Quote:The author may just have loved ciphers and wanted an excuse to write a book in cipher.
That theory says nothing about our ability to decrypt it. What made this author special, that he could encrypt a book on a fashion that he could decrypt it but we couldn't?
(19-09-2019, 10:25 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We know it's not a common European language in a simple code - luckily there is some consensus on this.
We also suspect that a very complex code is anachronistic.
So indeed, you could ask, why?
But all other options also raise questions. If it's nonsense, why on earth write so much? Q20 would have been entirely unnecessary.
I think you highlight an important point, namely that the Voynich is an anomaly. Whatever the explanation for its existence it will still inevitably be incongruous.
(19-09-2019, 10:26 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:The author may just have loved ciphers and wanted an excuse to write a book in cipher.
That theory says nothing about our ability to decrypt it. What made this author special, that he could encrypt a book on a fashion that he could decrypt it but we couldn't?
I didn't think that was your question. I thought your question was one of motivation.
I would say our author was highly intelligent and whilst some other renaissance individuals manifested their intelligence in one way, he manifested his intelligence in this way.
I should add the fact that I think the author was highly intelligent also means that I don't think he was simply copying from other books, but his own ideas and imagination influenced many of the drawings that we see in the manuscript.
(19-09-2019, 10:26 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:The author may just have loved ciphers and wanted an excuse to write a book in cipher.
That theory says nothing about our ability to decrypt it. What made this author special, that he could encrypt a book on a fashion that he could decrypt it but we couldn't?
Maybe he was a man of the renaissance, which produced many marvels and works of genius.
Hildegard von Bingen was highly intelligent, curious, inventive, and creative. She was accomplished in art and music and wrote an herbal manuscript that was more organized and informative than many of the herbals penned at the time. Her cosmological drawings are heads-and-tails above others, while still conforming sufficiently to traditional themes that they can, for the most part, be understood. They include creation themes, planets, winds, all the things one might expect, except they are artistically more like some of the best-illustrated Beatus manuscripts rather than other cosmology diagrams of the time in terms of style, while including a dose of originality in both color and form. The woman was probably a genius.
She was chosen by her peers to lead her religious community, so they evidently didn't consider her "madness" an impediment to being an administrator.
Some have postulated that her visions might be related to migraines. Since illness tended to accompany the "lights" that she saw in her earlier days (before the "lights" became full-blown visions), this is entirely possible. Migraines are full-body neuro-circulatory disorders that can manifest in numerous ways and visual effects, scintillating shimmering prisms, accompany certain kinds of migraines.
Her encryption glossary is very rational and organized. If you look at it, you will see logical patterns, like the use of endings to group similar characteristics. For example, I noticed that "bz" (similar to the Latin abbreviation), was used as an ending to indicate something was an herb. She clearly had a scientist's proclivity for categorizing.
Her alphabetic substitution system is not hard to learn, like many ciphers of the time it was basic one-to-one and some of the shapes were only slight modifications of the Latin letters for which they stood, although they were done more artistically than most. It wasn't strong encryption, it was probably just intended as a way to slow down outsiders and I'm guessing it was deliberately designed to be easy to learn and to write, as was true of many medieval cipher alphabets.
(19-09-2019, 09:37 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Simply question - why encrypt the VM?
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So let's look at the mindset. Why would anyone encrypt a whole book? Because they thought it was full of personally important and confidential information? In which case, it would be the most important book from the era we have - because it would be unique. Nobody else from the era thought it important enough to encrypt their entire notebooks, let alone create an entirely new unbreakable encryption system.
That's a great question. I suppose fundamentally that the reason to encrypt anything is to hide the plaintext from unauthorized readers. That's sounds like a truism, even tautological, but let's use it as a starting point.
Of course there are other ways to the hide the plaintext. Physically, for example. The access to the book itself can be physically controlled, put under a lock and key. One benefit is that encryption protects the plaintext even when the medium is not sufficiently protected. You can see why letters would be encrypted, because the sender may not have full control over the physical security of the plaintext until it reaches the recipient. For a book, however? Encryption would be a (further) protection against theft or plagiarism or something like that. But ordinarily, I think that keeping a book of secrets in a good hiding place would be enough.
As to authorization, this could get into a teacher-pupil relationship, where the content of the plaintext is imparted only to a paid-up pupil. Thus, the content is viewed as a valuable and the encryption is to exert further control who can access it. In other words, there could be an economic reason for the additional control. Or, it could be some sort of an intellectual challenge. Hard to say, possibile motivations could be endless.
It may even possible that there are no authorized readers of the plaintext beyond the creator of the VM. Perhaps we have a Da Vinci situation where the creator wants to keep the work secret from rivals. Alternatively, the encryption could be used to hide the lack of content or relevance of the plaintext. For example, the creator VM drew fanciful pictures but had no content to explain them. Such a person could take a known but irrelevant plaintext (for example, Genesis or other widely copied book) and encrypt that to make it look like the pictures have accompanying explanations. In this case, the key may never be disclosed because the nature of the VM would be exposed.
But encryption with no authorized readers is awfully close to asemic writing. If the encryption is strong enough (or loses too much information), we may never be able to tell the difference.
I've already answered this question a couple of times.
We don't have to guess at the medieval mindset, we just have to listen. When a daughter of a medieval physician asked her father why a manuscript had to be encrypted, he said that it protected the contents and gave it more value. I posted a more complete and accurate version of this a couple of years ago.
Trade secrets almost don't exist any more. On the Internet people pry into everything and give everything away, but trade secrets were an extremely important aspect of business and professional worlds for thousands of years. It was part of every professional adult's consciousness in the Middle Ages.
Would the VM be perceived (in the 15th cen.) as an encrypted text or an exotic language text?
(19-09-2019, 11:45 PM)Stephen Carlson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would the VM be perceived (in the 15th cen.) as an encrypted text or an exotic language text?
It depends who's doing the perceiving, I guess. An experienced reader in the 15th century would recognize most of the characters as common ligatures, abbreviations, numbers... So my guess is that they would think someone's been messing around rather than it being some genuine foreign script.
I agree with JKP. This question should be approached from the perspective of medieval mindset.
There are several possible motives - from protecting specific professional information to practising some kind of magic.