Two Corpora

It is clear that the Voynich codex is both misbound and incomplete. In fact, it is best described as disfigured. There are pages, and sections, missing, and the original order of the pages has been obscured by unintelligent binding. The current sequence of pages is, in part, not the original sequence. It seems the work has been rebound at least three times in its history, and it would seem that parts were rearranged somewhat, or lost, at each rebinding. It is very difficult to establish the original sequences.

What we can establish, though, is that the manuscript consists of an assembly of distinct  materials, and they were originally arranged in some coherent order.

If we overlook the shuffling that has happened we can identify several bodies (corpora) of material that have been brought together into a single work. It is, that is to say, a composite composition. It is presented as a unified work, but in fact two bodies of distinct material have been wedded together - although, not unnaturally.

Of what is it composed?

Looking at the manuscript as a whole, its constituent parts can be described as this:

TWO CORPORA, plus an apparatus of circles, and a map.

This is the original, quite simple, schema.

As I see it, there are really only two bodies of material in the work, two corpora – plus circles, plus a map, which material is best understood as APPARATUS. This is the simplest way to characterize the document. Two bodies of material have been brought together and an apparatus of circles (and map) has been added.

The two corpora are the HERBS and the NYMPHA. Corpus A. Corpus B.

These were originally separate (but related) bodies of material and have been composed independently of one another.

The Voynich manuscript brings two these corpora together into a single work.

From its structure this, indeed, would seem to be the main literary purpose of the work. The primary literary purpose of the Voynich manuscript is to bring together these separate bodies of material, the Herb material and the Nymph material, Corpora A and B. The circles of astrological and meteorological systems are another separate body of material.

Each corpus had the same format:

A collection of illustrations with text followed by text only pages.

The main disfiguration of the text that has happened in its history is that the PHARMACOLOGICAL section has been displaced. It belongs with the herbal material at the front of the work but has been shifted to the rear half of the work. At the same time, the NYMPH section has been disconnected from the text only pages we find at the end of the work (Quire 20), the section erroneously described as the "Recipe" section.

The binding that has happened has been unintelligent and done by people only interested in the conservation of the work but without any insight into its proper internal organisation.

Indeed, the original work was not bound (stitched) at all. It was folded.  It was disfigured when it was brought into the form of a codex and stitched together. There was no need to stitch it in its original form: it was an ensemble of folded sheets. Its original form was lost when it was bound and turned into a collectable.

*Page one of the manuscript is an introduction added to the completed work and was not part of the Herbal corpus. (Note the absence of the glyph [q] on this page. It is a separate composition.)

*The Herbal text that has been lost was in the gap between page 58v and 65r. This was to the Herbal corpus what the star text (Quire 20) was to the Nympha corpus.

*The circles had an original, intelligent sequence - the circles were supposed to be consulted in a certain sequence - but this has been lost in the manuscript's current form.







R.B.