It’s time for a new Voynich research direction!

Thanks to Benedek Lang’s “Unlocked Books”, I’m starting to realise that I’ve perhaps spent too long thinking solely about codicology of the single text, when what is often as important is the ‘codicological context’ – i.e. the collection of other (but presumably conceptually related in some way) texts that were bound alongside by the owners and users of the text. Just because the Voynich Manuscript has come to us without any such informative context doesn’t automatically mean it would have been “so ronery” in its very early life too.

So… given that the Voynich Manuscript is (quite probably) a 15th century herbal / astronomical / astrological / recipe manuscript with both Occitan marginalia [the zodiac months] and possibly Occitan marginalia [f17r, f66r, f116v] in another hand, I suspect that the place to hunt for external codicological clues would surely be late medieval / early modern Occitan Provençal herbals and recipe books, for the simple reason that of all the documents we could think of, these are surely most likely to have shared one or more owners with the VMs, right?

And so I would like to thank Professoressa Maria Sofia Corradini at the University of Pisa for putting such a terrific amount of effort into collecting, editing and publishing a whole set of late medieval Occitan / Provençal herbals and recipe books back in 2004: here are the online versions of her edited texts (click on the headings below “Letteratura medico-farmaceutica” on the left to get started). The works she lists are:-

  • The Princeton Ricettario
    • Ms.: Princeton, Garrett 80, ff. 1r-9v;14r-18r; 21v-23v; 31v-36r.
  • The Auch Ricettari
    • Ms.: Auch, Archives départementales du Gers I 4066, ff. 15r-19v; ff. 71r-79v.
  • The Chantilly Ricettari
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 33r-37v; f. 53r; ff. 59v-62r; f. 71v.
  • Las vertutz de las herbas
    • Ms.: Princeton, Garrett 80, ff. 15v-21v.
    • Ms.: Auch, Archives départementales du Gers I 4066, ff. 2r-14v.
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 46r-52v.   [in verse]
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 53v-59v.  [in prose]
  • Letter from Hippocrates to Caesar
    • Ms.: Princeton, Garrett 80, ff. 9v-14r (seconda parte); ff. 23v-31v (prima parte).
    • Ms.: Auch, Archives départementales du Gers I 4066, ff. 67r-68v; 72v-73r; 77r-v;69r-71r.
  • The Thesaur de pauvres
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 1r-22r.
  • Appendix to the Thesaur de pauvres
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 26v-33r.
  • Rimedi per le febbri 
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 22v-26v.

Which is to say that while there are only three actual Occitan sources (Princeton, Auch, and Chantilly), each one comprises multiple documents, which presumably were copied from various sources (possibly overlapping, but let’s not get hung up on stemmatics here). In her preface, Prof.ssa Corradini notes the link between the medical schools around Montpellier and Toulouse and vernacular copies of texts, a local tradition to which these three books of Occitan would seem to attest.

Unfortunately, if you’re hoping at this point I’m going to include images or even some more detailed bibliographic information for these three items, you are sadly out of luck. I couldn’t find MS 330 at the Musée de Condé; the archive at Auch seems to have no online access at all; and the arcane front-end to Princeton’s legacy manuscript database quite defeated my search for MS Garrett 80. Perhaps someone else will do better in finding any of these?

Incidentally, the only secondary literature Prof.ssa Corradini mentions is a 1956 book by Clovis Brunel called “Recettes médicales alchimiques et astrologiques du XVe siècle en langue vulgaire des Pyrénées [beginning “Aysso es lo libre que fec lo mege Arcemis”]. Publiées [from the manuscript I 4066 of the Archives départementales du Gers]” according to the British Library, which has a copy (thank heavens), shelfmark 12238.ee.4/30.

Meanwhile, according to this page of links to related researchers, 54 years later “I[laria] Zamuner (Univ. di Chieti) is cataloguing all scientific texts in medieval Occitan, a task that will bring the work of Cl[ovis] Brunel up to date“. Central to this study is the Provençal vernacular version of the Secretum Secretorum, the one mentioned by Benedek Lang  (p.61) which helped set this whole train of thought in motion for me. But apparently J. Rodríguez Guerrero is also looking at some unpublished Occitania-area alchemical manuscripts from this period, which might also be very interesting; and there’s possibly more from Professor Peter Ricketts, too.

Might there be some kind of Occitan repository for scans of these documents, as part of the RIALTO project or something? I’ll ask around, but it may take some time to determine… please let me know or leave a comment here if you happen to find out! 🙂

16 thoughts on “Occitan herbals and recipe books…

  1. Vytautas on September 6, 2010 at 11:30 am said:

    After reviewing long history of tries to recognise VMS plants (especially work of Dana Scot on voynich.net), my opinion is such: if there were real prototypes for plants, most of them have added someone’s special signings… That is why these plants looks so strange and “psychodelic” for us. IMHO plants may be visual keys for enciphering, colors are used for relationships with enciphering device. I think about words of last message from Steve Ekwall on “Voynich monkeys” site: “Think in colors (if you can)” 🙂

  2. Vytautas: curiously enough, last night at the Voynich pub meet Marke Fincher also talked about the idea that the number of roots might well indicate an enciphering key for that page or paragraph. I’m not sure how much beer he’d drunk by that stage, so caveat lector (as always). 🙂

  3. Vytautas on September 6, 2010 at 12:00 pm said:

    Eehm… I don’t feel like a man who has been drunk bottle of whiski – yet 🙂 But let’s deciphered VMS will be judge for us =)

  4. Heck, it may be a cookbook for moonshine for all we know. Perhaps drunken musings aren’t so far from the truth after all?

