Written by Hanne Pearce

Bruce Peel Special Collections has recently acquired a hand-made replica of the Voynitch Manuscript. According to Special Collections Librarian, Linda Quirk, “The Voynitch is one of the most studied and most mysterious of all manuscripts. There has been a lot of interest in getting a well-made facsimile so that faculty and students around the world can go to their own university library to see and experience it for themselves. Like other good quality facsimiles, this one is designed to replicate the original in every sense. It looks and feels and sounds and smells like the original because it is a full-size and full-colour reproduction, bound in the same manner and printed on the same material at the original, i.e. vellum. Vellum is made from animal skin and was routinely used for manuscripts and early printed books before paper eventually displaced it. Produced by a respected fine-art facsimile publisher in 2018, this one was published in a limited edition of 898 copies.”

This new workshop also offers a unique experience for participants, by presenting two scholar’s perspectives on the manuscript, from very different fields of study. English professor John Considine presented a historical and critical analysis of the provenance and contents of the manuscript. Accepting the 1404-1438 carbon-dating of the vellum pages, Considine looks closer at the illustrations and overall composition of the manuscript to infer potential areas of origin and possible subjects of the work. Comparing illustrations, book genres of the time and known authors who created similar works Considine offers a number of potential purposes.

Bradley Hauer, a Ph.D. student in computing science, and Professor Greg Kondrak of computing science present a second approach to Voynitch. Hauer’s research interests include identifying languages with artificial intelligence. He explained how deciphering the Voynich Manuscript is exponentially challenging. Aside from being unable to read the encrypted script of the manuscript or identify the original language, previous analyses of the Voynitch show that the text must also be intentionally encoded. This means that the script is unknown to us, the language is unknown to us, and the order of the letters in the words have been systematically scrambled in some way. Using the analyses of older European languages, his team used algorithms to analyze the Voynich Manuscript to try and determine its language.

This workshop reveals an intriguing manuscript, that the University community can now engage with better because of our facsimile. It also demonstrates the usefulness of both human reason and artificial intelligence, and how the two working together may be the way to formulating new understandings.

To register for this and other Peel Workshops, find more information here.

I flipped to the front cover to start my visual buffet again when I saw the crest that embossed the inside front cover “Ex Libris Universitatis Albertensis - Linda Miron Distad Culinaria Collection.” Intrigued, I set out to find out a little more about The Linda Miron Distad Culinaria Collection.

I grab my phone and ran a quick search in the catalogue from the University of Alberta Libraries website and found the collection holds over 3700 items. As I scroll through the catalogue listings I find not only recipe books but there are books on wine pairings, gastronomy, the story of Pyotr Smirnov and so much more. A particular title that popped out at me was Collecting culinaria: cookbooks and domestic manuals mainly from the Linda Miron Distad Collection, which is the printed catalogue of the Bruce Peel Special Collections in-house exhibition.