VMs: The manuscripts of Rudolph II

["Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is probably well known to the historians on the list but I found
out a few days ago that a number of alchemical manuscripts from the
collection of emperor Rudolph II are preserved at the University of
Leiden with much other material of the same sort from Bohemia: the
collection is Codices Vossiani Chymici and 11 of the manuscripts are
definitely known to have belonged to Rudolph.

The collection was assembled by the Swedish armies which pillaged
Bohemia in the 1640s and sent to the royal library in Stockholm. When
Queen Christina abdicated in 1654 she made a parting gift of
manuscripts to the scholar Isaaac Vossius, a classicist who did not
want the alchemical manuscripts and tried unsuccessfully to sell them.
When he died in 1689 his entire collection of classical and alchemical
manuscripts was bought by the University of Leiden where they remain
today.

The 11 manuscripts are run of the mill alchemical literature: none is
enciphered, and they are all of 16th and 17th century date. However, it
occurs to me that it might be interesting to identify them in the
Kunstkammer catalogue of Rudolph's collection, matching their actual
contents with what Rudolph thought their contents were. If, as I
suspect, he was a gullible man who believed his collection to be far
older than it really was, it would lay to rest the association of the
Voynich manuscript with Roger Bacon, a story for which Rudolph is the
sole authority.

Rene used to have a copy of the Kunstkammer catalogue on his site, but
it seems to have disappeared.

Philip Neal



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