  5. Christopher: even after several pints, nobody at the Voynich pub meet talked in EVA, so perhaps beer (even when combined with curry) isn’t enough to do the trick here. You’d probably need a drugs expert to predict the precise combination of narcotics that might induce a combination of paranoia / overexcitability / megalomania / etc in someone to drive them to attempt to write their own Voynich Manuscript. 🙂

  6. It is not related to this article but surely to the VM:
    The pictures from ongoing repair of Clementinum in Prague can he seen here:
    http://zpravy.idnes.cz/foto.asp?r=domaci&c=A100907_1446202_praha-zpravy_ab

    Click on the icons on the right to get larger pictures. Pls notice some old frescoes.

    The article (the link is below the icons – sorry, in Czech only) mentions especially this:

    -The biggest baroque complex in Prague, built 450 years ago by the followers of the Society of Jesus, is through the first stage of repair.
    – Cross vault beneath Clementinum resonate with the sound of drill and cutter
    – Workers have repaired the Chapel of Mirrors, Baroque Hall and are currently adjusting the premises of the National Technical Library and the corner house at the Marian Square. Thanks to this some treasure came to light, what the preservationists did not even have a clue of. The archaeologists found under the floor of the Mirror Chapel and the foundations of medieval houses, which formerly stood on the spot Klementinum.
    – Walls that are now gone and the corridor will once again serve its original purpose. They will be decorated by another treasure, the painting discovered by laborers – the original wall frescoes from the time of the Jesuits.

    Jan

  7. It’s at home, and I don’t want to give bibliog. details from memory, but one of the Italian commentaries includes an image from a copy of the Tacuinum sanitatis which has a motif in it related (I believe) to the same tradition as a section of the VM.

    This would suggest a “Book of Health” rather than a herbal, and one emerging from the lineage and antecedents found in the Edessa/Nisibis/Antioch chain.

  8. Diane on April 8, 2011 at 1:20 pm said:

    Nick, I’m sure you have a good reason for not adding a message link to the blog – but in lieu of, just to say I’ve added a couple of plant identifications to mine, and would be hugely grateful for any pointers to persons who have, or may have, reached conclusions about foll6, r and v.

    I identify the plants as Breadfruit, and Castor respectively. Latter identification seems so very obvious that I’d be very surprised if I were the first there.

    See blogpage
    http://anothervoynich.blogspot.com/2011/04/folio-6r.html

    Thanks,

    D.

  9. Diane: you’ve probably seen this already, but the Voynich Attacks blog has ID’d the Castor plant, and pointed out that the same word/label appears to describe the star Castor as well.

    http://voynichattacks.wordpress.com/?s=castor

    I’m new at this and probably quite wrong, but I tend to think the labels might be the key to the whole thing.

  10. Link to Professor Corradini’s pages is either dead or dangerous. (What does it mean when the cursor turns into a hand with a ker-pow behind it?)

  11. Diane: thanks for picking up on that, fixed! 🙂

  12. Diane O'Donovan on March 28, 2012 at 6:47 am said:

    Ah – Nick – there still seems to be no direct email link, at least none immediately visible, except to Compelling press. Or am I missing it?

  13. Diane O'Donovan on July 10, 2012 at 9:13 am said:

    er – don’t usually advertise, but the plants are plants, and any encoding points to… yep, the sort of plants they are..

    this after a yonks-worth of research, condensed down to about a tenth of the notes on each.
    Starting to go up
    at voynichimagery (wordpress)
    Cheers.

  14. Mark Knowles on September 30, 2017 at 6:46 pm said:

    Nick: One of my contacts, an Italian Medieval Historian and expert on the Novara area, keenly told me unprompted that the individual I have been focused on was fluent in Occitan. This may or may not be relevant, but it is worthy of note. Can we be confident that we find Occitan in the Voynich?

  15. Mark Knowles on September 30, 2017 at 6:47 pm said:

    Nick: Can we conclude that the author of the Voynich was fluent in Occitan? Or is this a step too far?

  16. Mark Knowles on September 30, 2017 at 7:49 pm said:

    Nick: I think precisely it was Occitan Provencal. God knows why he knew that. I will have to enquire or maybe the local dialect at that time was akin to Occitan Provencal. My Italian is very limited and the Professor that I have spoken with does not speak English, so we muddle through with French.

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