Lisa Fagin Davis
@lisafdavis
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Executive Director, @medievalacademy ; @simmonsslis prof; paleographer, codicologist, manuscript blogger; PhD; @brownuniversity @Yale alum
Joined April 2009
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OK, people, you worked hard to get me to 10K followers, so here is your reward! An epic 62-Tweet thread about the
#Voynich
manuscript coming your way, starting NOW!
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I will reveal the absolute, definitive solution to the
#Voynich
manuscript at the end of this thread.
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Let this be a lesson to you all: do NOT mess with archivists.
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What am I supposed to do with an 18-page typed
#Voynich
manifesto sent to me by a retired NSA cryptologist who believes that the manuscript was written by a late-Italian community of lesbians trying to use their knowledge of the occult to reproduce parthenogenetically?
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The Special Collections library at the University of Cape Town burned in a wildfire today. Many of these important African history collections have been digitized, but much of the original materials are now likely lost. Heartbreaking.
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Hi, I'm the Executive Director of
@MedievalAcademy
. You might know me from my greatest hits, including these actual things I have said on the phone: "Sorry, we don't teach archery"; "Actually, Speculum is not a journal of obstetrics"; "That's M-E-D-I-E-V-A-L."
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Please don't refer to the early Middle Ages (or any part of the Middle Ages) as "The Dark Ages." The ten centuries from the Fall of Rome to Gutenberg (my preferred bookends) weren't all unicorns & rainbows, but they weren't all "dark" either. They were full of humans being human.
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Well, you asked for it, so here it is: a brief history of the mighty ampersand!
#BreakfastPaleography
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"The death of Richard III is considered the end of the medieval era." Actually, I'm pretty sure every medievalist has their own "end of the medieval era." For me - a book historian - it's Gutenberg. OK,
#MedievalTwitter
, on your mark, get set, GO:
Died today in 1485: Richard III, King of England: Killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field
The death of Richard III is considered the end of the medieval era
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Ever heard of Cistercian numerals? I hadn’t either until yesterday, and after hours of diving down lots of rabbit holes, I’m here to tell you all about this fascinating chapter in the story of medieval numeration!
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Today is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, who is absolutely definitely and for real the patron saint of illegible handwriting. Here's his script in Vatican Library, Vat. Lat. 9850, written 1260-1265.
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Remember that time when the
#Avengers
went to
@BeineckeLibrary
because a villain named Diablo had absconded with the
#Voynich
Manuscript? When they caught him, he said he needed it for alchemical research and Vision noted he could have just read it online.
#ThisIsWhyWeDigitize
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This is really important. History matters. The Humanities matter. Did you see those guys waving Templar flags? The guy in the horn-helmet? The misappropriative imagery from medieval, Nordic, and Native American cultures is pervasive among white supremacists and it is dangerous.
Somewhere right now there’s a university administrator tweeting “this is unprecedented” while trying to get rid of his Classics and Religion departments
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YES! 1052 pages of paleography (or should I say "palaeography") greatness!
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Here's the big takeaway for me from
#Receptiogate
: if you plagierize, intentionally or not, & someone calls you out, respond in a way that will not cause the internet to dig further & turn you into a trending hashtag: "Thank you for letting me know! I'll fix that right away."
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1. First things first. The
#Voynich
manuscript (VMS from now on) is a real object. Please always keep that in mind! It is a medieval manuscript (more on that in a minute) that belongs to the
@BeineckeLibrary
at Yale University, where it has been MS 408 since it was given in 1969.
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I know we're all obsessed with the stream of discoveries about
#receptiogate
, the revolving-door website updates, & Rossi's doubling-down claims of innocence that are easily disproven, but I also want to talk about her
#fragmentoogy
work, which is troubling in several respects...
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To journalists writing about medieval vs. modern 1) plague, 2) race, 3) climate, 4) anything: please talk to an actual medievalist. Your assumptions are almost certainly incorrect. There are 3500 medievalists in the
@medievalacademy
database. We can connect you with an expert.
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I am thrilled to announce that I have been appointed as a Lecturer
@Yale
for the spring 2021 semester, teaching a weekly graduate seminar in Latin Paleography
@BeineckeLibrary
! I'll be spending one day each week in New Haven. I am so excited...it's a real homecoming!
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47. Want to see for yourself? The entire manuscript is digitized in a high-resolution open-access viewer here:
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This gave me chills.
