https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispectral-imaging-and-the-voynich-manuscript/ Manuscript Road Trip Skip to content * Home * About Lisa Fagin Davis * About this blog * Breakfast Paleography * Research Resources [screenshot-675] - Filling Blank Spaces in Medieval Manuscripts (a.k.a. On (to) Wisconsin) September 8, 2024 * 12:40 pm | Jump to Comments Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript (with thanks to Rene Zandbergen, Ray Clemens, Roger Easton, Claire Bowern, Bill Endres, and the curatorial and conservation staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) [voynich-detail] I have some exciting news for all of you Voynich fans! But first, some background about multispectral imaging... Multispectral imaging is a way of capturing a digital image using non-visible wavelengths such as ultraviolet and infrared (click here to learn more). Where medieval manuscripts are concerned, UV imaging in particular can make faded or effaced text legible. This is because most medieval inks (including that used to write the Voynich Manuscript) have a significant iron component. This allows the ink to "bite" into the surface of the parchment rather than sliding off of it. When ink is scraped away or fades, the molecular bond remains, and the faded text may therefore fluoresce when exposed to UV bandwidths. This technology has proven invaluable in helping scholars read palimpsests and damaged manuscripts such as the Archimedes Palimpsest and the Syriac Galen Palimpsest. Could such imaging of the Voynich Manuscript help reveal its secrets? Back in 2014, while working on a different imaging project at Yale University's Beinecke Library, the imaging team from The Lazarus Project (Michael Phelps (Early Manuscripts Electronic Library), Gregory Heyworth (then at University of Mississippi, now at University of Rochester), Chet Van Duzer (independent map scholar), Ken Boydston (Megavision) and Roger Easton (Rochester Institute of Technology)) was granted permission by the Library to take multispectral images of ten select pages of the Voynich Manuscript (a.k.a. Beinecke Library MS 408): 1r, 8r, 17r, 26r, 47r, 70v1, 71r, 93r, 102v1, and 116v. The intent was to make the images publicly available on the Yale website, but for various reasons (including staff turnover, development of Yale's new image platform, library backlogs, and COVID) the images were never posted. Details of several images were published on pp. 31-32 of The Voynich Manuscript (ed. Raymond Clemens), and a few have been explored by Voynich researchers (here and here, for example), but the full set of these MSI images has never been publicly seen or studied - until now. On a whim, I wrote to Roger a few weeks ago to ask if he still had the images, and he very kindly sent them to me. I have been given permission to make all of the images public, and I am thrilled to announce that they may be viewed and freely downloaded here. (there may also have been images taken of a few other pages, but those are TBD) [if you want to skip the technical details and jump straight to the good stuff, click here] There are four folders in the shared drive: "Lab_True_color_TIFF" (high-resolution TIFFs of some of the pages); "Processed_Images" (post-processed multispectral images); "Raw TIFFs" (enormous unprocessed multispectral 16-bit TIFFs in different color bands, not readable by most image viewers); and "RGB_true_color_JPEGs" (high-resolution JPGs of some of the pages). When using or referencing these images, please credit "The Lazarus Project and The Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science at Rochester Institute of Technology" and cite the manuscript as "Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library MS 408," including the particular folio number. For more information about image capture and post-processing, see the "Technical Details" section at the end of this post. The really interesting images in the shared drive are in the folder labeled "Processed_Images." In this context, "Processed" means that an imaging expert (Roger Easton, in this case) has applied complex color transformations to the raw 16-bit TIFFs in order to make them "legible" to the human eye. Because he has worked on so many MSI projects, he knows which transformations are most likely to be useful. For some of the pages, he made these transformations in September 2024 at my request, focusing on making particular areas of the images more legible (that's why there are more images in some folders than others, as each version of the same page represents a different post-processing strategy). I would advise you to approach these images with caution. Because processed multispectral images have unnatural color profiles, it is very easy to misread or misinterpret them. And we all know that where the Voynich Manuscript is concerned, excitement and enthusiasm sometimes