What Pavel Left

~ Monday, August 14, 2023 ~

Pavel Šimánek stopped answering email in March. I assumed he was travelling, or had changed address, or was simply doing the thing that independent researchers sometimes do when they are deep in something: ignoring everything that is not the work. In June a mutual acquaintance forwarded a notebook. I have been sitting on it since then. I am publishing this because I think someone else should know the notebook exists. I am not sure what it means.

I mentioned Pavel once before on this blog — in a 2022 article on Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer (The Emperor’s Collection and What It Means to Prove a Purchase), where I thanked him for facilitating access to a facsimile of a Rudolf II period inventory held at the Strahov manuscript collection. That was the extent of his visibility here. He did not contribute articles; he did not ask to.

Voynich_Manuscript_%281%29.jpg
Beinecke MS 408. The worn goatskin binding is not original to the manuscript; it dates to the Collegio Romano period, after the manuscript’s arrival in Rome ca. 1666.

Pavel

Pavel Šimánek was an independent manuscript researcher — Czech, based in Prague. He had worked for several years as a cataloguer at the Strahov Monastery Library before leaving that position around 2020; I never had a clear account of the circumstances and did not ask. We met at a conference in Vienna in autumn 2019, fell into conversation over a shared interest in provenance documentation and what he described as “the parts of archival work that nobody publishes because nothing was concluded.” We stayed in intermittent contact by email after that. He had limited web presence, which is not unusual for someone working outside institutional frameworks and not particularly interested in being found. The last email I received from him was in February 2023, concerning an unrelated matter. I have not heard from him since March.

The notebook

The notebook is A4, ring-bound, approximately two-thirds full. It is a working document: archive visit dates, call numbers, partial transcriptions, folio dimensions noted in margins, calculations I cannot always follow. Not a diary. There are dates but no reflections on those dates; there are names but they are institution names, not people. It reads as the record of someone working through a specific problem in the way archival research works through problems — slowly, with frequent dead ends noted and crossed out. The handwriting is consistent with the notes Pavel sent me in earlier correspondence.

Three sections of the notebook are the reason I am writing this.

The folio

The relevant entry is dated 28 January 2023. Pavel had been at an institutional collection in Moravia — I am not publishing the specific reference yet — and had been granted access to a bound collection for reasons unrelated to what he subsequently found. He describes, in three pages of close notes, a single vellum folio that came to his attention as accompanying material within the bound collection: loose, unbound, tucked between two bound items with no notation indicating it belonged there or explaining how it had arrived.

The notes are careful in a way that suggests he understood he might be wrong about what he was looking at, and wanted to record what he could verify separately from what he was inferring. What he could verify: vellum, single leaf, written on both sides, left-to-right script, ink consistent with iron gall, dimensions approximately 23.5 by 16 centimetres. A small sketch of one corner of the recto, showing partial text and a marginal annotation in a different hand that he describes as “numerals, partially legible, three or four digits, possibly a reference notation.” He identifies the script as matching the character set documented in published analyses of Beinecke MS 408.

Beyond the script, he notes the recto’s visual register as unlike any MS 408 section he was familiar with: not botanical, not the bathing figures from the balneological section. The composition, he writes, appears geographic — a network of small symbols connected by lines that might be roads or rivers, with denser clusters suggesting settlements. He noted a resemblance to early Bohemian cartographic forms, specifically the tradition of the Klaudiánova mapa, the first printed map of Bohemia (Mikuláš Klaudián, 1518). I cannot evaluate this from the small corner sketch he made.

What he was inferring: that the folio was a separated leaf from MS 408. He based this on the script identification, the dimensions, the vellum quality, and what he described as “correspondence with the lower left register of the nine-rosette diagram” — a detail I cannot evaluate, since he did not elaborate and I do not have the sketch in sufficient resolution to see what he saw.

The dimensions Pavel recorded are consistent with MS 408 folios. They are also consistent with a range of early fifteenth-century Central European vellum documents. I am not in a position to say what the folio is. Pavel believed he knew, and he had handled more manuscript material than I have. I wrote about the documented phenomenon of separated Voynich folios in a 2021 article; the scenario Pavel described — a folio found loose in a bound institutional collection — fits the pattern I outlined there more precisely than I am comfortable with.

The other item

Tucked inside the back cover of the notebook, folded twice, was a separate piece of vellum. Unfolded, it measures approximately 148 by 105 millimetres. One side is blank. The other carries a pattern of symbols — not text, not a diagram in any conventional sense I recognise, but a deliberate arrangement of marks drawn with some care. Three of the marks are larger than the others and appear to function as anchor points of some kind. The ink is consistent with iron gall; the vellum looks old, though I am not qualified to date material by eye.

Pavel had written on the blank side, in his usual hand: PGU, Kircher K., XI/2022.

PGU is the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome — the institution that was the Collegio Romano, where Athanasius Kircher worked and where the Voynich manuscript was held for two centuries after Marci sent it in 1666. Kircher K. is presumably the Kircher collection within that archive. November 2022.

I do not know what this piece is or whether it has any connection to the folio Pavel found two months later. I am publishing a photograph of it because it was in the notebook and the notebook is the reason I am writing this article.

Image does not exist: PLACEHOLDER_KEY_PHOTO

The synthesis

The third section is a single page, and it is different from the rest. The archival entries in the notebook are structured, cautious, written to be verified against later — the record of someone who had learned to separate what he could establish from what he was inferring. This page was written differently. All at once, by the compressed look of the hand. No verification annotations, no crossed-out dead ends. It reads like a conclusion that arrived suddenly and had to be set down before it could be lost.

Pavel had drawn lines connecting three things: Bishop Kapalini’s article on the theological weight of the apostolic number (The Number Beyond the Count, published here in 2021), the Latin burial text I found in the Moravian archive that same year and published here as A Register Without an Owner — *signo XIII notatum, nomen ignotum* — and the folio entry from January 2023.

At the bottom of the page, underlined twice:

B.K. má pravdu. Třináctý nebyl doplněn — byl pohřben. Signo XIII není symbolika. Je to místo.

B.K. is right. The thirteenth was not replaced — he was buried. The XIII sign is not symbolic. It is a location.

I have read this many times. I am not sure what to do with it. I am publishing it because I think someone else might know.

The archive

The institutional collection Pavel was accessing when he found the folio is in Moravia. After reading the notebook carefully I realised that the specific collection he had noted — bound material from the ecclesiastical Group E fonds — is the same collection I examined briefly in 2021, when I found a short undated Latin text in an anomalous hand and published a transcription: A Register Without an Owner. The access date in Pavel’s notebook is 14 February 2023. I had not known that he had read that article, or that he had applied for access to the same material.

This is the other reason I am publishing now rather than continuing to sit on it.

I am not drawing a conclusion from the coincidence of the access records. I am noting it because I do not think I should be the only person who decides what it means.

If anyone has been in contact with Pavel Šimánek since March 2023, I would be glad to hear from them. The blog’s contact form reaches me. I am not asking anyone to do anything with this information. I have published it because the notebook exists and because it seems to me that is sufficient reason.

Related