@mjc_associates
shows medieval grafitti inscriptions imaged for
@medievalg
project, including this one in an English church, inscribed in plague-year 1348: "God help me"
#DarkArchives
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3. The Voynich Manuscript is written in an unknown alphabet apparently encoding an unidentified language, embellished with astonishing botanical, astronomical, and biological illustrations.
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I just learned that King Arthur once knighted Superman and Batman. My life will never be the same.
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After years of development, we are very proud to launch the
@MedievalAcademy
Database of Medieval Digital Resources! So far, 130 online resources have been vetted for inclusion. If you don't see your favorites yet, use the website's Recommendation Form to submit them for review!
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Say hello to Dulcia, a nun/scribe who signed Laon, Municipal Library MS 423 in the first half of the eighth century. IMHO, this manuscript is *chefs kiss*. Time for some
#nuntastic
#BreakfastPaleography
!
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2. I have seen it on multiple occasions and can confirm this. It is not imaginary. It is not fake. It is not a gift from aliens. But what IS it?
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Say hello to the
@biblissima
@IIIFramework
cross-collection engine! Search more than 65,000 records from nine collections of IIIF-compliant digitized pre-1800 manuscripts and rare books! Metadata elements & authorities clustered and normalized. BRILLIANT!
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If this doesn't convince you to survey your library's early bindings, I don't know what will! To repeat, loudly: This fragment was found pasted inside a 17th-c. binding. It was written in the early 8th c. AT BEDE'S MONASTERY and DURING HIS LIFETIME.
#fragmentology
This extraordinary fragment of Bede's De ratione temporum was discovered in 1975 in a paste-down of a 16th c. book. Dated to c. 725 and written in Wearmouth-Jarrow, it was created in Bede's monastery and during his lifetime.
#medievaltwitter
Darmstadt Hs-4262
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I am heartbroken to report that our treasured and beloved colleague Will Noel died yesterday from injuries sustained in a traffic accident in Edinburgh. It is hard to imagine a world, and a medieval studies, without him. 🧵
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9. This large foldout attracts a lot of attention but also has resisted interpretation. The video shows its codicological structure.
I made a short film (:45) to show the codicological features of the magnificent
#Voynich
Rosettes foldout, so if you're interested, here it is. (full screen is best)
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6. First, the contents. The codex begins with with 66 folios of botanical illustrations and accompanying texts. The fantastic and impossibly elaborate plants have resisted any attempts to fully and reliably identify them.
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OK, brace yourselves, because here comes a REALLY LONG THREAD on liturgical calendars, starring the great Sherborne Missal (a.k.a.
@BLMedieval
Add MS 74236):
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7. Next comes a series of astrological and astronomical diagrams, including ten circular diagrams surrounding signs of the zodiac (two are missing). The miniature naked women standing in baskets who populate the rest of the manuscript make their first appearance in this section.
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4. Cryptologists and mathematicians and linguists worldwide have been studying this manuscript for hundreds of years, and no one has ever offered a satisfactory solution to the enigma that is the Voynich.
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13. Now let’s talk about Voynichese. There are around 25 symbols that are used throughout the manuscript with different frequencies, and a few that are extremely rare. All of the common symbols can be seen "in the wild" on the slide at right:
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It's
#HugAMedievalist
Day and I really miss you fine people. Sending virtual hugs to anyone who needs one.
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15. Voynichologists have developed an ASCII substitution alphabet for Voynichese that allows you to transcribe the manuscript in a machine-readable way. The Extensible Voynich Alphabet (EVA) is used by Voynichologists worldwide.
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This is simply splendid in every way. Let's hear it for ancient librarians and for the great Carl Sagan, and let's say it one more time, nice and loud for the people in the back: ANCIENT FOLKS KNEW THE EARTH WAS ROUND (and that includes medieval folks, too).
This still gives me chills.
Ingenious.
Carl Sagan explains how the Ancient Greeks, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria, inferred that the Earth was round and calculated its circumference 2200 years ago. 240BC
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18. Linguists also look at word frequencies, looking for patterns that may help determine what KIND of language Voynichese represents. Here are the top 100ish VMS “words,” showing how Voynichese obeys a linguistic axion known as Zipf’s Law (look it up):
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This is Mary.
Mary is punching the devil in the face.
Be like Mary.
(
@BLMedieval
Add. MS 49999, "The De Brailes Hours," f. 40v)
The Virgin Mary punching the devil in the face, 'The De Brailes Hours', Oxford ca. 1240
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8. The next section seems to depict women bathing, and has been interpreted as relating to balneology, the medieval practice of medicinal bathing. It also includes what may be biological illustrations having to do with gynecology or women's health.
