“So the Voynich Manuscript could be one of the books Widemann got his hands on and sold to the emperor, because, for sure, it would have already looked valuable back then to a collector of weird and precious things like emperor Rudolf. Newly found archival material has revealed that Rauwolf owned a small collection of books, Guzy adds. “I assume that he probably inherited some books from him (it also seems that both families were somehow related).” “ lived in the Augsburg house of the well known botanist Dr Leonard Rauwolf, and he started selling books to the emperor immediately after the death of Rauwolf and his widow, who both had no children,” Guzy says. The 600 gold coins mentioned in Marci’s letter was also an extremely expensive price for a single book, so it would make sense for the Voynich Manuscript to have been sold as part of a small collection.īut if Widemann was the manuscript’s owner before Rudolf, how did it come into his possession? One intriguing option stands out. “Even if a deal was made with ducats or thaler, florins were usually used for the final transaction.”Ī spread from the Voynich Manuscript Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut This page includes: A brief summary of some library resources and collections of material related to the Voynich MS: Beinecke Library, Grolier Club, Marshall Library. “Almost all of the emperor’s money transactions were made in guilders (florin), usually Rhenisch guilders, with only very few in thaler or ducats so I believe that the information in the letter was just meant to be ‘gold coins,’ which both florin and ducats are,” Guzy says. The Voynich MS - Bibliography and references Introduction. A further record refers to the collection as “remarkable/rare books” and that they were transported in a small barrel, Guzy writes in his research paper, published in the proceedings of the first International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript 2022. The records revealed that in 1599, the physician Carl Widemann sold a collection of manuscripts to Rudolf for 500 silver thaler, an amount cited in another record by its equivalent in gold, 600 florin-another type of gold coin. Luckily, out of almost 7,000 journal entries, including 126 book transactions, only one case involved a book sale for 600 gold coins. The letter from Johann Marcus Marci to Athanasius Kircher, found with the Voynich Manuscript Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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