Prague Provenance and the Bohemian Hypothesis
~ Monday, July 11, 2022 ~
The phrase “Bohemian hypothesis,” as applied to Beinecke MS 408, means several different things in different contexts, and the differences matter. In most of the writing I have read, it refers loosely to the manuscript’s Prague history — the Rudolf II claim, the Hořčický signature, Baresch and Marci. This is a provenance claim. In a smaller body of writing, it refers to a theory that the manuscript was produced in Bohemia. This is an origin claim. The two are not the same, and conflating them has produced a great deal of confusion.
The carbon dating places the vellum in 1404–1438. The stylistic analysis of the manuscript’s illustrations places composition in Italy during the Italian Renaissance. Current scholarly preference is northern Italy, first third of the fifteenth century. This is an origin claim, and it is essentially independent of the provenance question. A manuscript produced in northern Italy in 1410 could have been owned in Prague in 1610 without contradiction.
The documented Prague circle
The provenance I can actually establish runs from Hořčický’s probable ownership (before 1622) through Baresch’s confirmed possession (before 1639), to Marci’s receipt of the manuscript and its dispatch to Rome in 1665–1666. All three figures have documented Prague addresses and documented professional identities. The chain is real, however incomplete.
The gap I cannot bridge is the one between Hořčický’s death in 1622 and Baresch’s first letter to Kircher in 1637 — fifteen years unaccounted for. Baresch described his own relationship to the manuscript as decades of puzzlement, which suggests he had held it for some time before 1637. The interval between acquisition and the first letter could be substantial. Where the manuscript came from — whether from Hořčický’s estate, from some other Prague collection, or by some route that has left no trace — is not in the record.
The archival record of the period
Czech and Moravian archives hold substantial material from the seventeenth century: ecclesiastical records, court documents, estate inventories, notarial records, correspondence from the major monasteries and chapters. The coverage is not uniform. Descriptive work on large institutional collections continues; material aggregated in the nineteenth century from multiple ecclesiastical sources often has only outline catalogue entries, with individual items flagged for later attention that in some cases has not yet arrived.
I spent several weeks in 2021 working through part of this record at the Moravian Land Archive in Brno. The condition of the documentary material I encountered there is consistent with what I describe above: A Register Without an Owner describes a specific case of undescribed seventeenth-century vellum in a bound institutional collection. This is not an anomaly. It is the normal state of large archival holdings from this period. The material is there; the description is incomplete; the catalogue flagged items for later attention, and later attention has not always come.
Whether any of the undescribed material in Czech and Moravian archives touches the Voynich provenance is a question I cannot answer without working through considerably more of it than I have. I note it as a structural feature of the record.
The nine-rosette foldout
The manuscript’s most discussed single feature is a six-page foldout — the largest opening in the codex — depicting what appears to be nine connected rosettes linked by what some researchers describe as causeways, with what might be castle forms and a possible volcanic feature in the composition.
The geographic reading — that this diagram represents a real landscape, a literal map of a specific place — has been advanced by multiple researchers and not established by any of them, because the geographic reading requires a geography to match against, and no such match has been accepted by the field. The Beinecke catalog describes the section containing the rosettes as cosmological rather than geographic. I find this a reasonable classification, though I note that the distinction between a cosmological diagram and a geographic one was not always as clear in the fifteenth century as it might appear to us now.
The more interesting question, to my mind, is not whether the diagram is a map, but who commissioned a six-page foldout for a manuscript whose text nobody since has been able to read. The physical structure — the planning, the cutting, the folding — represents deliberate design. Whatever the diagram means, someone knew what they wanted it to look like.
Five hands
Lisa Fagin Davis, a scholar of medieval manuscripts, has identified evidence of five distinct scribal hands in MS 408. This is the finding in the recent literature that I find most significant, not because it resolves the authorship question but because it changes its character. Five hands means a scriptorium or a collaborative setting. It ends the solitary-author model — not by argument but by observation. The manuscript was not produced by a single person in secret. It was produced by a group, working in a context institutional enough to have multiple trained scribes contributing to the same project.
This does not tell us what the context was, or where. It tells us that whatever we are looking at is not a private cipher notebook.
What the Bohemian hypothesis amounts to
The manuscript passed through Prague between approximately 1600 and 1665. The figures who held it during this period are documented. Where it was before — and where its missing pages went — is not in the record.
These are the same kind of absence. Provenance has gaps; manuscripts have missing folios. Both conditions are normal. What makes this manuscript unusual is not that its record is incomplete — every manuscript’s record is incomplete — but that the content has attracted enough attention to make the incompleteness feel significant. The gaps in the custody chain and the gaps in the quire structure are simply facts about what we have and what we do not. I have found nothing in either that requires a special explanation. I have found quite a lot that requires better cataloguing.
In this series
- A Manuscript Without a History
- The Folios That Are Not There
- The Emperor’s Collection and What It Means to Prove a Purchase
Sources
- Wikipedia — Voynich manuscript: en.wikipedia.org — origin hypotheses, northern Italy preference, scribal hands, nine-rosette foldout.
- René Zandbergen, voynich.nu: voynich.nu — provenance documentation, quire analysis.
- Moravský zemský archiv v Brně (Moravian Land Archive, Brno): mza.cz — Group E ecclesiastical fonds.
- Davis, Lisa Fagin. Remarks on scribal hands in MS 408 (cited in Wikipedia: Voynich manuscript).