There’s a reason why I haven’t written much lately (apart from chronic lack of time). I’m researching a relatively ambitious future blog post, but the work is slow and it won’t be finished any time soon.
So while we wait, here’s a short post about something else. Three seemingly separated lines suddenly joined together in my mind. Here’s the premises:
- From my research on Quire 13, I have concluded that the images there are layered by design. If you look at a figure in one way you get the first meaning, but if you focus on a different part you get the second meaning. The same is true for a number of the plant drawings, both large and small. Both linking of separate spheres of information and the creation of slightly absurd images are known to facilitate learning and boost memory retention. Hence, I believe the images were first made this way to be used in a didactic context. Not necessarily a school, but any situation where the intention of the audience to learn was a strong concern.
Layered by design. - The Voynich script is incredibly simple. It looks like fluent writing that has been presented in a more accessible way. Chopped up cursive, accessible to those used to Latin and Greek scripts. Just look at the hordes of amateurs who have developed their own Voynich theory. This wouldn’t have happened if the script looked like the Visigothic example on the left. Which one would you rather transcribe?
- In discussions about what Voynichese could be, certain related arguments often return. The bottom line is that Voynichese as a language would make some more sense if we could assume that the spaces we see don’t really divide words. Depending on who you ask, spaces have been inserted in specific places, or the “words” are actually syllables, or the language has only one-syllable words to begin with. Bottom line, we could explain, or at least attempt to explain, Voynichese’s oddities better if we can treat the words as syllables.
But how would I link didactically layered drawings, an accessible writing system and writing in syllables? Well, I came across the following article: https://news.utexas.edu/2017/11/29/ut-austin-professors-discover-copy-of-jesus-secret-teaching
Biblical scholars at the university of Texas (Austin) have discovered a Greek version of the secret teachings of Jesus, an apocryphal text. Such writings were part of early Christianity, but have not been allowed into the New Testament. The fact that this scroll is in Greek is relevant, since this would imply that it is not a translation. Hence, the new find is likely the closest we have found so far to the original.
While this is interesting already, it was the following paragraph that caught my attention:
With its neat, uniform handwriting and words separated into syllables, the original manuscript was probably a teacher’s model used to help students learn to read and write, Smith and Landau said.
“The scribe has divided most of the text into syllables by using mid-dots. Such divisions are very uncommon in ancient manuscripts, but they do show up frequently in manuscripts that were used in educational contexts,” said Landau, a lecturer in the UT Austin Department of Religious Studies.
Now I’m not saying that the VM’s contents must have originated in the same setting. For example, they envisage a school teacher with presumably young students, while I’d rather think of adults arriving in a multi-linguistic setting they are not entirely familiar with. But the principle described here does line up with the points I described above. A teaching context, easy script, apparent splitting into syllables.
It’s not something I’d put all my money on. But if I were forced to explain the “why” of the script, the language and the strangeness of the drawings, this would be part of my answer. Layered for learning, written for accessibility.
Koen,
the difficulty for me with the ‘ teaching-text’ theory – at least from what little I know about teaching methods in medieval Christian Europe – is that children just beginning in literacy were taught aloud and wrote on wax tablets or -elsewhere- on such things as potsherds or palm-leaves.
Once paper became cheap enough there, you do see block books in the hands of younger children, but our extant examples show very ordinary illustrations.
Dramatic mnemonic images – as recommended by Hugh of St. Victor, say, – were mental images which each individual devised to help recall word for word some text already known (more or less) by heart. Or so I understand.
Please don’t think this means I’ve changed my mind about the Voynich manuscript’s botanical images containing a mnemonic component. Any doubts I had when saying so in 2007-8 were resolved, and refined by the usual fires – by 2011. I just don’t see them as doing more than adding to the basic picture’s information (already presented, as it were, in shorthand).
My view is that the intended readers read all of its as easily as today a Catholic reads medieval religious iconography that requires others to set about learning it from books.
I would agree that a ‘Master-to-apprentice’ sort of teaching might apply. It also agrees with what we know [I emphasise ‘know’] of the 17thC history: Jakub… Baresch… Marci. Each was a man of excellent moral character by all repute, apparently without any immediate family obligations , and dedicated to learning: the first two dedicated to medicine, and the third to education and mathematics. All were educated and socially accepted by the Jesuit community of Prague.
For me – and talking of teaching – this makes especially interesting that there should be any rumour at all (true or not) that the content in the mss had come to Prague, ultimately, from a thirteenth century Franciscan.
Between the thirteenth century and the sixteenth, Europe’s foreign ambassadors and religious missionaries were appointed from the Franciscan order, but in the sixteenth century, their missionary role passed to the Jesuits – of whom Athanasius Kircher was one, and his keenest ambition to be appointed a missionary to China. Baresch also says the plants are exotics unknown to German botanists… at that time the best in Europe. The people who traded exotic plants and goods into mainland Europe from as far as China, as early as the early centuries AD.. but I’ve said all that…
🙂
PS – so… what sort of school?
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Diane
Yes, mnemonics work best when they are devised by the individual for personal use, though they were sometimes also “published” (like in mnemonic bibles) or known throughout (like counting months on your knuckles). Also, the use of memory techniques may have been somewhat constant throughout antiquity and the middle ages, with the printing press as a turning point.
That said, as I mentioned a few times in this post, I’m not thinking about any kind of school, and probably not about children either. Like you say, for example a master-apprentice relation is also a didactic context.
I think the difference between our views may be that you see the imagery as the result of a spontaneous or culturally logical evolution through use, while I see a conscious, forced (yet elegant) merging of layers. Like, someone has been thinking “how can I draw this nymph to make her evoke (a) and (b) at the same time?
And just to make sure, I absolutely do not think any medieval European person could or would have made the images – apart from the usual, crossbowman etc.
As for the script, it may be hard to argue that it’s as old as the images. So perhaps this must be seen as an evolution in the material that came in a later stage. But I’d hypothesize that it indicates continued didactic use in some way, the intention of which may or may not have been different from the original.
Now in this post I quote an example about children learning how to read, but an adult getting acquainted with a new script is also “learning how to read”. Hence, the point I wanted to make is that the apparent accessibility of the script, the syllable-ness of the words and certain properties of the imagery may all be tied to the continued didactic use of the material.
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Hmm Koen I think the difference between our views is essentially that you describe the text as if study of the text were the aim of the book, which is so if you’re studying the critical sciences: poetry, philosophy and so on. But the way I have come to see it is more like a 1950s car manual: made to be durable but still the materials weren’t A-grade, and they did get stained and greasy-edged,, with signs of water damage and oil-spots, and with some pages so often used as to be worn thin while others were still fairly pristine. Just an analogy and now I’ll stop it. Really. For a couple of months, anyway. 🙂
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Well… I’m pretty sure that at this point most explanations we can give about the text’s intention are highly speculative 🙂
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Ah.
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