![]() The Voynich Manuscript has been reliably dated to mere decades before the invention of the printing press, so it's likely that its peculiar blend of plagiarism and curation was a dying format. (The women's pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.) Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets. Gibbs even identified one image-copied, of course, from another manuscript-of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. ![]() The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all it was just shorthand. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. ![]() His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.Īfter looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. She lives in London.Further Reading So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution” Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. A frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, she completed her PhD at University College London. Mary Wellesley is a former research affiliate at the British Library, where she still teaches medieval language and literature. It isn't just an introduction to literary manuscripts but also a series of glimpses of the extraordinary diversity of medieval lives. Mary Wellesley has taken jewels from our bibliographic treasures and placed them, carefully and with love, in the palm of the reader's hand."- Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England "This is an engaging and beautiful book – the engagement arising from the author's deep commitment to understanding the lives of medieval women and men, and the beauty from her ability to make us see and hear them talking about and living their experiences. This is a sensational debut by a wonderfully gifted historian."- Dan Jones, bestselling author of The Plantagenets and The Templars Wellesley draws on her deep scholarly knowledge of medieval manuscripts to weave a captivating tale, told through generations of ‘tremulous hands' and forgotten artistic geniuses, whose works inform so much of what we know today about the Middle Ages. "Mary Wellesley is a born storyteller and The Gilded Page is as good as historical writing gets. The Gilded Page is the story of the written word in the manuscript age. Rich and surprising, The Gilded Page shows how the most exquisite objects ever made by human hands came from unexpected places. Scholar Mary Wellesley recounts the amazing origins of these remarkable manuscripts, surfacing the important roles played by women and ordinary people-the grinders, binders, and scribes-in their creation and survival. Other works by the less influential have narrowly avoided ruin, like the book of illiterate Margery Kempe, found in a country house closet, the cover nibbled on by mice. Many have survived because of an author's status-part of the reason we have so much of Chaucer's writing, for example, is because he was a London-based government official first and a poet second. Medieval manuscripts can tell us much about power and art, knowledge and beauty. A breathtaking journey into the hidden history of medieval manuscripts, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the ornate Psalter of Henry VIII
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