inspire us to rush ahead without paying close enough attention to evidence and detail. The interpretation of MSI images requires time and care and what is sometimes called "slow looking." To help you understand what these images are, and what they aren't, I have turned to MSI expert and University of Oklahoma professor Bill Endres for some guidance: "While we normally don't think about our vision as limited, it truly is. We only see a select range of the light spectrum, from about 380 to 720 nm (nanometers, the measurement for the lengths of a light wave). Conversely, bees see into the ultraviolet range and rattlesnakes see into the infrared, which allows them to hunt at night. If we had the eyes of bees, we wouldn't need technological help and could likely read erased and damaged iron gall ink. What makes the human eye limited is that it constructs color by collecting three different colors of light--red, green, and blue--and merges them together. To collect each color, the eye has a different type of cone. Human vision is impressive for its efficiency in generating color from a sampling of light, but this efficiency leaves out a tremendous amount of visual data. Multispectral imaging benefits us because the sensor of a monochrome camera can capture a larger range of the light spectrum and individual frequencies of light (by imaging in the dark and using LED lighting to generate individual light frequencies). Capturing individual frequences is crucial. A page of a manuscript is a collection of parchment, ink, and pigment. Substances reflect and absorb individual frequencies of light differently. Multispectral imaging allows us to leverage those differences. Sometimes the differences are subtle. Post-processing highlights those subtle differences." Now, let's get to it. Ten years after the images were captured, no one can quite remember why these ten specific pages were chosen for imaging. Some are obvious (such as 1r and 116v, the first and last pages), and others have features that the team thought might present valuable results. For the most part, they were right! Let's take a close look at a few of them.* * I haven't explored the images of folios 8r and 47r here because I didn't see anything of particular interest in those processed images. You'll find them in the shared folder. Take a look; you may see something I missed! [beinecke_dl_2002046_page_004_image_0001-1]Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library MS 408, f. 1r It's been known for more than a century that the first page of the manuscript includes an effaced inscription in the lower margin. Wilfrid Voynich himself observed that there was something written there: "When I brought the manuscript to America the margins of the first page had the appearance of being blank, but an accident to a photostatic reproduction of this page revealed the fact that an underexposure of the plate brings out a faded autograph in the lower margin. Chemicals were applied to the margins..." - Wilfrid Voynich, "A Preliminary Sketch of the History of the Roger Bacon Cipher Manuscript," in Transactions of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Philadelphia Third Series, Vol. 33 (1921), pp. 415-30, at pp. 421-422. Around the year 1914, Voynich applied a chemical reagent to this page in an effort to make the inscription more visible. That explains the dark stain in the lower and outer margins. MSI makes the inscription legible, confirming Voynich's reading of "Jacobi a Tepenecz," a.k.a. Jacobus Sinapius, a Prague alchemist who likely owned the manuscript in the late 1500s or early 1600s. The animation below shows three different stages of the imaging of the manuscript: Voynich's original image, taken around 1912 (before he applied the chemicals); the current state of the page in visible light (showing the staining caused by Voynich's efforts); and the MSI image. But the clear legibility of the Tepenecz inscription isn't even the most exciting outcome of the imaging of this page. For several decades, Voynich researchers have noted what appears to be a Roman alphabet written in the right-hand margin. In the detail below, you can clearly see the letters a, b, c, d, and e. [voynich_01r_bands01-12_rf_cal_r6g4b1-1] In visible light, it appears that there may be other characters written to the right of these letters, but they cannot be easily discerned. Under ultraviolet light, the faded letters become perfectly legible. Not only that, but it turns out there are actually three columns of lettering, not just one! Although others have theorized that there might be more text to the right of the visible alphabet, the lettering has never been clearly seen or transcribed before. The letters are written in three parallel columns: the Roman alphabet (a-z), a series of Voynich characters, and another Roman alphabet offset by one letter. My preliminary transcription of these alphabets