People and books
The people around the manuscript.
Each entry below is a row in the project's provenance table, and each row carries the file and the passage it was taken from. Holding a book, sending a copy of part of it, and keeping it in a cupboard are three different documented actions.
01 / The dated record
From the parchment to the Beinecke
Phase
Evidence class
O: an observation on the object. S: published or archival scholarship. M: a measured result produced by this project. A row can carry more than one.
02 / Four different things
Ownership, contact, custody, mark
Names and actions enter the record through inscriptions, correspondence and transfers.
Ownership
Georg Baresch is the earliest securely documented possessor in surviving correspondence. Marci owned the book between 1662 and 1665, and Kraus gave it to Yale in 1969. The dated entries identify the records behind each transfer.
Contact and reported reading
Marci sent the codex to Athanasius Kircher in 1665 or 1666. The same letter reports the six-hundred-ducat purchase by Rudolf II as second-hand hearsay, which is how the book treats it. An earlier possessor is reported to have copied a portion for Kircher while declining to send the volume itself: a copy could travel where the book did not.
Row e08 · Chapter 12, Names Enter the Record
Custody without demonstrated access
The long Jesuit period is recorded as receipt and preservation: institutional authority over the volume, with no evidence in the record that anyone read it.
03 / Comparative examples
How other books were kept
These are not Voynich documents. They are cases from the book's Part V, where the surviving paperwork of other volumes shows what such records can look like.
A catalogue kept the differences
At St. Katharina in Nuremberg, women recorded books brought in, borrowed and given away. One catalogue entry distinguished three earlier histories among the parts of a single volume. A 1499 note explained gifts of surplus books to other convents and recorded the material the library retained.
Chapter 13, Where a Book Could Wait
Work belonged to a household
Burkard Zink remembered copying while Elisabeth spun beside him, after a former teacher advanced money for paper. His account ties books to marriage, paid work and a changing livelihood.
Chapter 15, Baths, Households, and Keys
A copy could travel
Marci's letter of 1665 or 1666 reports that an earlier possessor copied a portion for Kircher while refusing to send the book itself. Marci later presented the volume to the same hoped-for reader.
Chapter 12, Names Enter the Record
The chapters are in the reading edition. See the book's contents.