Re: Why not Dee?

[Karl Kluge <kckluge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree that the evidence for Dee being connected to the Voynich Mss. is
tenuous. A couple points to add to the discussion:

1) The mystery of the "630 gold doucats." Brumbaugh says, "My friend,
S. W. Dunwell, discovered an entry in Dee's _Diary_ for 1586 that Dee,
then without funds and living in Trebona, had received '630 gold doucats.'"
There is no endnote giving a specific citation. I just got back from the
graduate library here at U of M, looking through

 Author: Dee, John, 1527-1608.
 Title:  The private diary of Dr. John Dee, and the catalogue of his library 
         of manuscripts, from the original manuscripts in the Ashmolean Museum
         at Oxford, and Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
 Published: London, Printed for the Camden Society by J. B. Nichols & son, 1842

The entries for 1586 cover roughly a single page of text, and I could find no
trace of an entry mentioning "630 gold doucats." There is an entry for Oct. 18
saying, "E.K. recessit a Trebona versus Pragam curru delatus; mansit hic per 
tres hebdomadas." Perhaps Kelly acted as the go-between if a transaction with
Rudolph did take place. 

The English entries for 1587 mentioning ducats use the spellings "duckettes,"
"duckats," and "duckatts," but no use that I could see of "doucats" as a
spelling. The memorandum quoted on Rafel's page in is Latin and does not
include the phrase "630 gold doucats." Is this in the Diary Mss and for some
reason was omitted from the published edition?

2) The Thomas Browne quote, "That this transmutation was made by a powder they
had, which was found in some old place, and a book lying by it containing
nothing but heiroglyphicks; which book his father bestowed much time upon, but
I could not hear that he could make it out." It is clear that *something* has
been conflated with the Book of St. Dunstan here, but the identity of the
"book...containing nothing but heiroglyphics; which book [Dee] bestowed much
time upon" remains unclear. Rafel says on his web page:

   before. That this   The statement that the book contained "nothing but"
   transmutation was   hieroglyphics cannot refer to VMS for one more reason.
   made by a powder    To a 7-9 years old boy VMS would surely be more
   they had, which     interesting for its colourful pictures and -- obviously
   was found in some   -- naked women than rather dull strings of letter-like
   old place, and a    characters.
   book lying by it
   containing          Can the inconsistency in Browne's letter be explained?
   nothing but         It is actually quite easy. John Dee himself mentions in
   heiroglyphicks;     his diary the book containing nothing but hieroglyphics
   which book his      -- not a cypher, however, but alchemical images, which
   father bestowed     are more consistent with Arthur Dee's relation. The book
   much time upon,     was Angelicum Opus -- "all in pictures of the work from
   but I could not     the beginning to the end" [4]. The young Arthur
   hear that he        remembered the book of pictures (which must have
   could make it       appealed to his imagination) and his father's and
   out. He said also   Kelley's conversations about an alchemical book found
   that Kelley         "in an old place" together with the powder they used for
   dealth not justly   transmutations. After half a century, when he talked
   by his father,      about it with Browne, those two books became one -- or
   and that he went    after another 30 years Browne confused the two.

One thing that always annoys me is the extent to which people tend to think of
the Biological B folios when thinking of the Mss. While this is likely due to
the frequency with which they are used to illustrate the Mss in articles, they
are hardly representative. Also, while it's been a while since I was a 7-9
year old boy, I'm not sure that age group is particularly taken by images of
naked women (especially someone in a culture where artistic depictions of bare
chested women were by no means uncommon, and therefore less taboo and
forbidden, and therefore less pruriently interesting).

Plus, it seems somewhat odd to reject the identification of the "book...
containing nothing but heiroglyphicks" with the Voynich on the grounds that
a 7-9 year old would find it more interesting for its pictures and then
argue for an identification of it with a book containing nothing but pictures
and no text at all.

In short, while I agree that we can't see this as a clear reference to the
Voynich, neither am I willing to accept that it's not a plausible 
identification.

3) The hundred ducat "Arabik boke" and the impressiveness of a 600 ducat
price. Based on the discussion with Il on April 18, 1583, this "Arabik boke"
would appear to be the Book of Soyga.  Given Dee's strong interest in the
contents of that book (and it's comparative scarcity -- only two surviving
mss), that to some extent calibrates the value of magical mss at the time. A
magical text worth six times the value of the Book of Soyga would be nothing
to sneeze at.

4) Other candidates to have brought it to the court of Rudolph: how about
Tycho Brahe, whose books were bought after his death in 1601 by the Emperor?
Or if we favor an Italian origin for the mss, how about Jacopo di Strada of
Mantua (d. 1585 in Prague), whose collection (along with that of Max. II) was
the nucleus of Rudolph's Kunstkammer?

Karl