is shown below. [screenshot-696] You might wonder how I was able to determine what was written under that dark oval blob near the top, which is a green leaf showing through from the other side of the folio (i.e. f. 1v). Once I realized that it was preventing me from seeing what's in the margin there, I asked my friend Bill Endres, who is a post-processing genius, if he could "subtract" the show-through. He rose to the challenge! [screenshot-691] Believe it or not, this actually helps me enormously. In the right-hand image, I can clearly see the letter [g] and enough of the Voynichese character to surmise which character it is. Are these alphabets an early attempt to decode the manuscript? Perhaps. The two Roman alphabets are written in what paleographers call "Humanistic bookhand," that is, the style of writing developed by Humanists like Petrarch and Boccaccio in Italy in the 14th century and used throughout Europe for several hundred years. I have carefully compared these letters to the handwriting of everyone known - or thought - to have been connected with the manuscript in the 16th and 17th century, including: Carl Widemann, his colleague Leonhard Rauwolf, Emperor Rudolf II, Jacobus Sinapius, Georg Baresch, Marcus Marci, and Athanasius Kircher. I even considered the handwriting of John Dee and (at Prof. Claire Bowern's suggestion) his collaborator Edward Kelley, who were once (spuriously) thought to have been associated with the manuscript. [jan_marcus_marci_00]Johannes Marcus Marci One of these men is a very good match: Johannes Marcus Marci (1595-1667). Note: I initially discounted Marci because I had compared the revealed alphabets to the letter attributed to Marci at the Beinecke. Rene Zandbergen reminded me that that letter isn't written in Marci's hand but by the secretary he is known to have worked with as his eyesight faded near the end of his life. He suggested that I take a closer look at the earlier autograph Marci correspondence linked from his website. Let's do it! [marci-hand]Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher (12 September 1640) Rome, Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, APUG 557, fol. 127r The best way to determine if a script is a match is by comparing each letterform in the unknown sample (the revealed alphabet) to a known sample (in this case, the letter written from Marci to Athanasius Kircher on 12 September 1640, shown at left and discussed here). For those of you unversed in Voynich lore, Marci was a doctor in Prague who inherited the manuscript from his friend, alchemist Georg Baresch, upon Baresch's death in 1662. Marci sent it to Rome as a gift to Athanasius Kircher in 1665, confident that Kircher would be able to make sense out of it. The manuscript stayed in Rome until Voynich acquired it in 1912 (that's the short version...for more, see Rene's Voynich website). Let's take a closer look, letter by letter. Time for some hardcore paleography! [1r-vs-marci-12]Comparison of letterforms: Marcus Marci vs. revealed alphabet There are several very strong markers that help make a convincing case for identifying this script as Marci's: 1. The loop-less [b], [d], [f], [h], [p], [q], [s], and [y]: During this period, many hands write prominent loops on the ascenders or descenders of these letters, loops that are lacking in both samples; 2. The open-bowl [g]: Marci doesn't always leave his [g]s open, but he sometimes does; 3. The [m] with a first stroke that is taller than the last, giving the impression that the letter shrinks from left to right; 4. The shape of the [z]: because [z] is a relatively rare letter, its shape and ductus tend to be distinctive in any particular hand. The example above is ligated with [t] at the end of a word, so the context is different, but the [3] shape is quite similar. Notes: [g] and [h] for the revealed text are taken from the third column, since they aren't legible in the first. Letters that aren't legible in either alphabet have not been considered. It is also important to note that in his correspondence, Marci's script has a prominent slant that is lacking in the revealed alphabets - however, because the alphabets are made up of decontextualized single letters, I would not necessarily expect the same slant as in the handwritten documents. The letterforms themselves, in their shapes and ductus (sequence of strokes) are very similar. [screenshot-678-1-edited]"Majuscules" on f. 1r As for the Voynichese column, all of those characters are in common use throughout the manuscript except for the last two (next to [y] and [z], in blue at left). They appear in my transcription as cropped details rather than typographical characters because they appear nowhere else in the manuscript. There are at least sixteen leaves missing from the codex. It is quite possible, likely even, that these two unusual characters were found on one of the missing