(07-05-2021, 03:28 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the other hand, for an enciphered document, the VM is absolutely massive, overshadowing all other enciphered creations that came before it.
Hi Koen,
let's not forget about Fontana's cipher manuscripts:
You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. (Nouvelles Acquisitions Latin 635), Secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum
You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. Bellicorum instrumentorum liber cum figuris
It is not clear that they "came before" the VMS, since they are almost perfectly contemporary (1420-1430 ca), but they show that there are long enciphered works from that time.
(07-05-2021, 01:55 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.
This is very true, very plausible. Possibly they had many sources they have created or acquired to be bound together, as a one book of secrets. Maybe some in different languages, which would maybe explain some oddities in the writing styles and statistics.
(07-05-2021, 01:39 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.
Of course, that also depends on where the VMS was made. If it was made in the Republic of Venice or Florence of the period, the things were different. The city states had already well organized espionage and intelligence networks, state inquisitors and other thing that any one producing questionable stuff would have been afraid of.
(07-05-2021, 01:39 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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.
Agreed, this could been one of the reasons to have more hands doing it. But still all of them should have been trained to the system, possibly taking notes and learning from examples. If any one should have seen any potential heresy or treason material was a potential risk anyway. Loyalty has limits.
(08-05-2021, 08:20 AM)Scarecrow Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (07-05-2021, 01:39 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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.
Agreed, this could been one of the reasons to have more hands doing it. But still all of them should have been trained to the system, possibly taking notes and learning from examples. If any one should have seen any potential heresy or treason material was a potential risk anyway. Loyalty has limits.
This is a very relevant point for my own theory, since the text I have read and interpreted clearly includes treasonous material against the king of England, written or commissioned to be written by an English duke. I would think that at least one "master scribe" must have known the entire cipher system, and been entrusted with such secrets. Such a person must have been very loyal to the duke indeed; perhaps that person had their own grievances against the king as well, who knows? But I think it is possible that the other scribes ("Hands") may only have been taught how to write the characters and script, and they could have been assigned the text to be written by the duke or by the master scribe, without having been taught the cipher system or the meaning or even necessarily the underlying language that the cipher text represented. (After all, we do the same thing today when we write in Voynichese characters!)
Geoffrey