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10. Next is a series of leaves and foldouts that may depict recipes and ingredients, with a few more botanical illustrations as well.
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Now, where were we? Oh, yes. No. 28. Paleography is the study of the history of handwriting. It involves 3 skillsets: attribution (establishing date/place of origin by comparison); literacy (learning to read unfamiliar scripts); and description (distinguishing between scribes).
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@anggarrgoon
27. I am NOT a linguist or a cryptologist. I am a paleographer and codicologist, with a lengthy track record of studying, cataloguing, and analyzing medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. That is how I approach my work on the manuscript.
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5. The VMS is an unassuming little mess. Dealer Wilfrid Voynich, for whom it is named, called it an “ugly duckling,” & you can see why! Measuring 225 x 160 mm, the manuscript currently comprises 102 leaves (at least 14 leaves are missing), including several multi-page fold-outs.
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31. The upshot is that I was able to identify distinguishing features of five different scribes and track each scribe’s work throughout the manuscript:
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Sorry, folks, "proto-Romance language" is not a thing. This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense.
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16. Here’s the EVA transcript of f. 2r. Important note: this is NOT a decryption! It is an ASCII-character substitution for machine-readability only!
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14. The linguists and cryptologists who have studied the VMS use strategies such as analyzing word and letter frequencies to conduct their analyses. But the uniqueness of Voynichese makes this process difficult. So Voynichologists have an interim step.
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Beneath the cover of the
#Voynich
you can clearly see the sewing supports and quire structure, as well as evidence of repairs both early and modern. 600 years of history laid bare!
@BeineckeLibrary
#codicology
#TheBonesOfTheBook
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Also, Happy International Hug-a-Medievalist Day! (it's a thing, look it up)
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The death of Terry Jones is a real gut punch. Many of you may not know that he was a published medievalist. He was a life member of
@MedievalAcademy
, and somewhere buried in a drawer in my desk I have a personal note from him signed "Without compliments, Terry Jones."
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This is a very cool example of a bilingual scribe using different letterforms for each language...note the Latin [g] and the Middle English [g]!
Look closely. This 12th-century gospelbook, written in Middle English, bears the signatures of two later owners on its first page.
One was Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury; the other was John Lumley.
Royal MS 1 A XIV, f. 3r
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25. This is the kind of evidence that linguists and computational analysts like
@anggarrgoon
and
@DrCLayfield
use to draw conclusions about the linguistic properties of Voynichese. Is it a real language? Is it gibberish? Is it an invented language like Elvish or Dothraki?
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21. And gallows can be combined with OTHER gallows to create even more interesting characters:
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26. In this article,
@anggarrgoon
and Luke Lindemann argue that Voynichese represents an actual human language; we just don’t know which one.
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12. The few lines on the final page (f. 116v) are roughly contemporary with the manuscript but are written in what appears to be a Germanic language, with some Voynichese thrown in for good measure.
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Can't tell Formata from Quadrata? Distinguishing Praescissa and Rotunda giving you headache? I'm here for you! Here's my Littera Gothica Textualis cheatsheet (you'll have to wait 'til next week if you want to work on bâtarde vs. cursive!):
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Mid-12th-c Germanic Psalter
@BeineckeLibrary
(cataloguing in-process, so no official shelfmark yet) with a slightly later pastedown covering even later spineliners! So much
#fragmentology
goodness...
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Stood in awe at the Valþjófsstaður door at the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik. 13th-c. wooden door tells the story of Yvain and the Lion (c-clkwise from bottom): 1) Yvain saves Lion from Dragon; 2) Yvain & Lion become devoted companions; 3) Lion mourns at Yvain's grave.
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19. Some of the most unusual and (for my work) interesting glyphs are these four, known as “gallows” characters. In EVA, these are (clockwise from UR) [f], [p], [t], and [k].
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20. These can also be interfixed into a “bench” to create combos like this:
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OMG they found a hnefatafl game piece at Lindesfarne!!! Apparently you can't raid a monastic enclave without your hnefatafl set. I have played hnefatafl, by the way, and I am really really bad at it.
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11. The final section is purely textual, with 12 (of at least 14) leaves of starred paragraphs.
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22. Fifty years ago, a scholar named Prescott Currier noticed patterns in groups of leaves that he called “Language A” and “Language B”. I tend to refer to these differences as “dialects” rather than languages, since they aren’t HUGE differences.
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Now that you
#receptiogate
obsessives know all about
#fragmentology
, say hello to my
@SimmonsSLIS
students'
@FragmentariumMS
reconstruction of
#OttoEge
no. 45, an early 15th-c. French Book of Hours that Ege dismembered in the 1940s. This is how we do it!