leaves. The style of the letters identifies them as what Voynichologists call "capitals" or "majuscules" out of expedience and convention (what they ACTUALLY are is unknown). These characters are now only found on the first page, and they are clearly different from the glyphs at the bottom of the second column of revealed symbols. There's another character in this style at the top of the right margin (shown at the lower right in the mosaic above), but its purpose, too, cannot yet be determined. The Voynichese sequence (we don't actually know if it is meant to be an "alphabet") does not correspond with original sequences on f. 49v, f 57v, or f. 66r (with thanks to Yale University Professor of Linguistics Claire Bowern for this observation), and the symbols aren't in any obvious order. A few common glyphs aren't included at all (such as the one-loop two-legged gallows glyph known as [k]), although some of the symbols in the second column cannot be clearly discerned as of yet. Additional post-processing may help clarify such ambiguities. The purpose of these three vertical alphabets is not at all clear. Knowing what we know about Marci's timeline, they must have been added between 1662 and 1665, when he owned of the manuscript. They may represent an early attempt to decode the manuscript using two different substitution ciphers, or Marci may have been using Voynich characters to create a cipher of his own. Regardless of their purpose, I do know one thing: these alphabets will likely not help us actually decipher the manuscript. This is because linguists like Claire and other researchers have established that the manuscript is almost certainly not encrypted using a simple substitution cipher, and the substitutions in these columns result in nonsense anyway. Even so, they do add an interesting and new chapter to the early history of the manuscript. I look forward to hearing from other researchers about this new evidence, especially from experts in cryptography who may have ideas about why Marci or any other early-modern decrypter would need three columns of alphabets to do their work. There is one more noteworthy feature of the imaging of folio 1r. Under ultraviolet light, several Voynichese characters that cannot be read under visible light become legible. For Voynichologists, any new textual evidence - no matter how little - is significant, as it adds data to the analysis of the text. More data leads to more detailed analytics, and more detailed analytics may lead to the ability to "read" this mysterious manuscript at last. [voynich_070v_bands01-22_rffl_cal_med3_r14g16b18_fl-b]BRBL MS 408, f. 70v1 The image of folio 70v1 (right) is instructive as it demonstrates a critical caveat where these and other images are concerned: the interpretation of multispectral images requires patience and care. It is extremely important to distinguish between an offset (i.e. a mirror image left when a book is closed for centuries and ink or pigment from one page rubs off onto the facing page), show-through (a mirror-image ghost of text on the other side of the page), and erased ink (non-reversed faded text made visible). It is very easy to be misled by anything you may think you see in an image like this, and when examing these MSI images you should always compare your findings with the facing page, the other side of the leaf, and the visible-light version of the image to be sure you aren't being led astray or leaping to unfounded conclusions. For example, the MSI image of folio 70v1 seems to have Voynichese writing that appears in pale blue in this multispectral image (see, e.g., the top of the diagram between the two outer rings of text). Is this an offset from the facing page, show-through from the other side, or hidden/revealed text? Let's take a closer look. [screenshot-684]BRBL MS 408, f. 70v1, MSI detail We can immediately exclude the blue text as having been hidden/ revealed, because it is inverted. So it must be either an offset from the facing page (f. 71r) or show-through from the other side (f. 70r1, the central panel of this foldout). If you invert the MSI image and compare it to the analogous sections of f. 70r1, you can clearly see that the faded blue text on 70v1 matches the text on 70r1, identifying these ghostly blue letters as show-through: [msi-results3] This is why it is so important to look at the surrounding pages before drawing conclusions about what you see in a multispectral image. Caveat spectator! Folio 71r (above) is interesting because it is the only zodiac page with significant color. It seems likely that the color was added later, but we don't yet know for sure. What's intriguing about the multispectral image is how similar colors respond to the exposure and processing in drastically different ways - the torquoise glows bright yellow, while the green appears light blue. This suggests that it might be worthwhile to test