Re: VMs: f1r symbols - wild idea?

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Colin,

At 20:21 07/07/2003 +0100, Colin Robson wrote:
> just as a crazy wild idea... could the first page represent some kind of 
> contents page?... with the first red symbol looks like a plant in the 
> ground... and the second symbol looks like some kind of jar with smoke 
> coming out (possibly representing alchemy...

Could be... though the first page of many similar manuscripts often 
contains a dedication to a patron or sponsor (o most illustrious patron, 
from whom all light doth shine etc), and I guess that's just as likely 
here. :--)

>  at the end of each of the paragraphs there is a separate right justified 
> piece of text... could this represent the section author? if i remember 
> rightly it has been mentioned that certain pages/sections look like they 
> have been written by different people.

It's not pushing the boat of plausibility out too far to suspect that the 
VMS is an encrypted set of (heterogeneous) MS by a plurality of authors (if 
you'll forgive my patent drafting trope), rather than a single monolithic 
document by a lone gunman. :-)

As for the right-indented text: Philip Neal once pointed out to me that 
this kind of thing also appears in several other places, such as (flicks 
through the CopyFlo) f8r [!!], f19v, f25r (start of quire 4), f28v, f31r, 
f39r, f42r [!!], f85r [start of quire 14], f86r, and f114r.

There are also centred pieces of floating text on f9r, f18r, f22v, f24r, 
f27r, f40v [end of quire 5], f58v, and f105r.

> The first folio page has four of these paragraphs... possibly representing 
> herbs, alchemy/pharmaceutical, astrology and biological? each with a 
> seperate author?

It's a nice observation - given that we don't know all the authors, one 
idea might be turn the words into possible section-name cribs ("herbal, 
astrology, water, pharma") in (say) Latin, English, and Italian (leaving 
Occitan and Chinese out *just* for the moment), and see where that leads. :-)

Like Enigma messages starting "Heil Hitler", one possible weakness of the 
VMS' very first page might possibly be intellectual smugness on the part of 
the encoder, who might have inserted a message on the first page addressed 
specifically to us. If we can predict this message (even in part), we might 
be able to use that as a lever into the code... unlikely, but you never 
know. :-o

Back to right justified pieces of text: Philip Neal and I both once 
wondered whether, given the apparently low error-rate in the VMS, these 
might have been addenda or corrections, added at a later date? However, 
looking at them again (in the cold light of day), the ink weight (etc) and 
hand suggest to me that they were in fact very contemporaneous.

But that's not ~quite~ the end of it: the corrections could have been made 
in the original MS (and then encrypted faithfully), so the 
floating-text-as-corrections hypothesis is still in the running too. :-)

> or am i going crazy from looking at this manuscript?!

Looking at it won't drive you mad - however, trying to make sense of it 
probably will. :-o

To stay sane, I'd suggest sticking to one observation at a time, and 
developing the logic of what that might imply right as far as you can take 
it. Works for me, anyway. :-)

This of course depends on how sane you think I am. :-(

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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