VMs: Some ramblings (was: Another VMS herbal lookalike)

["Maurizio M. Gavioli" <mmg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 20:55 13/02/2004 +0100, Elmar Vogt wrote:
> > > Fol44r is interesting. Along with the following pages, it looks like the 
> > > "key
> > > pages" found in the VM.
> >
> > Well, it seems to me a rather regular list of local names (sp.?) ("Other 
> > [call it] "partemeon", French [call it] "oblaodia", other "diocolofam", 
> > Neapolitan "obulatia"...)
>
> Indeed it is -- if you can read it. But don't you see the resemblance to 
> the VM key pages with a single letter seperate in front of the lines?
>
> So perhaps the VM key pages don't provide a key to the decipherment, but 
> are a similar list of... something. That was my idea; just looking for 
> analogies.
> ...
> Again, imagine this book was the VM for someone else. The problem _for us_ 
> is not to read the latin. But imagine somebody (say, an Arab) couldn't 
> read latin letters, but had only some empirical idea of our alphabet, 
> where some of the capitel letters look like the minors, while others 
> don't, the capitals concentrate on word and sentence beginnings etc. Now 
> you have a whole sentence which is composed only of capitals, which seems 
> to break all the rules.
>
> Any VM decoder would jump on this "clue", thinking is in any way 
> particularly significant... while here, it seemingly only served the whim 
> of a scribe.

I see your point and, in fact, I wrongly interpreted your "significance" 
like the Italian "significato" (= meaning). Of course, the sentence has a 
meaning, but this was not your point!

However, perhaps we can go a bit further. A great number of mss. have 
peculiarities and/or oddities (or, at least, they so look to us): "wrong" 
letter forms, "wrong" capitalization, "wrong" alignments, etc... This is 
because these mss. are *within* a writing (and book-making) history, they 
(or their creators) carry on habits and traditions old of centuries; most 
of the oddities are then the unconscious (or semi-conscious) product of 
this history.

The Vms, on the contrary, has presumably no or very little history behind 
itself and, by the way its text has been constructed, nothing in it can be 
habit or unconscious. There may be things deliberately inserted to deroute 
the breakers and/or things we do not understand (well, a lot of the those!) 
but I would assume that very little of its "significance" can be 
interpreted in the light of the tradition.
____________________

On another side, but partially converging with the above, I would like to 
share my impressions of a Vms 'newbie'.

As I said my paleographical background has by now faded a lot (and leaving 
aside drawings, about which I am mostly ignorant), however I have been 
surprised by how much the ms. looks *normal*!

There is nothing in it which does not firmly belong to the late-medieval 
Latin writing system and writing technique; very few of its letter forms 
did not appear in Latin mss. and even those are quite on the line of 'real' 
late-medieval Latin writings. Paradoxically, from a paleographical point of 
view, the ms. is rather uninteresting!

If something is strange in it, it is more what it is *missing*, than what 
is there: few letter forms, no external structure (almost no _rubricae_, no 
_capitula_, and the like)...

I have never seen the ms. directly, only from reproductions, but also 
codicologically there is nothing very peculiar, as far as I can see; the 
less usual detail being the folded folia, a rare event on skin codices 
(maybe also for technical reasons).

Who knows, maybe, this lack of peculiarities reduces the plausibility of a 
late forgery: if someone would have made it to *look like" a XIV-XV c. ms., 
he would have added much of the 'super-structure' of those manuscripts!

I am not trying to make any particular point here (beyond perhaps stressing 
the minimal influence of the "habits"), simple sharing some impressions, 
for what they are worth to other members of the group, much more expert 
than I am.

Cheers,
        Maurizio


 Maurizio M. Gavioli -  VistaMare  Software
 via San Bernardo 5, I-16030 Pieve Ligure, ITALY
 http://www.vistamaresoft.com/

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