More on Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku...

Note: this article has now moved to more-on-tadeas-hajek-z-hajku on Cipher Mysteries

I recently posted about Rudolph's physician before Sinapius, Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku: and wondered aloud whether he might have bought / owned / sold / annotated the Voynich Manuscript. It's a good question: the f17r marginalia seems to have been emended to read "mattioli..." (I believe it originally began "melhor"), and Hájek famously translated Mattioli's Herbal.

The first step would be to find some of Hájek's handwriting: with the help of Jan Hurych, I soon found the Manuscriptorium, which is a kind of uber-catalogue of Czech manuscripts. Searching for Hájku yielded 14 unique references, most of which are "Minucý a Pranostika" (i.e. tables and weather predictions) from different years, and which seem likely to be small printed pamphlets (and so probably of no practical use to us here).

However, there are four other documents which might have his handwriting (listed below, each with repository and shelfmark, if anyone happens to be in Prague or Zwickau and wants a challenge, as well as Jan's brief translation of the start of the title). I've asked the manuscript librarians whether Hájek himself is thought to have written any/all of these, and hopefully will get an answer relatively soon...

• Královská kanonie premonstrátů na Strahově, Praha - Kodex Dobřenského, opus 344.
  1574 "Tabule dlauhosti Dne..." - The table of day's and night's lengths


• Národní knihovna České republiky - 54 S 91 neúpl.
  1560 "Wayklad Proroctwij ..." - Explanation of Turkish prophecy...


• Knihovna národního muzea v Praze - 28 E 1O
  1556 "Wypsanij s Wyznamenánijm gedné y druhé Kométy" - The description and explanation of both comets...


• Zwickau Ratschulbibliothek - 4, 10, 39, přív.
  1580 "O některých předesslých znamenjch Nebeských" - About some heavenly signs in the past . . .

As a nice coincidence, I'm in the middle of reading Owen Gingerich's delightful bibliophilic road-trip book "The Book Nobody Read" and who should pop up on p.172 and p.178 but "Thaddeus Hagecius" (i.e. "Tadeáš Hájek" in Latin). According to a marginal note by Johannes Praetorius in the back of the Beinecke Library's copy of Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus" (the historiographic subject of Gingerich's book), Paul Wittich had passed a "terse list of three errors" in the book on to Hájek. The same list of errors appears in a copy in Debrecen, and in a copy in Edinburgh.

And so Gingerich throws the idea that this particular Edinburgh copy may perhaps have been owned by Hájek up in the air. But all the same, it's only a speculation. Still, I'll ask him if he ever went looking for marginal handwriting by Hájek, you never know...

...but now I've thought of searching Google for "Thaddeus Hagecius" (*d'oh!*), I find that there is a pile of correspondence between Tycho Brahe and Hájek (and a good-sized 2002 article on it here).

And according to this Czech page, the Prague-based Society for the History of Sciences ("DVT" = dějiny věd a techniky) published in 2000 "the first volume of the Czech monographic series Works on History of Technique and Natural Sciences dedicated to significant Renaissance scholar Thaddeus Hagecius (Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku)" (it was the 500th anniversary of his death that year). It seems to be called "Práce z dějin technika a přírodních věd 1", Praha 2000, 180 str: it's not immediately obvious how you'd buy a copy, though... (I'll ask Jan Hurych).

And there's also a 2004 article about his astronomy in this German book.

That's often the way with research: find just the right key, and zero research leads suddenly turns into ten...

Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (& the Voynich Ms)...?

Note: this article has now moved to tadeas-hajek-z-hajku-the-voynich-ms on Cipher Mysteries

Here's a little piece of Voynichiana pinging on the edges of the VMs research radar, concerning Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku (1525-1600), who I thought had not to date been speculatively linked with the VMs. It came from the text accompanying the "Earth and Sky: Astronomy and Geography at the University between the 15th and the 18th centuries" exhibition at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2005, but also (mostly) reappears in the Wikipedia page. (Which came first? I don't know!)

Why flag Hájek at all? Jan Hurych once put up a page on him on his Hurontaria site, but (I thought) only as a piece of background research data. It's true that as personal physician to Maximilian I (in Vienna) and to Rudolph II (mainly in Prague), Hájek would have vetted or commented on anything alchemical, astronomical, astrological or medical entering the Imperial Court prior to 1600. But might there be more to it?

"In 1554 he studied medicine in Bologna and went to Milan the same year to listen to lectures by Girolamo Cardano, but he soon returned to Prague, where he became a professor of mathematics at the Charles University of Prague in 1555."

If (as I do) you see a Northern Italian art history link in the VMs' drawings, then Hájek's Prague-Bologna-Milan-Prague travels probably jumps out at you too: so, please go on...

"Hájek was in frequent scientific correspondence with the recognized astronomer Tycho and played an important role in persuading Rudolph II to invite Brahe (and later Kepler) to Prague. His voluminous writings in Latin were mostly concerned with astronomy and many regarded him as the greatest astronomer of his time."

In the words of the Joker, "I like him already". But, errrrm, what about the VMs, then?

"[...]Hájek eagerly collected manuscripts, especially those by Copernicus, and may have been the one to convince Rudolph II to procure the infamous Voynich manuscript. [...] Throughout his life he also published numerous astrological prognostics in Czech and that is why he was until recently viewed as an „occultist” rather than a great scientist."

I think we can safely say that, apart from the absence of any actual evidence, Hájek is a great candidate manuscript carrier to add to the Voynich story, far better than Dee and Kelley. And what would make it even more poignant is that the pair of them visited Hájek's house in Prague, which was (according to a fascinating 1999 post on levity.com by Michael Pober) "'by Bethlem', first mentioned in "A True and Faithful Relation' p. 212, Prague 1584, 15th August."

Might Hájek have owned the VMs, perhaps buying it during his time in Italy? It would be interesting to see his handwriting and marginalia commentary style, just in case there's some kind of unexpected link between that and what we see in the VMs. I've asked Jan Hurych, but he hasn't examined Hájek's handwriting: so I'll have to pursue this with the Czech libraries myself (more on that soon).

Given that Hájek translated Matthioli's famous herbal into Czech, it is certainly interesting that the marginalia at the top of f17r appears to have been miscorrected to read "mattior". I had always guessed that it was George Baresch who had done this - but perhaps it might have been Hájek instead? Something to think about, anyway...