The Voynich Ninja

I now imagine some guy with a vision who hired the cheapest bunch of scribes and painters in all the land.

(07-05-2021, 05:06 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I now imagine some guy with a vision who hired the cheapest bunch of scribes and painters in all the land.

Well to be fair...

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"By May 1403, he was back in England. He was employed by the King in a campaign in Wales in the fall of that year, and on 12 November,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. he was appointed Lieutenant for South Wales for three years. Both this and his appointment in Aquitaine proved very costly, and by June 1404, he had sold or pledged his plate and was contemplating mortgaging his lands to pay his troops in Wales.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."

I mean he had to cut costs somewhere...

(05-05-2021, 03:21 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the question of whether the VMS makes sense or not, I can only repeat myself at this point. I think if you consider the effort that was spent on the creation of the VMS, then you have to assume that it makes sense. If it were only a few lines of code, then it would be also conceivable that it concerns a hoax. With a whole codex the thing looks however different. 

While I do agree that VMS is readable with a real meaning, I am hesitant to assume *anything* in relation with the VMS. As logical it may sound, the effort put to something does not still demonstrate the importance or usefulness of it. It is a non-sequitur.

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(05-05-2021, 03:21 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font]
What is quite possible is that the content should only be accessible to an "exclusive" group of readers. That is, anyone without the necessary prior knowledge of the writing system should be excluded from the outset. So it was not about the distribution of information / knowledge to everyone who could read but about the transmission from insiders to insiders. The complete absence of any plain text (annotations, marginal notes and so on) reinforces this assumption.

This is a good possibility, again if we think the effort needed to produce the VMS and the ideas that were put in it. To ideate and design such a writing system that VMS has, cryptography+steganography (IMO), would also lead to think that the intended audience was intentionally small. Did they do it by themselves? Hiring external people to do would have exposed their system which they evidently didn't want to happen.

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(07-05-2021, 05:06 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I now imagine some guy with a vision who hired the cheapest bunch of scribes and painters in all the land.

While still keeping the system and content a secret?

(07-05-2021, 02:36 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If the VMS was financed by a patron it certainly broadens who might have been involved in creating it.

True. A lot more possibilities, but then that would have exposed the system and potentially the content to a wider audience, a thing that it seems to me, they tried to avoid in the first place.
And that makes me wonder why a one-shot, why not reuse the system for more things? People tend to have more than one secret in their closets.

Don't forget that a massive amount of documents has been lost to history. This should be especially true for documents like the VM, which could be interpreted as containing magic, witchcraft, herecy or other forbidden subjects. To me, the fact that it has reached us at all is a miracle on itself.

(07-05-2021, 07:51 AM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(05-05-2021, 03:21 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
What is quite possible is that the content should only be accessible to an "exclusive" group of readers. That is, anyone without the necessary prior knowledge of the writing system should be excluded from the outset. So it was not about the distribution of information / knowledge to everyone who could read but about the transmission from insiders to insiders. The complete absence of any plain text (annotations, marginal notes and so on) reinforces this assumption.

This is a good possibility, again if we think the effort needed to produce the VMS and the ideas that were put in it. To ideate and design such a writing system that VMS has, cryptography+steganography (IMO), would also lead to think that the intended audience was intentionally small. Did they do it by themselves? Hiring external people to do would have exposed their system which they evidently didn't want to happen.

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(07-05-2021, 05:06 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I now imagine some guy with a vision who hired the cheapest bunch of scribes and painters in all the land.

While still keeping the system and content a secret?

Keep in mind that the time period was feudal, medieval Europe. Late medieval yes, but still a feudal society. It would not have worked the way we imagine it today with a wealthy capitalist hiring a group of wage workers. It would have been a feudal lord with a noble title who had a large retinue, like a small army of servants who pledged their loyalty only and exclusively to him and his family, their liege lords if you will. Sure, the system was beginning to fray at the seams after the Black Death, but the feudal social order still existed in the 15th century. 

The point is, the lord would have taken it for granted that his secrets could be entrusted to the servants and subordinates in his retinue. It would be unthinkable to even imagine that his or his family's secrets were not safe with them. Now I grant you that if the secrets expressed thoughts as extreme as something like "the Duke wants to kill the King", a certain level of discretion may have been observed, and the illustrators for example may not have been in on that part of the secret. But still, when the Duke or whoever was ranting and raving about his grievances against the King within the walls of his castle, at least some of his servants still would have heard him and known about such things. Their primary feudal loyalty was still pledged to the Duke, if he was their lord, and it would have been taken for granted by all that they would never betray such secrets.

Again, I acknowledge that this old feudal social order was beginning to fall apart by the 15th century, and by the 16th century it was replaced with a new social order. But those would have been the social expectations that everyone had and that everyone was expected to maintain and live up to. 

So to get to the point, I expect that in this scenario, the few trusted scribes and clerks who were given the task of performing the actual physical writing of the text of the secret cipher manuscript in the secret script would have been entrusted with the secrets. Perhaps different sets of secrets for the "Hand 1" scribe writing in "Language A", the "Hand 2" scribe writing in "Language B", etc.

