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. (The women's pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.)
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. Libraries with a number of occult and occult related manuscripts: Sloane manuscript collection at the British Library This massive collection of over 4,000 items is not exclusively esoteric or occult but there are a number of iconic texts on the subjects of alchemy, magic, astrology, and related topics. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.
Voynich manuscript pdf age code#
"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. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. The parchment on which this document is written has been. 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. The Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated manuscript written in an unknown script called Voynich. 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. 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.
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