ‘omega’ state) wrapped around it. You may disagree about the precise nesting Q13A had in its original ‘alpha’ state, but I think Q13B’s nesting order looks pretty rock solid, with f78v-f81r in the centre and f84-f75 (i.e. Rather, to make sense of Q13, you have to see that it was originally formed from two separate gatherings – my late friend Glen Claston called these Q13A and Q13B – that were then shuffled together into a single oversized gathering, and then (mis-)bound into an oversized quire.įor Glen (actually Tim Rayhel), Q13A was the three “ medical – biological – Galenic” bifolios, while Q13B comprised the two “ Balneological” bifolios. It’s not enough to grasp (as per my discussion in Curse 2006) that Q13’s bifolios ended up misnested ( and this certainly happened early on, even before Q13’s 15th century quire number was added). to leave it how we see it now) has come a long way. However, since 2006 my codicological understanding of what happened to Q13 (i.e.
#WHO WROTE THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT PLUS#
Q13’s mix of balneo plus strange tubing plus strange body-function pieces seemed a world away from the (generally plaintext, generally unremarkable) documents of the first half of the 15th century (which are often little more than Latin “Rules of the Baths”). When I first started looking for balneological parallels to the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (Quire 13) back in the early 2000s, I found nothing remotely resembling it. Make of it what you will ( but wish me luck). So it’s time for a new angle, a new direction of attack: this post describes my new plan that I’ve spent a few months figuring out. But I think it’s fair to say that these different trees have all yielded small, stony fruit.
I’ve spent a long time trying to understand the Voynich’s drawings a long time trying to understand its heavily structured writing a long time trying to understand its codicology and development a long time trying to find historical precedents (in terms of both visual and structural parallels) and a long time trying to reconstruct its path “ from vellum to Prague“.
#WHO WROTE THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT CRACK#
And while I can see an awful lot of people who want to crack the Voynich Manuscript, I can’t currently see many who are trying to do so guided by anything that could be described as a plan. As with just about all historical research, simply wanting to find things out isn’t enough: you really have to have a plan to guide you.
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