Circle Section

It is not noted often enough that the middle section of the Voynich manuscript, as presently arranged, is a collection of circles. There are the usual tussles about these pages: astronomy or astrology, clouds or constellations? Regardless, circles. There is an obvious design feature that unites this entire section: circles. They depict different things but they are all circles. I'm inclined to refer to it just as the Circle Section, to save all arguments.

it is very easy to identify, and it is very easy to lift this section out of the text. It is freestanding and independent. It has every appearance of being a coherent section inserted into the middle of the codex between the Herbal corpus and the Nympha corpus.

 

 

I refer to this section of material as APPARATUS. The circles, I take it, are intended to be consulted. The map and its circles are separate again. The circle on page f57v is the only circle out of place.

* * *

I am generally unmoved by paleography and don't care much about "hands" and "scribes". The simplest, unspectacular conclusion to reach from the handwriting is that several scribes worked on it - a whole basketball team of scribes, according to some. But so what? That is what one might expect in a manuscript workshop. I doubt it tells us anything important, except perhaps that the author was probably not the scribe but instead employed several scribes to produce the work at some expense.

The dialects of the Voynich language are another matter. as is well known, there are two distinguishable variants of the language, A and B. Regrettably, these have been known as "languages" but this is surely misleading. They are far more like dialects of the same language than two separate languages. They are substantially the same, but have some distinguishing features. Nor are they set in stone but overlap in places - there are pages where the characteristics of A and B are mixed.

Some want to have the dialects "evolve". This is going a bit far. A and B are quite distinct, and the intermediate forms are largely confined to one section - the Circles - where A and B are mixed. Outside of the Circles inset pages of A and B are easily identifiable. Nothing "evolves".

We can see clearly in the chart I have adapted below that the mixed section corresponds to the Circle Apparatus section. The distribution of dialects A and B is, I think, clear enough. The division is as follows:

Dialect A

*Herbal corpus, including the Pharmacaological (Canister) section

Dialect B

*Nympha corpus, including the Star text at the end
*A small sub-section of the Herbal/Pharmacological material

The middle section - the Circles - placed between these two broad corpora (Herbal and Nympha) are indeterminate in regards dialect. This further underlines the way in which this section acts to join the two corpora together.

 

 Conclusions:

The work consists of two bodies (corpora) of material, the Herbal corpus and the Nympha corpus. See this page here. These have been brought together with an apparatus of CIRCLES joining them together. The two corpora are in different dialects, A and B, but the joining section, the Circles, presents a mixture of A and B. That is the simplest account of it.


R.B.