Our manuscript is carbon dated – for sure - to the first half of the 1400s.
This should have been the end of an assortment of hypotheses such as the modern forgery proposals and proposals that place it in the New World. But it takes more than carbon dating to deter a Voynichero and such proposals persist, regardless.
Less obstinate are those who have adjusted their view of the manuscript in the light of the dating or who have minor quibbles with the size of the historical window.
Carbon dating is not exact. It is necessarily only a set of probabilities. The sample was very small. There are many limitations to the method…
All the same, the results cannot be too far wrong. The official result was that the sample was from 1404 to 1438, with a 95% probability.
This allows wiggle room either side of those dates, but not much. We could stretch it to, say, 1400-1440 for the sake of neat numbers.
As it happened, there were several sober and respected opinions who were surprised the window was not slightly later.
They had their hearts set on the influence of Trithemius, but he wasn’t born until 1462. The official window is somewhat too early to put the work in a much more interesting age of more advanced cryptography.
Some of the scenarios I have considered are also slightly too late – 1450s – about a dozen or so years outside the window.
There are a range of hypotheses, linguistic, cryptological and otherwise, that would look better with a dating in the second half of the quattrocento.
But the carbon dating says the first half and leaves little room to quibble.
* * *
So what, of relevance, happened inside the window?
Our window is 1400-1440.
If we are sloppy we might call it “the first half of the quattrocento.”
And where?
We are less certain about where than when – ink analysis just places the work in Europe by ruling out exotic ingredients – but let us go with the majority opinion and say: Italy.
So the question becomes what, of relevance, happened inside the window 1400-1440 with Italy as our probable locus?
* * *
Before anything else, one feature of our window needs to be noted from the outset: it is the period on the cusp of the invention of the printing press.
The Gutenberg Bible was 1455.
The Voynich ms. was therefore made in a period when there was already attempts at printing, using glass type and other experiments, in Italy as well as Germany, and elsewhere.
It is, however, a handwritten manuscript, prepared by a small team of scribes, ink on vellum, with medieval technology.
All the same, it would be remiss not to note that our window is a period of invention and change in the realm of books.
* * *
Taking an overview of this period, one thing stands out as the defining historical current of that age.
We can point to various political and social changes in Italy at the time, but the zeitgeist was defined by the impending geopolitical collapse of what was left of Byzantium.
That is to say, Ottoman expansion.
In Italy, and Roman Christendom more broadly, there was the question of how to respond to Ottoman expansion, as well as the influx of Greek emigres as the vestiges of the once great Byzantine empire finally crumbled.
Our histories tend to focus upon the final collapse of Constantinople and its aftermath, but those events were a culmination of events extending back decades, exactly into our window.
Byzantium didn’t fall suddenly, overnight. It was a long and disruptive process.
The great wave of Greek scholars and emigres occurred slightly after our Voynich window, but scholars, artisans, clergy, traders, merchants and others had already started to drift westwards to escape Ottoman expansion in the decades prior.
In fact, we see evidence that Greek artisans were working in Italian workshops and studios at much earlier dates, bringing changes in religious iconography.
The waves of westwards cultural transmission began, in reality, as early as the Battle of Acre in the 1290s, after which the Crusader States and the pilgrimage to the Holy Land were increasingly compromised.
Earlier, many eastern religious orders, the Carmelites, the Hospitallers, and most famously the Templars, relocated from the Near East into Europe.
The impending fall of Byzantium as the mid-quattrocento approached was the latest geopolitical realignment in the east that brought a cultural shift westwards, with far reaching implications.
* * *
The early Renaissance was, almost by definition, a cultural revolution in Italy brought about by the influx and influence of Greek and other elements from the east moving westwards under geopolitical pressures.
This is to present western Christendom as a passive recipient of a dynamic oriental influence, and it overlooks indigenous and intrinsic developments in late medieval Catholicism, but it is not an unwarranted generalization.
Our Voynich window was a period of crisis marked by acute east/west realignments and adjustments.
