12-07-2019, 01:28 PM
Hi, everyone,
I've been lurking on this site for years, but Marco's invitation above inspired me to register at last. I've corresponded with some of you over the years, and it's nice to meet the rest of you.
Before I chime in on The Latest, here's a little bit of background on me and my relationship with the VMS. I am a medieval paleographer and codicologist with a PhD from Yale in Medieval Studies. I've catalogued hundreds of pre-1600 European manuscripts in US collections over the last thirty years. I am NOT a linguist and am not actively working to "solve" the VMS. But I have been reading and critiquing proposed solutions for several decades, first as the Assistant to the Curator of Pre-1600 Manuscripts at the Beinecke from 1990-1993, where I was in charge of Voynich correspondence (among other duties). I have seen and handled the manuscript several times over the years, including the day before yesterday (I'm currently in New Haven teaching a class at the Beinecke on digital imagery, metadata, and medieval manuscripts). For more about my work, check out my blog (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) or follow me on Twitter (@LisaFDavis). In my day job, I am the Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), the largest organization in the world dedicated to supporting the study of the Middle Ages.
My current VMS research has to do with determining particular features that distinguish different hands in the VMS, using the methods and methodologies of classical paleography. I will have two articles coming out next year on the subject, one in a journal called Manuscript Studies, and the other in a collection of essays on Digital Paleography. I hope that this work will help linguists refine the dialectal distinctions uncovered by Currier et al.
Now that that's out of the way, I do have some thoughts about The Latest, although I think my concerns have already been clearly laid out by others (JKP in particular) above. You don't have to read very far to see that this is ground that has already been well-trodden. We've all seen The Tironian Theory and the Vulgar Latin Theory before. When you dig down to the first principles, as with Cheshire and other recent proposals, it just doesn't hold water. Bax' work is not a strong foundation on which to build (mixing metaphors, I know).
We know a lot about this manuscript already - its history (well, most of it), its structure, its linguistic anomalies, its collaborative origins, its materiality. Like all of us, I am still waiting for a proposal that has solid foundations and is evidence-based, logical, reproducible, and that results in a complete legible text that makes sense and co-ordinates with the illustrations and charts. It's out there somewhere.
- Lisa
I've been lurking on this site for years, but Marco's invitation above inspired me to register at last. I've corresponded with some of you over the years, and it's nice to meet the rest of you.
Before I chime in on The Latest, here's a little bit of background on me and my relationship with the VMS. I am a medieval paleographer and codicologist with a PhD from Yale in Medieval Studies. I've catalogued hundreds of pre-1600 European manuscripts in US collections over the last thirty years. I am NOT a linguist and am not actively working to "solve" the VMS. But I have been reading and critiquing proposed solutions for several decades, first as the Assistant to the Curator of Pre-1600 Manuscripts at the Beinecke from 1990-1993, where I was in charge of Voynich correspondence (among other duties). I have seen and handled the manuscript several times over the years, including the day before yesterday (I'm currently in New Haven teaching a class at the Beinecke on digital imagery, metadata, and medieval manuscripts). For more about my work, check out my blog (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) or follow me on Twitter (@LisaFDavis). In my day job, I am the Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), the largest organization in the world dedicated to supporting the study of the Middle Ages.
My current VMS research has to do with determining particular features that distinguish different hands in the VMS, using the methods and methodologies of classical paleography. I will have two articles coming out next year on the subject, one in a journal called Manuscript Studies, and the other in a collection of essays on Digital Paleography. I hope that this work will help linguists refine the dialectal distinctions uncovered by Currier et al.
Now that that's out of the way, I do have some thoughts about The Latest, although I think my concerns have already been clearly laid out by others (JKP in particular) above. You don't have to read very far to see that this is ground that has already been well-trodden. We've all seen The Tironian Theory and the Vulgar Latin Theory before. When you dig down to the first principles, as with Cheshire and other recent proposals, it just doesn't hold water. Bax' work is not a strong foundation on which to build (mixing metaphors, I know).
We know a lot about this manuscript already - its history (well, most of it), its structure, its linguistic anomalies, its collaborative origins, its materiality. Like all of us, I am still waiting for a proposal that has solid foundations and is evidence-based, logical, reproducible, and that results in a complete legible text that makes sense and co-ordinates with the illustrations and charts. It's out there somewhere.
- Lisa