those pigments using X-Ray Fluorescence, which uses a spectrometer to analyze the chemical compounds that make up a mineral pigment (for more on this technique, see this blogpost). XRF testing was conducted on selected pages of the Voynich in 2009, but f. 71r was not one of the tested pages. The results of those tests can be read here (tl/dr: the tests did not find anything suspicious or out of the ordinary; all of the tested pigments were consistent with medieval recipes). Folio 26r presents a variety of MSI revelations. Here, we can see all three types of evidence: hidden/revealed, offset, and show-through. To demonstrate this, we need to look at three pages at once: 25v, 26r, and 26v: In the red square, you can see a mirror-image offset of the leaf on f. 25v, the facing page. The fact that the offset is visible only with multispectral exposure suggests that there may be more offsets hiding elsewhere in the manuscript that could provide evidence of the original sequence of leaves in the codex. In the blue rectangle, you can easily discern the show-through from the other side (i.e. f. 26v), although it's also visible in natural light. Generally speaking, the green pigment in the Voynich Manuscript tends to show through the parchment more dramatically than other pigments, due to its high copper signature (as identified in the XRF report I referenced above). This corrosive aspect can cause the pigment to leach deeply into the parchment, making it easily visible from the other side. Finally, there's a mysterious and as-yet-unexlained semi-circular something in the yellow box, which is within - although not necessarily related to - the waterstain in the upper margin. It isn't an offset, and it isn't show-through. It was hidden and revealed, although exactly what it IS remains to be determined. Folio 93r (above) may have been selected for imaging because of the stain that seems to match the color of the flower. The stain and the flower respond to the exposure in identical ways, suggesting that the stain is indeed the same pigment as the flower and was likely the result of a careless spill while the artist was working. It is noteworthy that the text is written over the stain. This confirms what study of other pages reveals - that the images were drawn and colored by the artists before the text was written by the scribes (there's actually some evidence that the artists and scribes were the same people but that's a topic for another day). Apparently the artist/scribe wasn't worried about the stain interfering with the text. Parchment is a valuable resource and it would not be surprising if a decision had been made to use the stained parchment rather than discard it. There are a few areas of interest on f. 101v2, all of which can be seen more clearly with MSI. [voynich_102v1_psc]BRBL MS 408, f. 101v2 Here, post-processing helps reveal the drawing beneath the rust-colored stain, the obscured text on the blue portion of the vessel, and the faded text on the heavily-damaged fold: We've got one more page to look at: the all-important folio 116 verso, the very last page. [beinecke_dl_2002046_page_207_image_0001]BRBL MS 408, f. 116v The lines of text and marginal doodles at the top are what make this page so interesting: [beinecke_dl_2002046_page_207_image_0001-1] The writing is similar to, but isn't quite, Voynichese. It has Germanic features and looks roughly contemporary with the manuscript, although it might be a bit later. There is a similar inscription in the upper margin of f. 17r, likely written by the same hand. No one really knows what these inscriptions represent, or when they were written, or where, or why. Some have speculated that the text on f. 116v might be the key to deciphering the manuscript itself. Others interpret it as an incantation or charm. Believe it or not (since I seem to have a lot of opinions about this manuscript), I don't have strong feelings about what this text might signify. But others do, and they will find these processed images extremely useful. MSI can definitely help clarify what we're looking at: [screenshot-675] There's quite a lot of "noise" because of show-through from f. 116r (the lines of mirror-writing in shades of brown), but even so it is possible to clarify some readings of this mysterious text. [screenshot-679] At the very top, for example, the first, third, and fourth words have sometimes been thought to begin with the letter [p], but in the MSI image it appears that the 3rd and 4th words begin with a different letter, perhaps [u] or [v]: the very faint lines that appeared to be descending from those first letters in natural light turn out upon MSI capture to be stains of some kind, not ink. This is the kind of minutia that can actually be extremely important to researchers. The processed multispectral images of f. 17r may also help researchers interpret the writing in the upper margin of that