The Voynich Manuscript is an undeciphered document from medieval Europe. We present current knowledge about the manuscript’s text through a series of questions about its linguistic properties.

unknown at any time or anywhere, but this is a very recent and fragile development. Of special fascination to historians of European imperialism from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century is Cohen's statement on page 141 that "a good case can be made that urban European populations of that period may have been among the nutritionally most impoverished, the most disease-ridden, and the shortes...

This nicely produced volume offers both more and less than its title promises. Begun as a dissertation on a group of late medieval herbals in Latin and French, including Wellcome 626, it studies the iconography of plants in a wide variety of manuscripts, from the Johnson papyrus, Wellcome 5753, written in Greek around AD 400, via Arabic manuscripts to Latin manuscripts of the fifteenth century ...

To the Editor: A scientifi c debate with public health implications wages: What caused the medieval European plague epidemics known as Black Death? Recent articles note inconsistencies between a rat fl ea– borne pandemic of Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes bubonic plague) and the documented characteristics of Black Death (1, among others). Ayyadurai et al. (2) acknowledge that a rat f...

A book on demography without statistics, graphs or charts: is this possible? Peter Biller has masterfully shown not only that it is possible, but that a textual approach to demographic questions in Latin Christendom before the Black Death (especially around 1300) enormously enriches our understanding of demographic trends in a period which lacks systematic statistical data, in which statistical...

reasons for the rise and decline of the spas in the first place. Neither does he adequately explore why Carratraca became one of the most important spas of the country, or why another one-Tolox-followed a very different developmental pattern, in that it began to take off at the beginning of the present century when the others were in definite decline. Moreover, although the book makes it clear ...

AVNER GIL'ADI, Children of Islam: concepts of childhood in medieval Muslim society, St Antony's/Macmillan Series, Basingstoke and Oxford, Macmillan in association with St Antony's College, 1992, pp. xii, 176, £40.00 (0-333-55598-8). This volume is a collection of eight studies by the author on various aspects of the history of childhood in medieval Islamic society. A useful introduction surveys...

In the squares of many Italian cities, unnoticed by most passersby, incisions carved in stone reproduce the dimensions of the measurements that were employed locally until 1861, when the nation endorsed the metric system. By gathering the evidence pertaining to these forms of display, this essay hopes to bring them back into historical consciousness. The story that follows is a rich one, for th...