![]() ![]() See for yourself! You can look at pages from the Voynich Manuscript here. Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in, but the sheer mundanity of Gibbs' discovery makes it sound plausible. Gibbs concluded that it's likely the Voynich Manuscript was a customized book, possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women's medicine. Once people could just reproduce several copies of the original Trotula or De Balneis Puteolanis on a printing press, there would have been no need for scribes to painstakingly collate its information into a new, handwritten volume. The Voynich Manuscript has been reliably dated to mere decades before the invention of the printing press, so it's likely that its peculiar blend of plagiarism and curation was a dying format. How he obtained it is still debated and mysterious. There is little doubt that the Voynich Codex was once in the possession of Rudolf II. (The women's pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.) The signature confirms that the codex was associated with the court of Rudolf II and existed between 1608, the date when Horicky was ennobled by Rudolf II, and his death in 1622. ![]() Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets. Gibbs even identified one image-copied, of course, from another manuscript-of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. ![]() Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all it was just shorthand. The Voynich Manuscript is the limit text of Western occultism. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. The Voynich Manuscript: The Worlds Most Mysterious and Esoteric Codex. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.Īfter looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. Indeed Both the Voynich Manuscript and Codex Seraphinianus seem like intriguing art collections to have at home. Although they had once been close friends, Manly felt a moral imperative to publicly denounce Newbold’s work in the “interests of scientific truth.” “In my opinion,” he wrote, “the Newbold claims are entirely baseless and should be definitely and absolutely rejected.Further Reading So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution” Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Newbold’s solution was debunked in 1931 by University of Chicago classicist John Matthews Manly in a journal of medieval studies called Speculum, leaving Newbold posthumously disgraced. In June 1921, the monthly magazine Hearst’s International announced that University of Pennsylvania Professor William Newbold had “come upon the key to the secret cipher of the Manuscript … and the truth of six hundred years ago is coming out!” Newbold surmised that 13th-century English scientist Roger Bacon had written the manuscript with the aid of a microscope and a telescope, centuries before the invention of either instrument. For centuries, the Voynich Manuscript has resisted interpretation, which hasn’t stopped a host of would-be readers from claiming they’ve solved it. ![]()
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