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45. Can science help? Yes!
@BeineckeLibrary
commissioned carbon-14 testing and chemical analyses. The results: the parchment is almost certainly from the early 15th century, and the inks and pigments are consistent with medieval recipes.
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17. The more-than-2% letter-frequency chart looks like this:
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23. For example, this "benched gallows" character is quite common in Dialect A but is rare in Dialect B.
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24. And this combo is extremely common at the end of words in Dialect B but is extremely rare in Dialect A.
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Hello, new followers! Come for the
#Voynich
manuscript, stay for
@MedievalAcademy
news,
#MedievalTwitter
,
#fragmentology
, balcony sunsets, and my dog Baxter!
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Talk about burying the lede: this extraordinary manuscript was still whole when it was seized by the Nazis from the Rothschild family. It was a glorious and important object with a dazzling Persian provenance. It was war booty. It was restituted. And now it's in pieces. 🧵
Very disheartening to see
@GuardianBooks
publishing what is little more than a puff piece for the sale of this wonderful folio, with absolutely no mention of the problems associated with the sale of single folios.
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Criteria for a believable
#Voynich
"solution": 1) sound first principles; 2) reproducible by others; 3) conformance to linguistic and codicological facts; 4) text that makes sense; 5) logical correspondence of text and illustration. No one has checked all of those boxes yet.
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In other news, an archivist from the Center for Sacramento History just sent me images of their new-to-me Beauvais Missal leaf (no. 109!) AND A DRAWER FULL OF MISCELLANEOUS UNCATALOGUED SINGLE LEAVES. I feel weak.
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@BeineckeLibrary
46. That does not PROVE the VMS date and place of origin. It gives us a LIKELY date/place. Some argue that the parchment may be medieval but the manuscript is a modern forgery. I don’t agree – I think that the object is too complex, with too many layers, to be a modern fake.
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People! There is a life-size replica of the Bayeux Embroidery at
#MAA2018
! This is not a drill!
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43. "OK, Lisa, that’s all really interesting, but when and where was it produced? And what does it SAY?!" you ask. Well, friends, I am sorry to report that after centuries of study, we still don’t know for sure.
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Let's take a minute to remember that Thomas Becket was not only murdered by agents of King Henry II but was later cancelled by royal decree. In this
@HoughtonLib
Book of Hours (MS Richardson 34), his name on Dec. 29 was scraped away but later restored.
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I don't usually use "Dr." as my title, but I earned it, and today, I'm using it.
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This Thanksgiving, I've decided to share my secret family recipe for sweet potatoes.
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30. I applied paleographical theory to the VMS using a tool called ArchetypeInk, which allowed me to annote images of the VMS with discoverable tags, pulling the annotations into a “lightbox” for comparison. Here are a few screenshots:
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Phew! Thanks for joining me on this epic tour! I'm about to get on the subway for an hour or so, so it's a good time to
#AskMeAnything
about the VMS! Hit me up with your questions...but just FYI, I'm not here to tell you if your pet theory is right or wrong! Let's get to it...
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@leoba
34. The fact that in the botanical section the scribal work is by bifolium, not by quire or even by leaf, suggests that the bifolia are actually now bound out of order.
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44. The script has humanistic features that are similar to Italian manuscripts like this one
@TheHuntington
, so it seems likely that the MS was written in the NE Mediterranean region or Eastern Europe in the early 15th c., but we can't say for sure.
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35. And why does THAT matter? 1) understanding the collaborative nature of the VMS; 2) digging more deeply into linguistic variety among the scribes. Every bit of evidence helps the linguists and cryptologists, all of which gets us closer to reading the damn thing.
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41. Voynich spent the remainder of his life trying to sell the manuscript, with no success. He brought in medievalists, cryptologists, and linguists to study it. No one could read it, and no one would buy it.
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Medievalists spent a lot of necessary time this week pointing out the dangers of alt-right misappropriation of medieval symbols, fully on view during the Capitol siege. Today, escape with me from the horrors of the day by deep-diving into some medieval manuscripts...
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49. Want to get started on your own research? Do the reading first! Start here:
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29. To apply the principles of paleographical analysis to the VMS, we are limited by two facts: 1) this is the only example of this writing, so there’s nothing to compare it to; and 2) no one can read it. So we can’t employ attribution or literacy. How about description?
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I just spent 90 minutes lecturing on the Sarajevo Haggadah and I will never not be utterly enchanted by that manuscript and its story...
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