Specifically, it saw fevered attempts to unite the Latin and Orthodox Churches in a common front against the Turks. It was a period of intense diplomacy.
Internally, these attempts coincided with disputes to define the power and position of the papacy.
These are the macro-historical tides of the period.
* * *
In the intellectual world, an important feature of our window was the humanist movement, dedicated to secular learning and the recovery of Classical knowledge from both Latin and Greek sources.
It has earlier roots but develops important literary manifestations exactly in the relevant period.
* * *
As it happened, the attempts to heal the Great Schism of the Roman and Orthodox Churches culminated in a brief agreement in the 1440s, but ultimately failed.
So too did attempts to curtail the authority of the papacy in favor of a church ruled by Ecumenical Councils.
It was a period of constructive ecclesiastical reform – cleaning up the abuses that had developed in the Middle Ages – but reform tended to mean standardization and centralization to Rome.
These were matters that were settled during our historical window:
*There was no effective response to the Ottomans,
*East/West dialogue failed, and
*The supremacy of the Roman pontiff was reasserted.
They were fateful settlements that, taking the longer view, all stirred the ground for the Protestant Revolt a century later.
Our Italian locus, though, underlines the encounter with the Greek East, most obviously through trading and diplomatic ports like Venice.
There were high level delegations that went to meet the Byzantine authorities and Orthodox clergy.
There was an influx of Greek texts, and most importantly the recovery of ancient and classical works in Greek.
Again, this began in earnest a decade or so later than our window, but it had certainly already begun before 1440 and was already having a deep impact on north Italian intellectual life.
Notably, the Greek world was more overtly Platonic – with the Platonist Plethon its beacon - than the more Aristotelean West, and Platonism (or Neoplatonism) emerged as a new intellectual force.
At the same time, this Greek influence inevitably brought with it learning and sciences and ideas from the Arab intellectual world.
Once more: the westwards movement of ideas from the eastern world was a centuries long process, moving in waves, but our historical window – 1400-1440 – saw an acute phase of this brought about by the crisis of Ottoman expansion.
The final collapse of Byzantium came in the 1450s, but Constantinople had been besieged by the Turks in the 1420s.
The Byzantine-Venetian port of Thessaloniki fell to the Ottomans in 1430, a defining event in the middle of our window.
In effect, by our terminus date, 1440, Turkish victory had long been inevitable.
Some, like the formidable Neoplatonist polymath Bessarion, saw the writing on the wall and moved west directly into the midst of Latin intellectual life.
* * *
It is not a controversial reading of the Voynich manuscript to place it in northern Italy, to designate it ‘Humanist’ in style, and relate it to the herbal manuscripts produced in the given time period.
The Italian herbals typically rehearsed the traditional Greek materia medica, celebrating the authority of ancient Greek sources.
All the same, our manuscript is profoundly eccentric and is not a comfortable fit in any particular lineage.
Nor is it controversial to see it as containing exotic material, most obviously by way of star lore and astronomy. This star lore is routinely described as ‘Arabic’ and was a matter of great interest to occidental scholars, along with accompanying medical and other scientific material.
It is highly arguable that we see such materials in the Voynich manuscript, albeit an eccentric presentation that defies ready analysis.
It is nevertheless entirely in keeping with the intellectual climate of the period, and the broader drift of things, to see a meeting of east and west in the Voynich, as much as we can tell from its illustrations and diagrams.
It is not an ecclesiastical work, and does not seem to participate in or allude to the contemporary politics of the Church. It is not pro-papal, or otherwise, on appearances.
It is a case of the secular reception of a body of eastern knowledge, with scientific or cosmological interests.
It might, though, conceivably participate in matters of concern in the struggle to find agreement between the Latins and Orthodox.
In the centre of the Voynich
‘map’, the so-called Rosette foldout, we see distinctly eastern architect, but evidently, from other details such as Ghiberline fortifications, imported into a north Italian context.
The map, in particular, tells us that there is some mode of east/west transfer in the work.