(07-05-2021, 07:57 AM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(07-05-2021, 02:36 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If the VMS was financed by a patron it certainly broadens who might have been involved in creating it.

True. A lot more possibilities, but then that would have exposed the system and potentially the content to a wider audience, a thing that it seems to me, they tried to avoid in the first place.
And that makes me wonder why a one-shot, why not reuse the system for more things? People tend to have more than one secret in their closets.

They did reuse the system for more things: herbal things, cosmological things, astrological things, bizarre story things, historical things, pharmaceutical things, etc. They just bound them all together in one big manuscript.

As Koen points out, most documents from such a remote historical time period have been lost. Somewhere out there, missing folio pages from the Voynich MS itself were presumably floating around at some point in time (unless they were deliberately destroyed for security reasons). But I don't think any of us are holding our breath waiting for the missing folio pages to be discovered in someone's archive. In all probability, they are lost and gone forever. And the same may be true for any other documents that happened to be written in this script, if they ever existed.

If it was indeed the creation of a single lord or family, that would restrict the number and distribution of such documents even more strictly and narrowly. How many families, even lofty noble families, still have historical archives maintained with personal documents and papers from the early 15th century? If it was English, for example, many of those records would have been deliberately destroyed when the nobility's possessions were ransacked in the English Civil War in the 17th century. In my research I come across reports of very prominent 14th and 15th century principals whose burial monuments were destroyed during this period. If even their graves did not survive, what hope was there for a handful of secret cipher documents to survive?

(07-05-2021, 08:59 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Don't forget that a massive amount of documents has been lost to history. This should be especially true for documents like the VM, which could be interpreted as containing magic, witchcraft, herecy or other forbidden subjects. 

Yes, that is absolutely true. Books are the silent victims of the times, wars, revolutions. I am not so sure about any miracle, but luck has been a great factor for VMS to survive. My thinking is that if VMS is a product of en exclusive group of people and the intended audience was also equally restricted, the other books they might have made using the VMS method should also have had the same possibility to survive. I could believe they took quite care of those products. At lease VMS was lucky to get in the right places and hands at the right times. So, w[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]hile miracles might happen, I still believe there are better true reasons of why VMS has survived. Luck has been a factor surely, but I have a feeling there are better reasons why the VMS was handled well. If they did do more than one MS, why just one survived. Miracle,as you say, can be called in. But is that the only possibility?[/font][/font]

I'm not so sure someone would have taken VMS as magic or heresy just by looking it, and maybe that's the raison d'etre of the illustrations, to create that safe impression, but of course it could have been like that, if there was a reason to do so. Especially if the group behind the VMS was, well, suspicious, in any way. 

(07-05-2021, 03:15 PM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(07-05-2021, 08:59 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Don't forget that a massive amount of documents has been lost to history. This should be especially true for documents like the VM, which could be interpreted as containing magic, witchcraft, herecy or other forbidden subjects. 

Yes, that is absolutely true. Books are the silent victims of the times, wars, revolutions. I am not so sure about any miracle, but luck has been a great factor for VMS to survive. My thinking is that if VMS is a product of en exclusive group of people and the intended audience was also equally restricted, the other books they might have made using the VMS method should also have had the same possibility to survive. I could believe they took quite care of those products. At lease VMS was lucky to get in the right places and hands at the right times. So, w[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]hile miracles might happen, I still believe there are better true reasons of why VMS has survived. Luck has been a factor surely, but I have a feeling there are better reasons why the VMS was handled well. If they did do more than one MS, why just one survived. Miracle,as you say, can be called in. But is that the only possibility?[/font]

I'm not so sure someone would have taken VMS as magic or heresy just by looking it, and maybe that's the raison d'etre of the illustrations, to create that safe impression, but of course it could have been like that, if there was a reason to do so. Especially if the group behind the VMS was, well, suspicious, in any way. 

I will just toss my own personal hypothesis out there, so that you can see how it fits into the thoughts you express here, and judge for yourself:

I think it was an English document in the possession of the Duke of York, and when he was killed at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, it came into the possession of some Frenchman in the confusion of battle after he was killed. Thereafter it was merely an "exotic" document of unknown meaning that circulated on the Continent and eventually came into the hands of Rudolf II almost 200 years later. I think its disconnection from its original context may actually have helped to save it: Since no one on the Continent could possibly know what it was, its survival posed no real risk to anyone. In England on the other hand, its discovery might have eventually posed a risk either to the House of York or to the House of Lancaster, and it may have been more likely to have been destroyed, either by the supporters or the enemies of the viewpoints expressed in its contents and illustrations. Also, in England it could well have been destroyed during the English Civil War in the 17th century if not before or after that time. But when it accidentally fell into hands that could not possibly understand any of the English context of it, nor particularly care about such things, it had no political "friends" nor "enemies" in the area of its new home. Thus its safety and chance of survival were greatly enhanced.

On the other hand, for an enciphered document, the VM is absolutely massive, overshadowing all other enciphered creations that came before it. So one could say that even within this one manuscript, the cipher got a decent mileage. Moreover, if the VM was a clearly delineated project, there may not have been any need, desire, possibility or impetus to apply its writing system elsewhere.