Voynich and Padua | Abano and the Euganean Baths

Few parts of the Voynich Manuscript invite projection more strongly than the pages full of human figures, pools, channels and tubes.

Researchers see baths.

Then they see Abano.

Then Padua begins to feel solved.

That sequence is too fast.

The Euganean thermal landscape is genuinely relevant to the Padua hypothesis because physicians in the Paduan network studied and prescribed its waters. But a real medical landscape is a comparator, not a label we may paste onto Voynich’s unexplained imagery.

Quick Read

The Euganean thermal district lies just south of Padua and includes Abano, Montegrotto, Battaglia Terme and related sites.
Its hot springs had ancient and medieval therapeutic use.
University of Padua research describes late-medieval pools, sweating facilities, visitors, statutes and hospitality around the thermal landscape.
Bartolomeo da Montagnana wrote on the Paduan baths.
Michele Savonarola later wrote a major work on Italian thermal waters and described multiple Euganean sites.
University of Padua’s MEDICAMENTA project names Abano, Monteortone, San Bartolomeo, San Pietro Montagnon, Montegrotto and Sant’Elena among the sites discussed in the medical tradition.
After 1405 Venetian rule encouraged and protected thermal tourism in the area.
This proves that bathing, water, medicine and travel were connected in the Paduan environment.
It does not prove that Voynich Quire 13 depicts Abano or any real bath complex.

The Balneological Temptation

Voynich’s so-called biological or balneological section includes naked or partly naked human figures associated with green or blue pools, pipes, channels and organic-looking structures.

The word “balneological” is already an interpretation.

It may be right.

It may be partly right.

It may be wrong.

So the Padua programme needs a firewall:

real Paduan baths + bathing-like Voynich imagery ≠ identification of the Voynich imagery as Paduan baths.

The Landscape Was Real and Medically Active

University of Padua’s Aquae Patavinae research describes the Euganean district as a long-lived thermal landscape with natural hot water, pools and sweating facilities.

By the late Middle Ages, the area was visited both for healing and for restorative bathing. Local statutes regulated visitors and required maintenance and cleaning of facilities.

This immediately gives us something much stronger than visual analogy.

There was a functioning therapeutic water system within the territorial orbit of Padua.

Abano Was One Node, Not the Whole System

Modern discussion often collapses the Euganean baths into “Abano”.

The historical geography was more distributed.

University of Padua’s MEDICAMENTA project lists several sites described by medical authors:

Abano;
Monteortone;
San Bartolomeo;
San Pietro Montagnon;
Montegrotto;
Sant’Elena at Battaglia Terme;
other associated thermal installations.

The region should therefore be modelled as a thermal network rather than one famous spa.

Medicine Turns Landscape Into Treatment

A hot spring becomes medically relevant only when someone converts the landscape into a therapeutic protocol.

That requires questions such as:

Which water?
For which condition?
At what temperature?
For how long?
By immersion, drinking, vapour or another use?
With what diet?
For which patient?
At what stage of illness?

That is why Bartolomeo da Montagnana and Michele Savonarola matter more than the springs by themselves.

They turn geography into medicine.

Montagnana Brings the Baths Into Practical Medicine

University of Padua’s MEDICAMENTA project identifies Bartolomeo da Montagnana among the physicians whose work describes the Euganean thermal sites.

Montagnana’s broader career is already important to the Voynich comparator project because he connects university medicine, patient-specific consilia, pharmaceutical preparations and practical therapeutics.

The bath layer adds another branch.

practical medicine ↔ compounds ↔ regimen ↔ thermal waters.

This means a medical corpus does not need to choose between “pharmacy” and “bathing” as mutually exclusive genres.

Savonarola Expands the Thermal Map

Michele Savonarola later composed De balneis et thermis naturalibus, a wide-ranging work on natural baths and thermal waters.

University of Padua’s pharmaceutical-history exhibition emphasises his descriptions of the Euganean district and multiple named bathing sites.

This gives the Padua hypothesis a useful continuity:

Paduan landscape → Paduan medical observation → written therapeutic knowledge → wider circulation.

Again, the physical bath stays in the landscape while knowledge about the bath can travel.

The Dondi Edge Reappears

The thermal environment also intersects the Dondi technical tradition.

University of Padua’s MEDICAMENTA account notes installations called the Domus novae and associates them with experiments by Jacopo Dondi involving salt production.

This does not make the baths mechanical laboratories in the modern sense.