On one reading of the map it reflects the relocation of pilgrimage from Jerusalem to substitutes in the Italian landscape.
It prefigures the ‘Nine Sacred Mountains’ tradition in northern Italy by which the symbolic topography of the Holy Land was superimposed upon a local landscape, an eastern landscape imposed upon a western one.
The ‘Nine Mountains’ substitute pilgrimage was, again, formalized in the second half of the quattrocento, but its development at a popular or folk level began in the first half.
In any case, the map displays a very eastern conception of Jerusalem and its symbolism is a development of themes more typical of Orthodox than Latin theology.
The need to reconfigure the devotions of pilgrimage became an acute and pressing matter during our historical window as the situation in the eastern Mediterranean – Ottoman expansion – deteriorated and closed access to the Holy Sepulchre.
On the face of it, the Voynich map can be placed in such a context. The manuscript addresses that contemporary concern and is visibly drawing upon eastern perspectives.
* * *
An issue of contention between the Churches was the calculation of Easter and other differences in the calendar.
Sections of the Voynich ms. seem devoted to solar and lunar cycles and might conceivably be an exercise in reconciling different calendars.
There were earnest attempts, and much devoted study, at reconciling the soli-lunar reckonings of east and west and devising a universal calendar.
* * *
Other issues of contention, more theological, were deemed to be largely linguistic, and so – in our historical window – there was new attention to Greek/Latin interlinguistics, seeking to overcome their differences.
Nicholas of Cusa, one of the great minds of the period – exactly contemporary with our window – was one of the first scholars to master Greek and was of the view that the differences between the Churches were largely misunderstandings of language.
It is proper to suppose this to be a period of some linguistic experimentalism, with attempts to accommodate oriental tongues and terminology into a Latin framework.
The most conspicuous feature of the Voynich ms., of course, is its otherwise unknown script, and its impenetrable language, or languages, (if indeed they are languages at all.)
It is, if nothing else, a linguistic experiment of some kind.
By some expert accounts the script draws, in part, upon Greek manuscript glyphs and conventions.
This might be contested, but it is not wrong to draw attention to the Greek/Latin linguistic ferment necessitated by the urgent need to see the Western and Eastern Churches unite and to note that it as an acute reality in our historical window.
Certainly, the language of our manuscript is the product of a person of deep literacy, wide learning and linguistic skill and in the context such a person must have been sensitive to new learning from the east.
A related feature of the linguistic climate was the advancement of national and vernacular languages – the preferred direction of those who placed the Councils of the Church over papal authority.
A strange, sustained, linguistic invention such as ‘Voynichese’ emerges from that wider context.
Or, similarly, if the text is cryptological in nature, then it is relevant that in our permitted historical window there were intense diplomatic manoeuvres that made encryption a matter of new interest for secular and church powers alike.
Again: the real advances in cryptology came in the latter half of the century, just outside our window, but there was active experimentalism within our window.
Giovanni Fontana composed an entire book in cipher, right in the middle of our time period.
* * *
All of this, of course, is necessarily only a sketch, and it omits and overlooks any number of other important factors, but it is not an inaccurate depiction of the strongest cultural currents in the period.
Whatever domestic currents were moving in our window, they were being shaped by the epoch-making events unfolding in the east.
The Voynich manuscript comes from that milieu.
Context. Context. Context. Any full consideration of the Voynich ms. must begin by placing it in its context, and the carbon dating has given us the solid context 1400-1440.
It must fit into its historical window.
There are attempts to explain the work as fully indigenous to Europe – as an account of northern paganism, for example – with a locus other than Italy – but it is hard to explain its content – the star lore, the map and so on -without reference to a much more cosmopolitan frame.
We can understand the manuscript’s content, in a general way, in terms of the reception, absorption, the appropriation of materials entering the Italian intellectual world from the east during the long, protracted fall of Byzantium.
In the case of the Voynich, though, ‘hybrid vigor’ has produced a very strange specimen.
R.B.
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