page: [screenshot-698]f. 17r, natural light vs. processed MSI (detail) I will leave it to those working on these pages to dig deeper into the interpretation of these images. A few final thoughts: 1. These images do not show any evidence of palimpsesting. In other words, there is no evidence of underwriting that would indicate reuse of the parchment. This is important because if there HAD been underwriting, it would have been critical evidence for refining the date of origin of the manuscript. The question of the date of origin of the manuscript is not entirely resolved, but Carbon-14 testing dates the parchment, with a high level of confidence, to ca. 1425. The style of the illustrations is consistent with that date, so I consider the manuscript to have been written in the early fifteenth century, although not everyone agrees. 2. The hidden/revealed marginal texts on f. 1 support the authenticity of the manuscript as a medieval object, as opposed to a modern forgery. Here's why. Imagine you are an early 20th-century forger trying to create an authentic-looking manuscript to dupe unsuspecting buyers (or so the argument goes). You find some unused medieval parchment, mix up some ink and pigments using medieval recipes, and get to work. You might even think to add an early-modern signature and annotations to the margins to add to the air of authenticity. But would you then fade those annotations (how would you manage that, anyway?), pour chemicals over them, and then hope that someday imaging technologies would develop that would allow future researchers to read them? Of course not. That line of reasoning defies both logic and practicality. It is much more likely that the manuscript is exactly what most believe it to be: an authentic early fifteenth-century book with traces of its history left behind by past owners and readers. 3. In the end, these particular images provide additional textual and historical evidence, but they do not provide a key to "reading" the Voynich Manuscript. They function instead as a clear proof-of-concept, indicating that more imaging of more pages would almost certainly result in additional evidence invisible to the naked eye. Such evidence could help researchers reconstruct the original order of the leaves, transcribe faded Voynichese for linguistic and cryptological analysis, or reveal the identity of previously-unknown readers and owners. Additional MSI might even uncover the key to understanding this most mysterious of manuscripts. It is possible that the entire manuscript will be imaged this way someday, but that remains to be seen. Any kind of imaging poses a risk to the manuscript due to heat and light exposure as well as the potential for physical damage (the fold-outs, for example, are extremely fragile). Although current imaging technology carries significantly less risk than that used a decade ago, the conservators and curators (and lawyers and insurance adjusters) at the Beinecke Library are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the care and survival of this amazing object. They will need to decide if the potential for research and discovery is worth the risk. It's their call. (please don't bug them about this - they already know!) [screenshot-701] I've here recorded only my preliminary thoughts about these images, and I am certain there is much more to discover. I look forward to seeing how you, and the community of Voynichologists, contribute to their interpretation. Let's get to work! p.s. In other Voynich news, I was profiled in the September 2024 issue of The Atlantic with an essay focusing on my thirty-year relationship with the Voynich Manuscript. I hope you enjoy it! --------------------------------------------------------------------- Technical Details The conditions under which each image was captured can be found in the "properties" metadata and are recorded in each pseudo-color image's filename. According to Easton (in private correspondence), the filenames are "from the original bands after 'calibration' (to remove the effects of the different exposure times for different bands). This is done by measuring the reflectance of the reference 'Spectralon' reflector in the image. Spectralon is a Teflon derivative that has very uniform reflectivity for wavelengths in the range 250 nanometers (ultraviolet) to 2500 nanometers (infrared). Before rendering the pseudocolor image, the median of the 3x3 neighborhood surrounding each pixel was evaluated to attenuate the visibility of any statistical variations, which are particular problems in the fluorescence bands, because the number of available photons is pretty small at each pixel." "MNF" in a filename "means that the image bands were combined based on multispectral image statistics using the 'minimum noise fraction' algorithm. A triplet of the resulting bands was selected 'by eye' to render a pseudocolor image, and these bands