It does show that the same Paduan family associated with medicine and astronomy also interacted with the thermal resource as a material phenomenon.

The network grows denser through documented relations.

Water Has Several Jobs

One reason the Voynich water imagery is difficult is that water can perform many different informational roles.

Therapeutic medium.
Bathing environment.
Drinking treatment.
Heat source.
Mineral carrier.
Flow diagram.
Anatomical metaphor.
Cosmological element.
Technical fluid.

Therefore “it looks like water” is only the beginning of classification.

A stronger comparator asks what operation the water performs in the page architecture.

The Human Figures Need Functional Analysis

The figures in Voynich are frequently treated as bathers because many appear immersed.

But an image of a person in or beside a vessel can encode different things:

a patient;
a body part;
a personification;
a stage in a process;
a category marker;
a zodiacal or calendrical actor;
a therapeutic action;
an abstract relational node.

Known balneological manuscripts should therefore be used to establish what actual bathing instructions look like before declaring Voynich an example.

The Pipes Problem

Voynich’s channels and tubes are among its most visually distinctive elements.

A thermal interpretation naturally reads them as water conduits.

But that is not enough.

A real hydraulic reading should predict:

direction of flow;
source and destination;
consistent junction logic;
reservoir behaviour;
relationship between figures and flow;
repeated symbols for repeated components.

If those structural expectations fail, the resemblance to plumbing weakens.

After 1405: Venice Inherits the Thermal Resource Too

The conquest of Padua did not leave the Euganean Hills outside the political transition.

Aquae Patavinae notes that after 1405 the thermal territory came under Venetian rule and that the Serenissima encouraged and protected thermal tourism.

Visitors from north of the Alps, especially German-speaking regions, became increasingly important.

This gives the baths a mobility function.

They are not only local resources.

They are destinations through which people, medical advice and regional knowledge can move.

The Hospitality Layer

By the end of the Middle Ages, thermal use had also generated accommodation and service infrastructure.

Aquae Patavinae describes the emergence of what could be called an early hotel economy around the baths.

This matters because medical landscapes need logistics.

Patients need somewhere to stay.
Food and regimen need to be supplied.
Facilities need cleaning and maintenance.
Visitors need guidance.
Physicians need a way to communicate recommendations.

Thermal medicine is therefore also a social system.

Why the Baths Are a Strong Comparator

The Euganean baths are useful because they connect several independent historical layers:

real geography;
real thermal water;
medical authors;
patients and visitors;
local regulation;
hospitality;
political control;
regional and transalpine mobility.

That gives us a historically rich environment against which to test Voynich’s human-and-water pages.

Why the Baths Are Still Not Provenance

The comparator becomes dangerous when we skip the discriminating step.

Many European regions had baths, spas, therapeutic waters and balneological writing.

So even if Voynich Quire 13 is genuinely balneological, Padua still has competitors.

The question must become:

Does Voynich preserve a specifically Paduan or Euganean thermal structure, terminology, sequence or visual convention that matched non-Paduan bath traditions do not explain equally well?

What Would Strengthen the Euganean Connection?

A repeated diagram that matches a specific therapeutic sequence documented in Paduan bath texts.
A regional thermal feature represented in a way that is not generic.
Textual structure that aligns with known bath descriptions or prescriptions.
A provenance or ownership edge involving a physician or visitor tied to the Euganean district.
Multiple independent correspondences across landscape, medical practice and manuscript structure.

What Would Weaken It?

If Voynich’s pools and channels fail basic hydraulic or therapeutic logic.
If comparable manuscripts elsewhere explain the imagery just as well.
If human figures behave more like symbolic or cosmological markers than patients.
If the text-image architecture does not resemble practical balneological literature.

The Correct Role of Abano in the Hypothesis

Abano should not be used as a picture caption for Voynich.

It should be used as a historical test environment.

We know:

the waters existed;
people travelled to them;
Paduan physicians wrote about them;
the district was medically and economically organised;
knowledge about it travelled beyond the landscape.

Now the Voynich pages must earn any connection.

Research Sources

Continue the Series

The Final Idea

The Euganean baths solve one problem and create another.

They solve the plausibility problem.

A Paduan medical world really did connect bodies, water, regimen, travel and therapeutic practice.

But that makes the identification problem harder, not easier.

A real bath landscape tells us what could exist. Only structure, function and independent historical evidence can tell us whether Voynich is describing it.

Voynich and Padua | Abano and the Euganean Baths: A Real Medical Landscape Behind the Balneological Temptation