were occasionally manipulated in PhotoShop to change the 'hue angle' (color tint) of the rendering, with the goal of enhancing the visibility of the text (s) of interest." In other words, the images must be processed in order to be of greatest use to the non-expert eye. During that post-processing, Easton informs me, the goal is "to find combinations of the image bands which produce images with enhanced visibility of the erased text. The combinations may be selected based on observation and used for every leaf, or we may evaluate the multiband statistics of each pixel and use them to evaluate combinations of input bands -- this is what I do in 'principal component analysis' ('PCA'), Independent component analysis ('ICA'), 'minimum noise fraction' (MNF), and 'spectral angle mapping' (SAM)." Share this: * Twitter * Facebook * Like Loading... Related 21 Comments Filed under Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Medieval Manuscripts, Paleography, Uncategorized, Voynich Manuscript Tagged as Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Medieval Manuscripts, Multispectral Imagery, Paleography, Voynich Manuscript - Filling Blank Spaces in Medieval Manuscripts (a.k.a. On (to) Wisconsin) 21 responses to "Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript" 1. Pingback: Multispectral imaging and Voynich Ms - sea-swoon 2. [ab876] D.N. O'Donovan September 9, 2024 at 8:47 am Fascinating. Thanks so much, Lisa (if I may). Nick Pelling will be pleased. He suggested having multispectral images made yonks ago and has often urged making them available since those few were made. Thank you so much. I am somewhat surprised to hear that you think the marginal writing is Marci's script - there's nothing in the documentary evidence - the existing correspondence - to suggest he did more than send it on, whereas we know Baresch worked on the ms for about what... over two decades? . Oh - just btw - Jakub Horczicky (Latinised as Sinapius) wasn't an 'alchemist' as we use the term. I looked into that question a while ago, resarched his circumstances and found that he had been apprenticed to a local pharmacist-physician, not actually a doctor with a degree, but a type of pharmacist who would also see the sick and prescribe medicines which he made up himself- probably using some basic chemical processes such as distilling. In the early seventeenth century, if you had a few beakers and make extracts from plants or a bit of distilling, you were termed an 'alchemist'. I did that work a while ago, so it migt be incorporated into Rene's website by now and seem old-hat. Reply 3. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details - TECH DEIYO 4. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details - Fjoddes.Net 5. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details - SpaceReporting 6. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details - Apnikhabre.in 7. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details | Ars Technica 8. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details - MacMegasite 9. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details - The Latest News! 10. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details - Starlight Digital Entertainment 11. [50a2e] Melissa September 9, 2024 at 3:43 pm Very neat! I have no wisdom on this but enjoyed your seeing assessment. Thanks! Reply 12. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details - GrokAI 13. Pingback: New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details - The Guardian Time 14. [967f1] markdunnell September 9, 2024 at 4:28 pm As a complete lay person I have been fascinated with the Voynich manuscript for years (along with the Herculaneum papyri). Thank you for such an interesting article. Will need to read several times!! Reply 15. Pingback: Duo Guang Pu Cheng Xiang He Fu Yin Shu Shou Gao - Pian Zhi De Ma Nong 16. Pingback: guia en linea 17. Pingback: Shedding New Light on the Voynich Manuscript With Multispectral Imaging - Mist Vista 18. Pingback: Shedding New Light On The Voynich Manuscript With Multispectral Imaging - n-cryptech 19. Pingback: Multispectral imaging of the Voynich Manuscript - Boing Boing 20. Pingback: Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript Luc on September 10, 2024 21. Pingback: Hackernews Jin Ri TOP 20| 2024-09-10 - Chu Hai Jue Jin ,Wu Xian Ke Neng . Wei Du Li Kai Fa Zhe , Kua Jing Dian Shang Cong Ye Zhe , Hai Wai Zi Mei Ti Ti Gong Zui Xin Chu Hai Zi Xun He Zi Yuan - Chu Hai Jue Jin ,Wu Xian Ke Neng . Wei Du Li Kai Fa Zhe , Kua Jing Dian Shang Cong Ye Zhe , Hai Wai Zi Mei Ti Ti Leave a comment Cancel reply [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] * Search for: [ ] [Search] * Recent Posts + Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript + Filling Blank Spaces in Medieval Manuscripts (a.k.a. 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